 Hello and good morning, good afternoon and good evening depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest E4C webinar. Today's webinar was developed in collaboration with Alexander Pan of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs and Mike Han from Synergy. My name is Paul Scott and I'll be moderating today's webinar and when I'm not doing this I actually work within ASME's Engineering for Global Development Group as the program manager for an initiative that's focused on hardware-led social ventures. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a little bit about today's webinar. Impact Inventing, strengthening the ecosystem for invention-based entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Software-based ventures or Impact Inventing are at the heart of Engineering for Global Development and at E4C we're focused on collecting and sharing information about the challenges in development and deployment of technology-based solutions as well as potential new innovations and supporting structures to scale products. As part of this effort we've invited experts in the field to join us today and share their thoughts. As mentioned we've got Alexander Pan who's the program coordinator of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs and Mike Han from Synergy. Mike's a product development manager at Synergy and Synergy's a social venture based in Kenya. We'd like to thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series. I'm Iona Aranda of ASME, Holly Shinder Brown, Michael Maider and Steve Walsh of IEEE and the rest of the team. Thanks for your help. If you've got any recommendations for future topics or speakers we invite you to contact the team via their email addresses visible on the slide webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Before we move on to our presenters I just wanted to give you a quick reminder of what engineering for change is all about. E4C is a global community of over 770,000 people such as engineers, technologists, development practitioners from NGOs and social scientists who work together to solve humanitarian challenges faced by underserved communities around the world such as access to water, off-grid energy, effective healthcare, agriculture, sanitation and others. We invite you to join the E4C community by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from our members including professional societies like ASME and EWB USA. Registration is easy and free. Check out our website at www.engineeringforchange.org to sign up for more information. The webinar you're participating in today is one installment of the Engineering for Change webinar series. It's a free publicly available series of online seminars to showcase best practice and thinking of leaders in the field. You can also watch them on demand at www.engineeringforchangewebinars.org and if you're following us on Twitter we'd like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag E4C webinars. Just to let you know about the next E4C webinar it's going to be on December 10th at 11 a.m eastern standard time and it's going to be the title is Simple but Intelligent Solutions for People with Health Restrictions and we'll have someone from Siemens Shufton joining us for that. A few high key to my housekeeping items before we get started. On the screen you're now seeing there are a number of different widgets on the dashboard at the bottom. The group chat is where you will interact with your fellow attendees and post any comments about the webinar. The Q&A widget allows you to submit any questions for the presenter. The help widget is for inquiries about technical difficulties and share this allows you to share the link of this webcast with your friends and colleagues. You can do this on Twitter and other social media sites. Lastly there's a survey icon that allows you to take a survey at any time about the webinar. We've got quite a few people from around the world on the webinar today. Even the presenters I know are in Canada on the west coast of the US and in Washington DC. So it would be really good to understand where we've got some of our participants from. So using your group chat please type in your location and then we can see whereabouts in the world you're joining us from. I see we've got people from the US joining us. We've got a few people from India, someone from Peru, a participant from Los Angeles and someone from London amongst other places. Thanks very much for letting us know where you're joining from and it's good to see we've got participation from all around the world. So let's talk a little bit about today's presenters. We've got Alexander Pan and he's the program coordinator at the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs. For those of you that don't know Andy they're a network of small and growing businesses around the world and they provide support to the ecosystem. We also have Mike Han who's a product developer at Sanergy and as I mentioned Sanergy is a social venture based in Nairobi in Kenya. So let's get onto the topic of the day and I'm just going to give a little bit of a framing of the of the discussions that will follow today. So we're here to talk about invention, we're here to talk about engineering and we're here to talk about hardware and products and why is that important? Well in recent times there's been a tremendous focus on the role of social ventures contributing to global development challenges. The challenge is that when it's done through products product based ventures or hardware or invention it seems to be very difficult to get these ventures to scale and so we're interested in looking at the concepts of this and understanding what actually it takes to get hardware based ventures to scale or invention based businesses to scale. There's much more complexity it's much more interdisciplinary than other