 Well hello everybody, it's about time for us to get rolling and I'd like to say good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or you can see for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E-Portese 2013 webinar series. Today's webinar, the Development Collaboration with F-Smart Global and our guest presenter is Jackie Stenson. My name is Yana Randa and I'll be moderating this webinar. When I'm not moderating, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as a Senior Program Manager in our Engineering for Global Development Department. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar. It's all about distribution. As part of E-Portese design principles, we encourage our community to embrace the market when developing solutions. We've seen that for a technology or tool to be truly effective, it must be affordable relative to the local economy and accessible to the community. So we're glad to have the opportunity to discuss supply chain issues today. To do so, we've invited today's presenter, Jackie Stenson, who is the co-founder of F-Smart Global to talk about some of the work that she's been doing. Jackie, we thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E-Portese webinar series, General. Along with myself, we have Holly Schneider-Brown, and Victoria Chum. All of these folks work on developing and delivering the webinar series, and I'd like to thank you, team. If anybody out there has questions about the series, please be encouraged to contact us via the email address visible on this slide. Webinars, F, engineeringforchange.org. Before we hand things over to all of those who are here today, we thought it would be a good idea to remind you about E4C and who we are. E4C is a global community of actually now over 15,000 technically minority members and then 30,000 followers, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs and social scientists, who work together to solve critical humanitarian challenges. Weather and water, energy, health, agriculture, sanitation, are other areas that are faced around the world today. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member or following us to any of our social media channels. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory, a few tested solutions, and related information from all the members of our coalition, including professional societies such as CWBUSA, FACHAPELE, ASCE, SWE and ASHRAE. As well as academic supporters such as MIT's D-Labs, international development agencies like USCID and Practical Action, as well as access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Check out our website, engineeringforchange.org to learn more. The webinar you are participating in today is one installment of the Engineering for Change webinar series. This free, publicly available series of online seminars showcases the best practices and thinking of leaders in the field who bring leading-edge technology and solutions to bear on global humanitarian and development challenges. Information on upcoming installments in the series as well as far-class videos on past presentations can be found on the E4C webinar's page, here at the website listed again, engineeringforchange-webinars.org. If you're on Twitter today, I'd also like to invite you to join us in a conversation by using the hashtag E4Cwebinars, all together, E4Cwebinars. And of course, you are welcome to check out our YouTube page for archives of our previous presentation. E4C's next webinar will be on Tuesday, October the 8th at 11 a.m. Eastern Center Time with lighting global on the topic of lighting global support of clean energy markets for the rural poor, and specifically will be focusing on designing standards in line with technology development and consumer expectations. Our presenters will be Dr. Arne Jacobson, who is the director of the SHOP Energy Research Center and associate professor at Humboldt State University and Peter Alston, who is a consultant in energy systems and doctoral candidates at the University of California Berkeley Energy and Resources Group. To register, please visit the E4C webinar's page later this week. If you're an E4C member already, just note that you will be receiving an invitation by email, and those of you who are on the fence can now be in person. So it should be a very exciting webinar and just in time for international standards day, so I'm pretty excited. So a few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's see where everyone is from today. In the chat window on the right-hand side, please type in your location. I'll get started and show you what I mean. There we go, some people already heard. Very well, I see folks coming in from Texas, Peru, Cambodia, we have folks from India as well as Malaysia and Virginia and New Jersey. So we're some folks now quite far, some folks coming in from Sweden and Texas and Pennsylvania. So I'm very excited to have you all join us today. Look like we have a great turnout. So as a reminder, all technical questions and minister problems should go into this chat window where you're typing in today. And also feel free to send a private chat to Holly or myself if you have a specific question. You can also use the chat window to type in any remarks that you may have. However, during the webinar, please use the Q&A window, which is located directly below the chat window, to type in your questions to the presenter. That way we can keep track of all the questions and they won't get lost in the mix. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, try hitting stop and then start. If that doesn't work, you can use the call and number for the teleconference. