Hasta La Ideas

For three days in early April, Oxford, England was buzzing with optimism, inspiration and great entertainment as an international group of social entrepreneurs including designers, businesspersons, humanitarians and investors gather at two events, the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship and its more discursive ‘un-conference’ the Oxford Jam.

In this rapidly-evolving space where design and business meet social and environmental well-being, the days were full of intense inquiry, inspiration, networking and action planning. A significant portion of the sessions was focused on securing investment to start and scale social enterprises. Design—as an approach to creating objects, frameworks, systems and services—was a key theme throughout the conferences.

Innovation and design processes

A stellar session at Skoll featured case study presentations from m-Pesa and IDEO’s Tom Hume. In just four years, m-Pesa has become a benchmark in mobile and financial services for the mass market in developing countries. It was originally conceived as a money transfer service to support the microfinance industry, but it’s true value was revealed in the hands of its target audience when people started using the service for person-to-person money transfer. Today, the system handles between two and three million transactions a day with the average transfer amount at $15.

Tom Hume presented IDEOs 3 principles to create large-scale innovation:

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