types of ventures trying to get to scale. So that's what we're here to talk about today. If we look at the different routes to market for an organization you can break them down into a technology journey, a company journey, a finance journey, a market journey and a policy and regulation journey and any social venture has to navigate these journeys in order to take their product to market and it's specific it's particularly difficult when you're looking at a product based venture on an invention based venture because the complexity of making all those things come to fruition and take them to market at scale is particularly challenging so that's what we're interested in exploring today and gaining insights from the series of round tables and the publication that the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs has done but then also gaining insights from the ground from an actual product developer who's out there day to day doing this type of work in the field. Just to think about the role of the engineering in this it's interesting to think a little bit about the different questions that are in an engineer's toolkit or a science and technology professionals toolkit to understand how to develop and deploy a product to market and these are some of the questions that perhaps you may ask yourselves if you're thinking about taking products to market. So with that said I'll pass it over to Alexander Pan of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs to take us through his recent publication on impact inventing. Alex, thanks very much for joining us today and over to you. No problem Paul, thanks for having me and thanks for the introduction and I also wanted to take just a second and thank the whole ASME and E4C team for inviting me to present today. As Paul said I'm from the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs and I'll take a brief second and kind of explain what Andy is as our acronym is known as. So we are a global network of organizations that work to support small and growing businesses in the developing world and we use the term small and growing businesses rather than the more traditionally known term of small and medium sized enterprises because we're really focusing on the small size of a small side of small and medium businesses that employ between five and 250 employees and are seeking growth capital of between 20,000 to a million dollars and the reason why we're focusing on this particular size is one because we think that there is a missing middle there. You know if you're a micro enterprise you can probably access micro finance and a variety of other supports and then if you're a medium size enterprise you can more readily access traditional finance through banks and other commercial capital. But in this middle is really a gap where no one really wants to invest in or support the growth of these small businesses but we think that's really important because by helping these small and growing businesses or SGB's scale we can create social impact in lots of different ways so we think that the growth of these enterprises creates jobs so that's social impact in itself but also a lot of these small and growing businesses serve a social purpose or they're trying to deliver goods and services to underserved markets and so we think that by supporting these small and growing businesses we can help alleviate poverty in the developing world. So Andy functions as a membership organization and we have members that represent the whole kind of ecosystem that supports these small and growing businesses so these include primarily capacity development providers so these are incubators and accelerators and the like also investors a range of different kinds of investors from your finance first commercial investors to more impact and social oriented investments but then we also have a range of other actors such as corporations, foundations, academic institutions, research and consultants as well as some DSIs and donor agencies and this network is really global in its scope so we have members all over the world and regional chapters in Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya and India and we also have kind of emerging chapters and in West Africa and East and Southeast Asia as well so in some the Aston Network of Development Entrepreneurs is a network of intermediaries that support small and growing businesses so we got into this this invention space or a technology-based entrepreneurship because we noticed that that our members that were trying to support invention-based entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs that are trying to develop and commercialize new technology-based products were facing a particular set of challenges and that they were finding supporting these types of ventures more difficult than supporting the kind of more traditional service-oriented entrepreneurs that they were used to so we wanted to understand what makes these entrepreneurs unique but also you know how can the ecosystem that Andy represents identify what gaps there are in this ecosystem and how can we work collaboratively to fill those gaps so what we did is we convened a series of global round tables with the help of the Lemelson Foundation and Paul at ASMA and we held these round tables in Brazil, India, Kenya, South Africa and one in Santa Clara, California and so we had over 110 participants from over 90 organizations and we held these round tables to explore exactly the gaps in the ecosystem the challenges that invention-based entrepreneurs face and what we can do and how we can work together to better address those challenges and just put this into a bit of context and I think Paul did a really good job of introducing this but you know we've seen this growing focus on social entrepreneurship and small and growing businesses as viable global development