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser that sometimes fixes that issue. Following the webinar, to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour for PDH for the session, please provide your full name and date that you completed this webinar, as well as the color that we will provide at the end of the session, and send all of this information to EAP-CEUadmin at IEEE.org to receive your certificate. This is for everybody who needs that for their PE license. Looks like quite a few folks today and we're very excited to have you all join us. And this one I'd like to introduce you to today's presenter, Jackie Simpson, is passionate about technology dissemination, which is science ethics and she'll be talking about it today. She's an engineer by training who works for technology development initiatives in 11 African countries and India. Until she was at the real challenge of getting these products that they're intended and users. And then she shifted her focus to technology dissemination strategies and low income settings. Her work in research helped lay the groundwork for SMART where she comes founded with Diana Du and you'll be hearing about today. Jackie studied mechanical engineering at Harvard and engineering for sustainable development at the University of Cambridge and we're thrilled to have her join us and take some time out of her business schedule. So I am going to turn it over to Jackie now to take you through her presentation. Great, thank you, Yana. Can you hear me all right? Very well, great. So hi everyone, thanks so much for coming today. It seems like we have people from all over the world which is very exciting. So the topic that I'm going to be talking about is distribution. But I think before we get into distribution, it's helpful a little bit to talk about from how I got started and why distribution is important to provide some of the motivation. So initially, I studied engineering and I was really interested in what I like to call innovations for development or what many people in this space like to call innovations for development. You can see on the slide that here's a number of different examples of innovations for development. Everything from agricultural tools to health technologies to cooking and cooling technologies. So there's a wide number of different technologies. And this is what I was really interested in as a mechanical engineer was in designing these types of products. And everywhere around me, everyone sort of touted these as really exciting innovations. So that became what I, that was the word that I became used to hearing around a lot of these products. Even though it's a very broad word and I wasn't quite sure what it actually meant. So ultimately I wanted to figure out which of these innovations I personally wanted to work with. And for me, I focused on a couple of them in a couple different countries mostly in East and Southern Africa to start out. And I wanted to see how I could contribute as an engineer to a lot of these innovations in the field. So one of the first ones that I worked with was or one of the technologies that I worked with not actually one of the first ones was this technology. This is a peanut shell or ground nut shell made out of concrete and made by an international NGO. And this was one of the organizations that I worked with in some of my travels. I had heard a lot about it. It had got a lot of press. And when I actually went to work with this technology in Malawi at the time, what I actually found was this. So this is that same peanut shell there except it was pretty much sitting in someone's yard hadn't been used probably since it was built. I don't actually know what a majority of the things are that are hanging off of it like the yellow ball and the giant piece of wood that's been added to it. And so that was really disappointing for me. It was seeing these innovations not actually be used. And this is one of the first ones that I stumbled upon. Meanwhile, in this particular community there was a lot of other people that were using ground nut shellers but they tended to look more like this which is a metal ground nut sheller made by a local welder. And this was the sheller that people were most excited about. But it was still having a little bit of challenges getting out there. So here's another example of the technology that I worked with on my travels. So this is a bicycle ambulance used to help transport patients from pretty rural areas to clinics to help speed up the whole process in case someone really needs to get to the clinic urgently. So when I went off to look and try to find these technologies and try to contribute to these technologies from the engineering side, what I found was something like this which looks like it's okay. But if you actually look at the wheel right here, I think I have this laser pointer and it's working, the whole wheel has actually worked. And as a result, this particular bicycle ambulance hadn't been used for a very long time. No one had fixed it, no one had budgeted to fix it. And actually this was a technology that I saw, a product that I thought that it was in pretty good shape because the next one that I found looks like this. It had been stored on someone's roof for a very long period of time. I think the only reason they got it down is because I asked to see it. And so what I found is that this was pretty common and it became a big frustration of mine of why all these innovations for development weren't actually reaching people and why they