Following is the text of the keynote address by Amy Smith at the MIT IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge Showcase and Award event.
Good evening to everyone, and congratulations to all of the teams. It is great to see such wonderful work! And thank you to everyone who came here to support them. It’s great to see that after 25 years, the IDEAS competition is still going strong!
Lauren [Tyger] asked me to speak about a few things this evening: the early years of the IDEAS Competition, some of my own work that reflects the values of IDEAS, and finally, back to tonight with perhaps a few pieces of advice for this year’s IDEAS teams.
IDEAS is a competition that was born of collaboration. I had just started working as an instructor at the Edgerton Center after 10 years as a graduate student, and had heard about a funding opportunity with the Massachusetts Campus Compact that might be a good fit for providing support for the classes that I was teaching about design for developing countries. I went to an information session, and was excited about writing a proposal. My boss at the time, Kim Vandiver, told me that he had heard from Jay Kaiser that the new head of the Public Service Center, Sally Susnowitz, was also planning on applying. So I made an appointment to meet with Sally to check out the competition. We had a wonderful meeting, with ideas bouncing off of each other like popcorn in a hot air popper. As Humphrey Bogart would have said, this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I have to admit, Sally’s vision was much broader than mine, with plans to create a Service Learning program at MIT, and myriad ways to engage with local communities. In one dimension, however, my vision was broader than Sally’s, and that was geographically, as I focused on international development, and at the time, the PSC worked only with local partners.
We quickly realized that if we joined forces, the proposal would be much stronger. The class I had envisioned became part of the Service Learning program, and we also made plans for how to integrate service projects into mainstream classes. Sally had an idea for a “Innovations for the Community Competition”, and as I had recently participated in the MIT 50K competition, I had a lot of thoughts for how competitions could be tailored to support work that was not solely profit-driven (which 25 years ago, was not as common as it is now). This was at the height of the “dot-com” bubble, and I had been quite frustrated by the way that the 50K Competition was framed in terms of for-profit businesses, and the mentoring that we received really was not particularly helpful, as none of the volunteer mentors had experience in development work. So if I could design a competition (and Sally and I were doing just that!), I’d make sure that impact and community engagement were at the forefront, and that mentors had relevant experience and could truly help the team move forward. We saw the competition as a vehicle for MIT students to apply their technical skills to problems that they cared about.
I’d been at MIT a long time, and knew that the competitive spirit was a great motivator, but we didn’t want to support just the few teams that made it through the “funnel of judgement” so we came up with this idea of development grants, which was part of the overly complex application process that we had developed. Teams would submit an initial proposal, and as part of that, they could ask for funding that would help them move to a better final proposal. It could be for travelling to visit their community partner, or for materials to build a prototype, or for running a small pilot of their solution. It also gave us a chance to give advice and provide the team with a mentor if they wanted. We gave out as much money for the development grants as we did for the prizes, and I think that the goal of helping as many teams as possible along their journey has continued to this day.
Going back to the early days, I guess that I should start with the obvious—Sally and I did get the grant. And so we set to work making things happen. At the time, the PSC did not have a large staff, but they did have a lot of student volunteers. I had also worked with a lot of students through my work at the Edgerton Center, so we put out the call for students to help run the competition. In those early days, there was no staff member assigned to run IDEAS, it was just volunteers and students, with Sally and I chipping in as well. One of the first things that we had to do was come up with a name. This process went on for weeks, we continued to shape the vision, work out the details, but we didn’t have a name for the competition. We could always fall back on “Innovations for the Community” but that didn’t have a lot of pizzaz. So finally, at one of our meetings in room 10-200 (check the room number) we locked ourselves in and agreed that we wouldn’t be allowed out until we had a name. As we know from thermo-dynamics, pressure can often catalyze reactions, but I am also eternally grateful that Jaisel showed up for that meeting, as it was he who came up with the idea of IDEAS. Most of you probably don’t know that IDEAS is an acronym:
- Innovation
- Development
- Enterprise
- Action
- Service
This so perfectly captured what we were hoping to achieve. Both in terms of the individual steps, as well as the spirit of the competition. We wanted to provide support to bring dreams to life, not to reward visions that had already been realized, so naming the competition for IDEAS seemed like a good way to indicate this.