solutions there's been a shift in the age community that has recognized that supporting businesses with social missions can can really deliver social impact. At the same time we have this shift recognizing that science technology and innovation and really have a positive impact on the lives of people living at the bottom of the economic pyramid and that we can really utilize the power of science and technology to improve those people's lives and then we also have have some shifting kind of macroeconomic trends that have allowed small firms to really be drivers of innovation and has taken away some of the competitive advantages traditionally seen by by large enterprises not to say that they don't still have an advantage but we've seen small firms be able to really be drivers of innovation particularly in BOP markets. So all these these factors kind of combine to create this opportunity for invention-based businesses to create sustainable, scalable and technology-based solutions for poverty. Let me just wait for this slide to advance. So I think Paul kind of covered this but quickly I just wanted to define my terms so when we're talking about invention-based entrepreneurship we're talking about a subset of technology-based entrepreneurs that are are really developing new physical technology-based products for those living on the base of the pyramid and so we use this term to differentiate hardware-based enterprises or people developing products from from software or ICT based technologies for the bottom of the pyramid not because we don't think that ICT is important but because we think there's unique challenges associated with building things physical products and we wanted to explore how to support those enterprises and there seems to be a lot going on in the ICT space but not quite as much investigation into into the hardware space and we we're taking what we call an ecosystem approach and I don't know if you can really read this slide but basically we believe that an entrepreneur's ability to succeed or their likelihood of succeeding is largely determined by the environment in which they're operating them so we think that entrepreneurs need support from a variety of different sources and to accomplish a variety of different goals so they need capacity development support they need access to finance they need access to talent so they really need to be engaging in in the ecosystem but what we found was that there's several important gaps in in the ecosystem for invention based entrepreneurs and those are particularly can be categorized into into five larger gaps so this is the market gap and the finance gap the talent gap the policy gap and the physical capital gap so I'll be going through each of those briefly and then we can take your questions at the end if you want more details into any of those particular areas so we're talking about markets developing a product is great but in order for that product to create social impact people actually need to to want to acquire the product and to use the product and unfortunately we're seeing that doesn't happen as often as we would like and this happens for a variety of reasons first and foremost there's a design disconnect a lot of these technologies are being developed in western universities either by grad students or researchers they really don't have a great sense of of the needs and the abilities of the target population that they're aiming to serve so there's really a need to to better understand the populations that products are designed to serve and we think that the ecosystem can better support this by by kind of encouraging and and teaching human centered design practices so anti members like ideo.org or catapult are really working working in this space to to increase better design and better connection with with the target markets. We also found that the people aren't collecting consumer feedback well in order to to develop a good product that has to go through several product iterations so so you need to test these products with the populations that you're you're aiming to serve and collect their feedback see how they they like it or don't like it and and then make the necessary design modifications but this process can be very very expensive especially in the remote markets that when we're talking about impact technologies these are hard to reach places so this process can be very expensive and very time consuming well there's a lot of emerging either technologies or best practices that they're designed to streamline this process and make it more efficient so for example Vilgro incubator out of India is working to develop a mobile phone voice survey that can help collect feedback from from populations on on products so we need to explore how to support that better consumer financing also is also very important you know you can design products to be affordable but oftentimes when you're talking about populations that live on less than $2 a day it's very hard to make products affordable enough but there's a lot of innovative kind of business plans or or technologies that you can utilize to make these make these products affordable to even the poorest of the poor pay-as-you-go technologies are really interesting and can de-risk the the risk of purchasing products and also there's a lot of interesting partnerships with microfinance institutions I think Mike can talk a little bit more about that later where our products are kind of supported by a local MFI in the field we also found some some issues around building the market for push technologies or technologies they don't really have a built-in demand because they're they're addressing a need of the consumer that they may not be aware of so queen cook stoves is a good example of this many people the target market of of queen cook stoves may not be aware that indoor air pollution is an issue so you