weren't ultimately being used and theoretically benefiting people. And I really started to shift my focus from mechanical engineering design to dissemination. When I found this book, so this was a big turning point for me. So I'm seeing a couple comments that people aren't seeing the slides. If everyone, should I pause for a second so we can just make sure, sort it out, because my whole presentation is picture based, so I don't want to continue. So there's one person who can see them. Yana, shall I just continue? We are looking to see a lot of folks can see them. So it seems that there might be a few, only a few. So I asked her the advice of Holly. If you can't see the photos, please try opening up up X and a different browser. So if you're using Google Chrome, try IE or Firefox and let us know if that corrects the issue. It looks like most can see. So if you guys can hear, please do follow the audio broadcast and try again to, yeah, to try Chrome. Looks like Tim here said that Chrome works. So let's proceed, Jackie. Excellent, thank you all for your responses. So as I was mentioning, a big turning point for me in sort of my frustration about finding all of these technologies that simply were dysfunctional was finding this book, which is, you know, UNICEF report, an appropriate technology round table discussion. And when I flipped through this book, I found a lot of different technologies, many of which won that first slide that I showed you with all those pictures. That ground nut shell or that was made out of metal that was fabricated by a local welder that was actually a picture in this book. And the surprising thing for me about this book is that it was actually published in April 22nd, 1983. And I found this book in probably 2009 or 10. So what that said to me was not only are these products not reaching people, but we have been reinventing the wheel for a very long time and that there was this massive gap between the technologies that had been designed or prototyped and the people that were actually theoretically benefiting from these technologies or the whole dissemination factor of these technologies. And so when I went and I looked back at all of these different innovations for development, I realized that perhaps innovation wasn't quite the right word. And that rather, a lot of these technologies were inventions and that they were simply a product that had been developed and perhaps prototyped and tested by a couple people. But that was it. They were a physical technological invention. Which brings me to the next question was, well, then what's an innovation? If they weren't quite inventions, then what is an innovation? And I think one of, innovation can be a very broad word and it can be defined by many people. But one of the definitions that I've come across that I like the best, that I first heard at a class at MIT but I'm sure it's been a lot of literature, is that an innovation is essentially invention plus commercialization. That definition is of course debatable as many of these definitions are. But that was a definition that really resonated with me is that an innovation is not just about developing a product, it's about getting this product from the concept phase all the way through reaching end users. And so commercialization to me, I broke down into was really sort of the interesting bit because there was lots of inventions that I was aware of but not necessarily, but these inventions were not necessarily reaching people and so what happens to that whole commercialization piece? So I broke down commercialization into two parts although it can be broken down into many, many parts. The first is manufacturing, so having to do with the technology itself and making it in a way that it can be produced. And then the second part is dissemination which is just a very broad term to include a lot of different things be it physical distribution, sales and marketing, after sales service, pricing, et cetera. So I lumped it all together into dissemination. And manufacturing is something many of the inventors who are working on these technologies were looking into ultimately with their prototypes. So what I became really interested in was the dissemination piece is how when you have a finalized product, can you actually get it to people in a way that is scalable and sustainable? Because like those products that I showed you before, there may have been great products that they simply weren't reaching people. And we have many, many great products. Many people are continuing to design them and many of them have been around for decades. And yet we still don't see a significant amount of dissemination for these products. So the next logical question that I asked myself was if dissemination is really what I'm interested in, who has figured out dissemination in the context of life-improving technologies for lower income settings? So I did, I actually went back to school and did my whole master's research on this. And I realized that who has figured out dissemination is perhaps not the best question to ask because I'm not sure anybody really figures it out. So rather I looked at who is addressing dissemination and how successful some of these techniques are. I'm gonna briefly go through a couple of these different categories of people that are addressing dissemination. And then I'm gonna highlight one of the ones that I focused on and some takeaways that I had from that and then how I applied this to Esmart, which is the social enterprise that I co-founded at Diana Ju. So who is addressing dissemination? I think traditionally