Til forsiden

Blog
Knowledge
Kort
Udskriv kort
GEMBA Innovation A/S, Bygstubben 4, 2950 Vedbæk, Denmark, +45 4565 5500
GEMBA Seafood Consulting A/S, Bygstubben 4, 2950 Vedbæk, Denmark, +45 4565 5504
ForsideGEMBA InnovationGEMBA Seafood ConsultingGEMBA ZingGEMBA 8ideas
24. november 2008 by Bob Jacobson

Innovation from Constraint


Heart

Innovation from Constraint (the extended dance mix)

Ethan Zuckerman, My Heart’s in Accra, November 10, 2008

http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/11/10/innovation-from-constraint-the-extended-dance-mix/

…So let’s try a challenge based on innovating from constraint. Let’s design a cooling system for market sellers to use to keep their vegetables cold. This is an important task if you’re a small-scale farmer in a hot country - as soon as you pick your crops, they start wilting and become less valuable by the minute. If you can keep your tomatoes, cabbages and carrots cold, you’ll sell more for more money, and you’ve got a better chance of feeding your kids and sending them to school.

Lots of people try to solve this problem by looking at inexpensive electric refrigerators. After all, dorm-sized refrigerators are already pretty cheap - maybe we could scale one down, remove some parts and make an “appropriate technology” developing world version… coincidentally opening up a whole new market for Maytag or Haier.

But that’s a poor solution to the problem. Even if you can reduce the cost from $100 to $30, it’s still way to expensive for the market you’re trying to serve. Plus, your market sellers don’t have electricity either at home or at work, so you need a generator - expensive - and diesel - expensive. And even if you can line up the generator, the diesel, the fridge, none of these things are made locally. If they break, you’re shipping in parts from overseas and asking local mechanics to repair technology they’ve not often worked with.

Our constraints: no electricity, local materials, built and maintained locally, with a price point under $5.

Here’s how you do it. (Here’s how you do it if you’re an extremely creative and innovative Nigerian engineer.) Make two clay pots, one smaller than the other so it can fit inside it and leave a gap. Fill the gap between the pots with sand. Thoroughly wet the sand. Cover the top of your apparatus with a wet cloth. A couple of times a day, wet the sand and the cloth.

Keramik

It won’t turn the mountains on your can of Coors Light blue, but it will keep your vegetables below 20C even if it’s 45C outside. In fact, the zeer pot works better the hotter and drier the day is. It uses the principle of evaporative cooling. As the water evaporates, the more energized, fast-moving molecules evaporate first, leaving the cooler, less-energetic ones behind. Your molecules left behind are less energetic on average, which is to say, cooler… and the vegetables inside   that inner pot will stay cooler too.

4399 comment(s) for "Innovation from Constraint"