need to build awareness for the social problem that the product is trying to solve moving on to talk a little bit about finance finance is I think one of the most obvious challenges for any kind of social enterprise but there's a particular challenge around financing hardware-based enterprises oftentimes financing hardware is more expensive it requires higher risk tolerance because you're not just taking the risk in the business but you're taking the risk in the technology it takes higher due diligence costs and oftentimes investors don't have the expertise to appropriately do their research on the technology and determine if the technology is is sound and all these all these kind of nuances make create a need for for unique financial instruments and it's also important to recognize that there's a variety of different types of finances out there everything from from governments to foundations in philanthropy to social impact first investment to to more kind of traditional venture capital and then finally to commercial capital in banks and what we what we were we're finding was that a lot of times these entrepreneurs that are developing products in the developing world are spending you know 90 percent of their time running around chasing financing and and not enough time actually building their businesses so we need to to find a way to to better streamline this financing process and and to you know share due diligence costs across investors and to to build collaborative financing mechanisms to to streamline the the financing process I'm aware that I'm running a little bit of short on time so I'll run through these the talent gap so I think this is this is maybe one of the most important challenges that entrepreneurs invention-based entrepreneurs face you know we hear all the time from from our partners that that getting good talent in in social enterprises is one of the biggest barriers to growth you know you can you can place all the financing you want but if you don't have the the adequate management structure in place that business isn't going to scale and when you add the invention opponent this talent challenge becomes even more complicated because not only do you need the business skill to run the business but you also need engineering talent and what we're finding is that in a lot of local universities there's not a emphasis on entrepreneurial entrepreneurship so a lot of the top engineering talent wants to get jobs and in either in the government or major corporations but they don't see entrepreneurship as a viable career path so we need to change that need to work with universities to help build the entrepreneurship component of their engineering programs there's also not a lot of technical support for for invention-based businesses out there not a lot of incubators or accelerates specialize in providing technical support to those ventures and also if you're an established invention-based enterprise it's very difficult to to recruit and retain qualified engineering talent a lot of the engineering talent coming out of the universities may be very book smart and and may be well suited to work in in major corporations but they lack that certain the on-the-job skill that that is required for these small startup invention-based enterprises moving on to policy I won't spend a lot of time here because this is very context specific but essentially we're there's a lot of policy issues that prevent the growth of small and growing businesses and invention-based businesses in the development world and these can kind of be categorized into r&d and commercialization policy intellectual property rights and also access to raw materials a lot of countries are very kind of focused on getting foreign investment so they they make it easier to import finished products rather than industrial inputs so acquiring the raw materials to to grow businesses is very difficult. Finally we're talking about physical capital gap and I think Mike's going to talk about this at more length but basically in order to build prototypes and refine prototypes you need to have access to the equipment to to actually build those prototypes and in the developing world a lot of that equipment isn't necessarily available and the process of building a prototype in a lab in the United States shipping it to Kenya testing it in the market there finding out something that you need a tweak and then flying back to your lab in the United States building another prototype flying back can become very expensive and very time consuming very quickly so there's really a huge advantage to being able to prototype locally but oftentimes these entrepreneurs have difficulty in finding the necessary equipment they need to prototype so in some local ecosystems we found that this equipment might actually be around but just not readily available so it might be in a university a local corporation might have it but they're unwilling to provide access to entrepreneurs for a number of reasons so being able to locate this this equipment and forming partnerships to to increase access to that equipment can be very productive and I think Michael definitely talked about this but there's also a lot of emerging kind of efforts to to provide this physical equipment in the form of maker spaces or kind of incubation spaces where entrepreneurs can access the physical capital they need to prototype so our report came up with several main recommendations first of all to to map the ecosystem and and see what's out there and and create access to what's already out there so you don't need to duplicate efforts create a community so having a community of people that are all interested and and working to support invention-based entrepreneurship engaging the universities so universities are very important and a variety of sectors but have been somewhat reluctant to to engage in this