dissemination has often, or at least in the past, was traditionally left to a lot of the NGOs for these types of technologies. The challenge sometimes with the NGOs that distribute these technologies is that they end up like this peanut shell or the ground nut shell that I showed you before. And ultimately, this technology was given away for free for a variety of, I think, very complex reasons. And no one ended up really valuing it or taking care of it. So there's a lot of challenges around giving technologies away for free. And even for NGOs and nonprofits that attempt to sell their technologies because funding sources can be quite unstable, it can actually be really challenging to disseminate the technologies through these organizations because you may all of sudden be able to send your technologies out through the market channel and then the next year you can't do it at all. So it can be a very unsustainable and unscalable way to try to get technologies to reach communities. But I won't dwell on this now because I'd much rather focus on a couple of other categories. So there's also governments who are trying to address dissemination, oftentimes in partnership with organizations. So this, for example, is a partnership that the post office in Tamil Nadu had with Delight, the Solar Lantern Company to sell technologies through the post office. One of the challenges that you can have with governments is that the whole process to come up with a lot of these arrangements can be very lengthy and very time consuming. And it suffers from some of the same challenges as the nonprofits that NGOs do, which is that the funding may or may not be there the next year. And so they can be quite rewarding if you take the time to develop those relationships, but it can also take a very long time. One of the third channels is banks and microfinance institutions. So this is a way for, or microfinance institutions, MFI's for short. This is a way that people have tried to sell their products, especially when they're higher value products and they're selling them to communities that can't necessarily afford the product. If you can get a bank or microfinance institution interested in selling your product, it can be great to have as a source of financing and make it much, much more affordable. The challenge is that they don't actually cover the physical distribution in and of themselves. So you're still left with moving products and the logistics and supply chain behind that. So it really is only one piece of the puzzle. This is probably the most common way that I've seen to disseminate this sector of products, which is a direct sales force. It's essentially an Avon lady-style model where you have door-to-door salesmen or door-to-door saleswoman who walk around to communities selling products. I'd say that until very recently, this was the primary focus of organizations trying to disseminate life-improving technologies. This picture is from Living Goods, which is probably one of the biggest names in this space with women that they employ that go door-to-door to sell initially health products and now a bunch of different types of products. While Living Goods may have one of the biggest names for creating a direct sales force model, there are many other people that are trying to replicate this. For example, this is another organization called Solar Sister, which has that same direct sales force employment model. So while this is a very common model that people have been excited about, there's also quite a few challenges with a model like this. The first is that you're limited by your ability to recruit really good salespeople, and that can be incredibly challenging, especially at a larger scale. And the second thing is that it is very difficult to scale the model in general, because each salesperson that you bring on is only capable of making a certain number of sales to end users. And it's very difficult to scale exponentially versus linearly. It's also incredibly resource-intensive. Most of the organizations that I know doing this don't actually have their mission as dissemination or distribution, but rather their mission is creating employment and the distribution happens to be something that people can be employed doing. So really, first and foremost, they're generating these jobs and putting a lot of effort into training, but retention can be quite difficult, which is why they focus on that. And finally, of people that are addressing dissemination, there's the retail shops themselves. So in many countries around the world, there are millions, hundreds, millions, thousands, et cetera, retail shops that really litter the landscape and sell everything from Coca-Cola to small shampoo packets to larger, slower-moving, more durable goods. And there are millions of them everywhere. And in India, where we focus, I have seen estimates between 12 million to 18 million of these local retail shops. And I've seen them all throughout other countries as well. These products until this date, though, have not been selling the type of technologies that I was interested in. They weren't selling these life-improving goods like improved cook stoves and solar lighting solutions and agricultural tools. But they were actually addressing dissemination just not for the technology segment I was interested in. So I thought it would be most interesting to look at these retailers and figure out what have they done right about dissemination and how can we apply that to the technology for development sector? What techniques have they used that have worked really well and how can we apply