So we were ready to hit the ground running! We created logos, and pamphlets, and refined our descriptions.
- Innovation: imagine a better way of doing things
- Development: refine your thoughts and ideas
- Enterprise: pull together the resources to make it happen
- Action: go into the world and bring your idea to life
- Service: make a contribution to the community
We held networking dinners to help students form teams and meet community partners who had challenges that needed solutions. We were so nervous that we wouldn’t have any entries, but we did, and in the end, it was a success!! We learned a lot in that first year and made a variety of changes as we moved from one year to the next. Interestingly, it took us three years to notice that we had spelled Competition wrong on our flyers!! In 2008, we realized that we had made it to the big time because East Campus ran a Bad Ideas Competition over IAP as a spoof on our competition. A few years after that, as part of MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration, there was an opportunity to scale up the competition and to create a global platform to engage alumni around the world in the process. It was a time of growth for IDEAS, but at this point, I had drifted away from the Competition, as I got busy with D-Lab and busier with my own fieldwork, which in many ways is cut from the same cloth as the IDEAS competition.
Which brings me to part two of my remarks. It’s always been important to me to find ways to support people in creating solutions to problems that they think are important, and in 2009, I started working with communities in Uganda who had been displaced by conflict. We developed a program called “Creative Capacity Building,” which taught people the design process so that they could create solutions to challenges in their lives. In the training, they identified the problems that they wanted to solve, and we guided them through the design process and taught them the skills they needed to build their prototypes (sounds familiar, doesn’t it!!). Over the years, we developed a 5-day training that is accessible to people of any educational background, and we have implemented programs in more than 20 countries.
What we’ve found through this work is that the process of design is just as important as the products of design. The intangible benefits of creating something that you believe will improve the world around you are significant, whether you are refugees in Uganda or students at MIT.
I guess that brings us back to tonight, where once again, we celebrate the ideals of Innovation, Development, Enterprise, Action, and Service as represented through the creativity and ingenuity of MIT students and their community partners. The process of supporting students has changed and evolved over the years. Now known as the Social Innovation Challenge, IDEAS continues to support students in their journey to impact.
And I’d just like to take a moment to thank the staff members who have carried on the vision of IDEAS to this point. I’d also like to appreciate the students who have invested their time, creativity, passion, and energy into their projects, and the partners with whom they are working.
And finally, I thought I’d share with you some of my favorite quotes, as you may find some wisdom there:
“Opportunity is missed by many, because it is dressed in overalls and looks a lot like work.” -Thomas Edison
“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still, I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.” Edward Everett Hale
I particularly like this perspective because it is the very fact that we can only be part of the solution that requires that we must be part of the solution.
The final quote, from friend and Ghanaian farmer John Manu, requires some context: In 2010, we were working together on a project in New Longoro to develop and teach low-cost methods for drilling wells, and Manu had agreed to let us practice on his mango farm. You pound a pipe into the ground, with your hand on top, acting as a valve. With each stroke, a spurt of water and soil is forced out of the pipe, and the hole gets deeper. We were not very good at controlling the process. After one particularly large blast of muddy water hit Manu in the face, I apologized... Manu just scraped the dirt from his face and said, "You cannot do this work if you fear mud," and got back to work. Innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, development, design – these are elusive concepts that are difficult to teach. They are messy; there is no clear, correct answer. In other words: you cannot do this work if you fear mud.
So in closing, let me wish you all the best as you do the something you can do, even when the path is muddy and the work is hard. These are the best kind of journeys.
More information
MIT IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge
Contact
Amy Smith, MIT D-Lab Founding Director
Lauren Tyger, Assistant Dean for Social Innovation, MIT Public Service Center