entrepreneurship or the entrepreneurial ecosystem so engaging them forming partnerships with corporate actors is also important and finally I think a lot of the time a lot of the focus is on financing but we think that the building this ecosystem to support will really unlock financing so I'd encourage you all to to read the report it's available online at abstinence2.org slash andy or just google impact inventing but I will let you go ahead and and I think Mike has some very interesting things to say and then we can we can get back to Q and A at the end so I look forward to your questions and I think I have my email and our twitter feed here so if you have anything please feel free to show me an email and with that I'll turn it back over to Paul brilliant thank you very much Alex for that overview and I think he gave a really good snapshot of the landscape and the ecosystem and the interdisciplinary nature of trying to take inventions to market you know the complexity of the market the finance the talent the policy and the physical capital really shows the the complexity of of what people are trying to do and I'd be interested to hear in the question and answer if that if those same themes were very constant across the locations that you did the workshops or if there was any significant differences in given local contexts so now we've got that big picture perspective from the report and the publication that Alex has done and the work that he did around those workshops what we really wanted to do was really drill down into someone who is actually doing this work on the ground so we're really lucky to have with us today Mike Han from Sanergy and for those of you that don't know Sanergy they're a sanitation based organization working out of Nairobi Kenya and they're doing some very interesting work and as I say this is an opportunity to hear from people that are actually doing it and to understand what the challenges are and opportunities are from their perspective on on the ground so over to you Mike thanks for joining us thanks Paul thanks Alexander thanks for having me you for seeing me and everyone apologize to anyone who is actually in the Santa Clara meeting these slides will look very familiar but in any case yeah Sanergy we're a sanitation provider in Nairobi Kenya focusing on urban sanitation where we make sanitation accessible affordable and hygienic in urban slums for all forever that's our little tagline to go into our business model we believe that simply providing sanitation isn't enough to to create a sustainable solution and we really believe that the business value chain behind it is going to make it sustainable over the long haul so in this chart you can see we we build franchise toilets in the slums and we sell those to micro entrepreneurs who operate them on a daily basis in charge per use and they collect all of that revenue from their customers and we collect the waste from the toilets every day and aggregate the waste at our waste treatment plant and process it into fertilizer biogas and other and other byproducts so to go into a little bit more detail we build these toilets out of a precast concrete panels you can see on the left and on the right you can see a franchise owner and we collect the waste every day as probably many of you are aware urban slums are extremely dense and access to the toilets is difficult and oftentimes actually more than 90 percent of the time is hand collection is necessary so even the cart can only get so far so typically that we collect from the toilet by hand take it to the cart cart goes to a collection node where the truck can access that and and then aggregated to our processing facility where we convert it on the right into a fertilizer and as a small enterprise growing enterprise this process started essentially is a is a composting process but as we scale we've converted to industrial processes that have a much higher turnaround time much faster turnaround time and then finally we have the sale and reuse of the byproduct which is where we make the money to sustain the business so give you some perspective on my role in the organization I lead the product development team and was charged with redesigning the toilet from the ground up when the when I joined the company we had 15 toilets on the ground and the company was very aware that this toilet design was not going to be scalable it was essentially a prototype that became the production model out of necessity to get the business going and over the last couple of years has been sort of bandaged to the point where it works decently well but there's a lot of loss and a lot of efficiency to be gained from a from a better design and this picture you can see is a sort of timeline of the what we call squat plate development and going from the earliest on the left to the new on the right so we use a urine diverting dry toilet which separates the urine from the waste from the solid waste at the source source separating and so a lot of the the development centered around the end user aspect the customer aspect and their their their perceptions of quality of our toilet because that's where we are that's our competitive edge in the in the marketplace in the urban sanitation marketplace we're not the first to to have charge peruse toilets we're not the first to provide toilets throughout the slums that's not new our value add is a very high quality experience for the customers clean hygienic guaranteed every time before I go into that I want to talk a little bit about this pyramid triangle scheme that I I constantly think about in product development where we want it all we want if we want it to be a fast process we want it to be high quality and we want it to be low cost but in in actuality we can't have all of those at the same time and so I think this is especially important in small growing enterprise