those? And so to do that, I looked at a bunch of companies, and here's four of them as an example. Sorry, my slide's got full. Here's four of them as an example that really got their products out to communities. So here you see Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola's reached everywhere. They're often an example of really great distribution. But I also looked at a couple of different other things that aren't as big of a name as Coca-Cola. For example, a cement company that actually gets their product out quite far, or an agricultural seed company, or especially in racing years, cell phones, and specifically I looked at Nokia. And I was most interested in what lessons can we take from these different sectors, and how can we apply them to the technology for development space? So I focused on five main categories. The first is price and financing. Second is marketing and branding. The third is the physical movement of goods. The fourth is after sales service. And the fifth is trust and choice. And what each of these successful distributors that are getting their mostly fast-moving consumer goods to local retail shops have done. And what has the technology for development sector not done or can learn from this? So price and financing. One of the first things that I noticed is that most things are priced in very, very small packets, usually in the most affordable packets as possible, or the smaller that are small. Unilever has done a ton of research on having very small shampoo packets so that people can ultimately buy them in very small doses. This is a challenging one for the technology for development sector because many of the products are significantly more expensive. For example, this is a solar lighting system by barefoot power, and it costs on average $140 U.S. dollars, which is just oftentimes way too expensive to be bought for its target users. So this was sort of one area that didn't really carry over particularly well because the fast-moving consumer goods sector that really goes to the local shops hasn't had to address these large product prices as much. What I did find is that the larger, more expensive products were really only available in the nearest Perry Urban Center as opposed to the most rural center. Okay. Second was marketing and branding. This is an example of an ad that Coca-Cola put out in Kenya when they were launching Coke Zero. It's a little bit crazy. There's a helicopter and some sort of Coke Zero ambulance looking vehicle and explosions and fireworks, and it's like a very intense, very exciting ad. And it wasn't just Coke that created ad campaigns like this. It was sort of everybody was working on promoting their product in the best light possible. So this, for example, is a Nokia ad. And I found that there was a pretty stark difference between what many of these companies that had successfully gotten a price out there were doing and what the technology for development space did. So even in this ad, which isn't quite as crazy as Coca-Cola's ad with the fireworks and the explosion, they're depicting someone using their phone, smiling, looking like they're having an enjoyable time. Well, as many of the advertisements and marketing and branding around the technology for development space focus on pictures like this. And this is a picture from the life straw of our child being down and drinking out of a very dirty bowl of water. And this does not look like a particularly aspirational picture. I know if I saw this picture, there would be no way I would want to buy this life straw. And frankly, that's what happens that many people didn't actually want to buy these life straws. But there was a huge gap between the way that we were marketing these technologies for development and the way that successful companies that had reached rural end users were doing their marketing, which was a focus on aspirational products. And that was something that really the technology for development sector I found was missing, was making these products seem like they're aspirational and not designed for lower income settings because many people who are of a lower income setting don't want to buy something that's immense their status of that. So the third section that I looked at was the physical movement of goods, is how many of these products were physically out there versus in other situations. And so the most obvious one to look at for that was Coca-Cola, someone that has gotten their products out absolutely everywhere. And they have this massive network of independent authorized distributors that go all over countries, be it with trucks or push carts or motorbikes. But they really have this network of people that physically transport their goods out there. They're a big name example, but they're not the only ones that do that. For example, the cement company that I looked at, which you can see some of the cement bags that are here, also have a significant network to get their products out to smaller communities. But in the technology for development sector, I found that oftentimes this physical movement of goods, the physical distribution, which is only one piece of the puzzle, was missing. And that it was often challenging for these organizations to get their products out there. And I think part of it is lack of resources, and part of it is engineers not having enough time or resources to focus on the distribution. I think part of it is also the media of attention and interest in the product rather than getting it out there. But part of it is also the model in general. And many times we'll see models that