Innovation: top-down and bottom-up smackdowns

I know I can sometimes come off as ideologically wedded to the bottom-up approach. It's true, I like the idea of bottom-up--it sits well with my own attitude that authority needs to earn respect. There's also some sociological evidence that outsiders are more inclined to come up with breakthrough innovations because they are not caught up in "the way things are done." But for the record, I really like to see these approaches go head to head and the proposition get tested empirically. And in truth, I suspect that one approach may be better for some types of problems, and that while there might be a tilt to one approach or the other from time to time, there will be plenty of counterexamples to "disprove" most rules of thumb. But I had cause to come across 3

One, students from Laval University created a 2487 MPG eco-car. That far exceeds the performance of any eco-car created by professional car manufacturers.

Two, I love to cook, and am a complete devotee of Cook's Illustrated. I also love to read the commentary and inputs and ideas featured on Food 52. When these two beloved institutions decided to run a cook-off, I was in heaven. For non-foodies out there, Cook's Illustrated, run by Christopher Kimball is the gold standard for expert testing. They publish authoritative bibles like The Best Recipe. No hedging, and it's pretty much all invented in Vermont. MIT Poverty Action Lab meets GiveWell. Food 52, founded by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, is lightly curated site populated by regularly held contests for the best recipes. So much more like GlobalGiving, or DonorsChoose. I can't wait to find out what happens.

Three, our own GlobalGiving-Innocentive GlobalGiveback challenge sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. We're still in the middle of it, but I just heard from the Innocentive folks today that in 3 out of the 5 challenges (they happen to have had earlier deadlines for solutions), solver interest in providing a solution has been 2x what Innocentive sees usually in comparable solutions being sought by for-profit entities. That there's so much pent-up interest in the Innocentive community to contribute to solving social problems confirms my bias that international development has an untapped resource in the broader public. We just haven't made it all that easy for people to contribute.

A matter of faith

GlobalGiving was founded on the realizations that:

• there were entirely too many potential social entrepreneurs all over the world that needed to be given a chance to test their idea of fighting poverty


• for one rock star social entrepreneur, there were probably at least a hundred people who had tried something like, and failed


• international development badly needed more than one Nobel Peace Prize winner in the sixty plus years since colonialism


• and try as we might, there was no way for even the best and the brightest to know who would succeed, and who would fail, much less why

So what the world needed was a platform that made it safe and easy for all these bottom-up efforts to be visible and accountable to the outside world, and whose mission it would be to continuously lower the barriers to entry so that we didn't inadvertently leave another Mohammed Yunus stalled for lack of support. Of course, you can argue for development Darwinism, that the social entrepreneurs who aren't crazy or committed enough to keep going against all odds weren't going to succeed anyway--but clearly there are economies in the world that provide a hospitable environment for small-scale businesses and others that do not, and most of the economies that don't pay the price in lower prosperity overall.

So it's my vision for GlobalGiving that we play a small role in making social entrepreneurship just a little less crazy, a little less quixotic, and that we thereby make it possible for more innovation and change to happen in development. We won't know ahead of time what those innovations will be. We won't even know who will lead those innovations. We might know if someone one day can trace a rock star social entrepreneur back to their beginnings on GlobalGiving, but there's no guarantee we will be directly responsible, nor even that they might have succeeded without us. So it comes down to a matter of faith--an ironic position for me, as basically a non-believer with a Buddhist heritage.

This is, of course, a restating of Dennis's latest post (which in turn is really a hat tip to Bill Easterly), but here I am restating what we're about because we had two retreats last week, and in reiterating what inspired us to start GlobalGiving, I was struck by the fact that most of my colleagues encouraged me to state it, and state it again. So here it is.

(It's also a way for me to get back to blogging. I realized how bad it was when I saw that I had unmoderated comments from June--eek. Eli, Dibyendu, my apologies!)

*How* to spend the stimulus bill

Most of the political debate has been about whether we need a stimulus package, whether all the pork has or has not been stripped out of the package, etc. But now that we have a package, the screech of the rubber hitting the road is in the paucity of ideas on *how* to spend the money (not on what, although that's another topic entirely).

But by and large, this isn't a sexy topic. The rules and incentives you set up on spending is the minutiae of bureaucratic work--but as Sir Humphrey Appleby knows well, you can win or lose a lot of battles there. And it's hard to report on. So I was pleased ... until I wasn't, when I heard a story on NPR the other day about how to exercise oversight over spending. The story pointed to the procedures developed at NEA after the Mapplethorpe etc. flap as one way to go. I'm sure I'm not doing the rules justice, but it came down to accepting no applicants who weren't already approved and vetted NEA grant recipients (in other words the usual suspects), and limiting grant requests to 2 sizes--$25,000 or $50,000--to make it easier to process. The commentary in the piece sort of says it all in terms of what bizarre sorts of behavior you could end up with:

But that's one grant protocol that poses a challenge for grant writers. They never want to ask for too little — arts groups are constantly cash-strapped. Ask for too much, though, and they might price themselves out of the competition and get nothing at all. It can be a tricky calculus.

As a good ex-bureaucrat myself I know that rules like this work to get money out of the door faster, and if the money doesn't get out of the door it doesn't have any stimulus effect. But are we reduced to reaching for a process that was developed essentially to prevent public funds from being spent for outre art in figuring out exactly how to spend the stimulus package? I know there aren't easy answers, but this is an unprecedented opportunity/challenge.