where we really don't have enough money to make things happen fast and at high quality and so we're sort of driven into this area of doing it more cheaply and taking a much longer time because we still need to maintain that high quality of the final product so I just want to put this out there some of the sort of frame my discussion to going into detail this is the old toilet design the squat plate is mounted on a piece of plywood which is epoxy painted in the floor this concrete which has also been epoxy painted and you can see the waste containers in the bottom there the problem with this and actually the picture on the right is actually wrong the the the blue container at the bottom is actually a jerry can not a barrel not actually sure why that's in there but in any case there's a lot of room for error here there's the tolerances are super wide containers can get misaligned the squat plate is can feel unstable after a while of washing you can imagine plywood absorbing cleaning liquids and and actually cleaning liquids from cleaning the floor going down into this this hole in the ground which we call a retaining box which sanergy staff is responsible for so in the franchise agreement where sanergy is responsible for everything below grade and the owner is responsible for everything above the floor maintaining cleanliness providing toilet paper sawdust a hand washing station with soap making sure the mirrors intact on the door the co-hook operates and you know all of those things and if they don't then coming to us repairs but so this creates a huge problem for our waste collection staff or the standard the fresh life front line as we call them where they'll arrive to a toilet that has had a problem of misalignment or spillage or cleaning liquids have gone down and they're actually responsible for cleaning that up so it's a huge time loss and it creates this really negative environment or relationship between our franchisees and our waste collectors and that's a really valuable relationship to us because it's a it's a day-to-day relationship and if they're unhappy together then then it creates much bigger problems down the road so quickly go through some design research ergonomic research sampling a number of people to understand positions and ergonomics and most of the design as you can imagine is the squat plate is based around women because men are very simple to design for but we were finding that women were actually moving between urination and defecation and and the reason for that was that they are aiming for the front of the squat plate and I apologize for anybody who's sort of at lunch now or whatever I'm used to talking about all this quite candidly so that became a real design driver for our squat plate and making it deep splash resistant or you know anti-splash and also making it as deep as possible to prevent that splash so prototyping this in Kenya there was a video here but I'll snapshot the process built the prototype out of clay did a plaster casting from that clay and then made a fiberglass functional prototype from that plaster using the plaster as a mold and that was a very available I say very available it took me weeks to find the right clay and the right plaster and then what you what you get out of it is a is a prototype that works really well for as a prototype and and creating a functional prototype that you can actually test in the toilet and get exit interviews and and talk to people about its function but at a certain point this doesn't really work for manufacturing so after a certain amount of that we arrived at you know this is what we wanted we can draw it in a computer we need the toilet to be this now this is really hard to do in Nairobi if you're talking about generating a tooling for these precast panels the squat plate which is made from plastic and the retaining box that goes in the ground which is a roto molded part and so it's sort of forced us to bring that process back to the U.S. because we have I have personal connections here that was able to leverage those and you know access to technology is much easier and and also being able to trust suppliers with with your design in terms of knowing that they'll do a decent high quality job so here you can see the new retaining box container configuration that eliminates putting the containers in wrong it eliminates the movement of the containers this alignment becomes impossible but it also creates a it's hard to see in the picture but it also creates the a lip above the floor where the sort of water dam if you will so when you're washing the floor the water can't go down inside this box but even if it did it's plastic and it's easier to clean and then of course the precast tile flooring instead of epoxy paint so here's a snapshot of the process that I need to go through in terms of building the tooling for the squat plate and reminder that on to go back to that triangle we're doing this as cheaply as possible but trying to maintain a high quality and so typically if I if we had a lot of money I would have sent this CAD file to a mold or a tooling producer and they would have made this out of an aluminum block and sent it to a high-end vacuum forming shop instead we made it on a shop bot out of MDF resin fiberglass and took it to a kayak manufacturer out here in Washington state that is willing to do these sort of odd jobs but here's the final product and I'll welcome any questions in terms of that enter gearbox gearbox is a prototyping facility that sanergy ihub brick and others are starting out of necessity in Nairobi and so I tell the sanergy story has an intersection to this and I say prototyping facility because it's not a maker space as we tend to think of maker spaces it's really focused on bringing products to market in creating the ecosystem or culture in in the space to do that to create a backing