The World Resources Institute has officially launched NextBillion.net, an online community focused on the intersection of business, innovation and poverty. We were lucky enough to get an early look at NextBillion, and WRI was kind enough to quote our impressions in their press release. See for yourself!

New WRI Blog Targets 'Next Billion' Consumers Dollars

WASHINGTON, May 27, 2006 - The World Resources Institute has launched an interactive blog focusing on business's role in eradicating world poverty. The organization hopes to position its new "NextBillion.net -- Development through Enterprise" blog as "the world's premiere online water cooler and conference room" for socially responsible business development.

Previously, there have been e-mail lists for such business developers, but NextBillion.net allows development and poverty reduction to reach a new level by offering a bottom-up educational resource and threaded-discussion tool for everyone from multinational executives to small-business entrepreneurs.

Representatives of companies such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Pitney Bowes, DuPont and SC Johnson (as well as many innovative individuals) have already begun posting comments and discussions on the blog. For instance, noted author Stuart Hart posted exclusive content this week detailing issues highlighted in his new book, Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World's Most Difficult Problems. Additionally, with today's official launch, NextBillion.net's creators expect to quickly establish the site as the top news feed and content resource for corporations, foundations, the business-school community, poverty NGOs, development organizations, and many others.

Regular BRINQ readers may have noticed a lack of posting the last couple of weeks, this is because we've been working overtime getting ready for the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Protocol pilot in Kenya, where we'll be hitting the ground in just two weeks. For a quick summary of the Protocol, it answers the following question:

Remember how much fun spinning around on a playground merry-go-round was when we were kids?

In our recent article, Capturing the Unexpected Innovation, we included a picture from a story we knew we had to chase down (see image right). Thankfully, just as we were looking for more, BBC News ran the article, "Why pumping water is child's play".

"It's a positive displacement water pump, and as the children spin around it transfers their energy into vertical or reciprocal motion, and that pumps water from an underground borehole or well to the surface where it's stored in a tank for future use."

With the children pushing the roundabout around 16 times a minute, the play-pump can produce 1,400 litres of water per hour from a depth of 40 metres.

For those that have followed our work here at BRINQ, our efforts with the toy industry, and our focus on discovering "Innovation in Utility", the Boston Globe has an article which has gotten us really EXCITED!!! It even starts with an example from the toy industry!

Here's a quick quote, you can find a link to the rest of the article below:

Ultimately, user-centered innovation may transform not only companies' product development processes but also business models, turning them into the providers of innovation toolkits to users and the marketers of their innovations, [MIT's] von Hippel suggests.

Innovation toolkits!! We definitely need to talk to this guy!

“Ever had one of those conversations,” Stu Hart asked the crowd, “where you think you and another person are talking about the same thing, only to discover you’ve been discussing something completely different?  In my work, I run into that all the time.”

Stuart Hart is a professor at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management, recent author of the acclaimed “Capitalism at the Crossroads”, and one of the world’s foremost experts on the strategies and business opportunities for sustainable enterprises and serving the world’s poor.  Hart was co-presenting with colleague Mark Milstein (of the World Resources Institute) at Cornell’s 3rd annual Sustainable Enterprise Symposium.  

Hart and Milstein explained that there are so many different “sustainability tribes”, each using their own vocabulary of buzzwords, that even basic communication proves difficult and unwieldy; strategic planning and collaboration are even harder.  How can we collaborate in creating a better future if we can’t even communicate?