investment but also be able to do a small batch production of prototypes and first run to test the market at a decent scale so so the gearbox will incorporate a lot of tools wood shop metal shop modeling shop electronics lab and a fab lab we're calling it which is the larger higher-end tools for you know five acts of CNC's three-axis mills for actually doing fabrication jobs for local industry I believe is a large revenue stream that is potential for this so in here's what it might look like this is actually not the space but a number of mills and so it also incorporates a very high level of training to get our local entrepreneurs making high quality products right from the beginning and understanding the the time and resource that that requires I think there's a bit of uh naivete on um uh entrepreneurs engineers slash entrepreneurs um in the amount of time and energy and craftsmanship that it takes to bring even a simple prototype to market and this is an example of a industry player in Nairobi containers who who's a rotomolder um and they're excited about generating new products and increasing their catalog but to do so they've historically gone to India to relatives and there are personal connections in India that the design shops over there the the tooling shop is over there and having molds shipped back to them and so it's a very long time intensive process for them to generate new products and oftentimes it results in um a sort of attitude of oh well it's good enough or we'll um we'll just take whatever molds you have and and not really provide a product that's specific to the market needs and so they're very excited about being able to prototype things and and generate tooling locally in Nairobi um here's a quick idea of what the space might look like um in terms of uh layout um we're looking for 25 000 square feet um to start with and uh going from there um and just so you know we're always looking for funders um and in kind um support equipment being a major um major area for support that we're we're looking for currently um but we're also looking for the file leaders and professional um instructor leaders and and mentorship um to do sort of residency programs and this this program is not yet defined um but um if you're interested definitely give me a shout send me an email um so I guess with that I'll uh I'll open up to questions send it back to you Paul and uh we'll go from there excellent Mike thanks thanks very much for that and I think you know with the the experience of synergy on the ground and specifically the experience of a product developer trying to prototype um with a view to scale on the ground that complements very nicely with the the general themes and the overview that that Alex presented to us earlier about the the complexity and the intricacies of getting products to market in a an effective and scalable way so they meet users needs now um we're going to a question and answer session for this portion for we've got about seven minutes to do that so if you have any questions please enter them into the the question and answer tab of your um of the portal uh I've got a few that I would like to start with um and then as extra ones come in I'll I'll put those away um and and I'll I'll ask uh from those so uh Alex I alluded to this earlier maybe you could talk a little bit about the you know are these the the themes that you you saw across um invention-based entrepreneurs and in terms of the ecosystem the market the finance the talent the policy and the physical gap was that constant across all the locations in the in the workshop and you know how much was was global and how much was locally specific like yeah I think that's a really good question um I think I mean I would say that I think the challenges face by invention-based entrepreneurs are somewhat consistent around the world but I think that the the way that we address those problems needs to be very sensitive of the local um local context um so for example I think one of the big differences that we saw was the country's experience um kind of supporting the growth of technology-based ventures whether they be impact focused or not um so for example Brazil has a really great history of of um technology incubation have a huge um and thriving kind of technology um venture space whereas Kenya on the other hand doesn't have that um so you know in our in our roundtable in Brazil we we in all the roundtables actually we encourage participants to think about tangible actions that they could take um to improve their local ecosystem so the participants in in Brazil came up with this this kind of theoretical project um where they could partner with with local technology incubators um Fundacion Certe was the one they were talking about um and who was attending the roundtable and they're you know really well respected um and and well established technology incubator but they don't focus on social impact technologies um so partnering that that institution with kind of the Andy incubators in in country that have the experience incubating social ventures can be a really productive partnership um so we're talking about creating like a track in their incubation program um that would help incubate social ventures um whereas you know if you're you're in Kenya you don't have that that expertise um to to leverage so you really have to think about how to um to to build um from the ground up um but I would say overall it's very important to to look at the local context um and before designing any kind of intervention think about what resources are already there that you can you can leverage before you try to reinvent the wheel um and and start all over again from scratch excellent thank you and um you ask one question and many come in so keep them coming in there's there's questions coming across um of which we should have time to answer to most of them one for you Mike which is an interesting one you know obviously at the moment um you you're managing to do in this uh development and manufacturing um internationally and and and and getting that to market in that way what's Senage's strategy for for transferring that development locally and upskilling um your local talent to be able to do that um closer to the customer um yeah I think um this question might you know be geared more towards gearbox um because sanergy is a you know um ideally we wouldn't be doing all of these things ourselves um we would be working in an environment where we can outsource aspects of the aspects of the development of these hardware products um so the strategy is really to get gearbox run up and running and develop the training curriculum and um success stories to create a culture of of uh of high level manufacturing skills and um and design training um we we've actually had a very difficult time finding local employees uh within for the product development department of sanergy and we're we're really sort of looking to gearbox to develop the culture um and and uh increase the amount of people that are a wanting to do this kind of work I think um Alex alluded to this earlier um when he was talking about um engineers not really uh either knowing or wanting to participate in this um space um because of uh sort of access to corporate you know good paying corporate jobs um and um frankly this work is quite a you know this is very difficult because we're sort of demanding that everyone do everything because we're on such a bootstrap budget that we're really looking for talent that is across disciplines and that is something that's hard to find um locally um and it's not something that's being um sort of emphasized from the university perspective not sure I answered the question but um um Paul can I take a shot at that as well please do Alex um so yeah I think there's you know there's there's a short term solution there's a long term solution I think and the short term mentoring is a really um important kind of uh vehicle that we need to explore and we need to do better um I think ASME is well suited to play in this place because they have a huge network of engineering talent um at a very senior level um and I think it would be great to be able to tap into and provide some of these these small and growing businesses with access to that sort of mentorship and that sort of advice a lot of these entrepreneurs don't have any sort of board level or mentorship level support um to bounce ideas off of or to get mentoring from so increasing access to that is a very important short term solution but we also have to address this at at the systemic level and that's that's through the university system um I think we really need to increase the university's awareness of of what talents um these kind of enterprises need um so whether that's through um internship programs or partnerships with um local incubators or accelerators um I think we need to identify the kind of the disruptors in these university systems um and work with them through partnerships to to help them understand um the needs of these small invention based enterprises yeah thanks elix and I think that that's a good point in terms of the different stages of this the short term and and the long term and you know to to paraphrase your your answer Mike I mean I think you know given that it was becoming such a detriment to your business that it's really the incentive that has led you to to participate in the gearbox initiative um and to really try and build that out for the future not only for for synergy but other locally um local entrepreneurs that are interested in this space so you know I think you've already taken your first step along that strategy but you know obviously it takes time to to get you where you need to be um unfortunately we've we've we've run out of time um but there if you submit a question through the question and answer um uh tab on the on the webinar we'll make sure that we get an answer back to you on the specific points I think a number of the questions that came across were related to the um interaction between the different elements of this and I think that that's something I'm a social scientist by training in that interdisciplinary nature of of of trying to take these products to market I think is very important um so you know I think that that was the theme a lot of that came through a number of the questions specifically on the local policy and how the local policy um provides the right environment or the wrong environment for for the ability to do um some of these uh these ventures effectively and to make them competitive in the local market so just to take two things before we leave firstly I'd just like to announce that um hopefully there are some um there's the ability to um to to to provide some support in this with the launching of something that's called the ASME Innovation Showcase and for more information on that please go to go.asme.org forward slash i show um there's going to be over $500,000 worth of prizes uh in cash and engineering support specifically for hardware based social ventures so take a look at that if you've got an idea and you want to take it to market and lastly for those that have participated on the webinar today um you have your professional development code which you can enter to get an hour's worth of time and just to remind you that if you have any questions um or you have any comments or you'd like to suggest um new themes or potential topics for webinars uh please email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org and before we leave today just again to say a really big thank you to our presenters Alex Pan from Andy and Mike Han from Sanergy thanks so much for your time uh really enlightening engaging discussions so thank you and take care