look like either of these models, which is essentially a buy one, give one away for free model. And I've seen this quite a few times, mostly when we're not actually sure if you want the product to begin with. Or there's a challenge with something else, be it pricing. But this tends to be a very unsustainable way to get products out to people. Because you're totally dependent on someone buying it in North America or Europe, and ultimately giving them away for free, which that was often the case. It also is very dependent on people's ability to buy some of these products. So for example, when we had a recession, purchasing and charity and charitable giving significantly dropped. And so that was one challenge that we really faced if you rely on this type of model for distribution. The fourth thing that I looked at was after sale service. And what I found was that most of the products that were moving were mostly these fast-moving consumer goods, FMCDs for short. So these fast-moving consumer goods were oftentimes candies or cooking foods or inputs, shampoo packets, things like that, Coca-Cola even. They didn't really require after-sale service. So this was something that at least many of the companies that have gotten their product out into the field haven't had to deal with. But the technology for development sector does. So here's a picture I showed earlier of the bicycle ambulance with the broken wheel. And this was really a challenge of after-sale service. The products physically needed out there, but there was no after-sale service in place. Nor was there nor had the user who got the product budgeted for maintenance fees, and thus the product ended up not making it out there. So after-sale service was really something that current distributors who make it to retail shops haven't had to address as much, but the technology for development sector really does. And finally, I looked at trust and choice. These are a little bit more ambiguous than the four things that I previously mentioned. And what I found is that a lot of organizations and brands were putting a significant amount of effort into building up their brand name as one of quality and trust and of providing their end users with a large choice of products. So for example, this is a Nokia dealer. They have many Nokia phones. They also have many knockoff Nokia phones. But really, if you were a customer that wanted to buy a mobile phone, you could go to someone that you trusted in your community who you probably knew, and you could choose what you ultimately wanted to buy for yourself. And while this seems very obvious when I say it, it's actually something that the technology for development sector has just not focused on. Oftentimes, we see organizations go in there and choose what products the communities should theoretically want, but that's not necessarily what the communities actually want. So for example, this is a little small, but hopefully you can see it and I'll explain it. These are not-profits who are raising money to buy one specific type of technology for their community. So this first one wants an ambiverific cook stove, and the second one wants a delight solar lantern, and the third one wants green light planet solar lanterns. And while I think it's great that these organizations are trying to get these products out to their community, I question whether or not they're the ones that should decide if their community should get a delight solar lantern or a green light planet solar lantern or another locally made solar lantern, because there's so many options out there. And up until this point, we still haven't given customers a choice of what products they actually want to invest in and therefore what products they think are best. Many times it really is us pushing these products on one community and not providing them through some sort of trusted retail outlet. So these were a lot of the conclusions of my research looking at how technologies that have successfully gotten their products out to communities which tend to be fast-moving consumable companies like your Coca-Cola and your Nokia. Well, Nokia's actually not a fast-moving good, but Coca-Cola or even agricultural inputs or cement or something like that. And what they've done well that the technology for development sector can really learn from. And so it was taking all of this research together that Diane and I came together and started SMART. And in essence, SMART is trying to address a lot of these gaps by not focusing on the invention and not even focusing on the manufacturing, but focusing exclusively on the dissemination. And that to us means three things. It means marketing, distribution, and after-sales service. And I'll reiterate those in a second. But the way that SMART came up with our model is we looked at sort of everything that I just told you and we focused first on the local retail shops and we also focused in India for a couple of reasons. But we focused first and foremost on the local retail shops because we realized that these are people that were already reaching their end users and already getting their products out there. But there were also people that were a trusted presence within the community, so that fifth point that I mentioned really about offering trust and choice. And these local retail shops already had access to a significant number of households that depends on them for buying pretty much everything, be it from things that they buy every day to helping make choices on what products are new and coming into the community. These local retail shops really are people's lifelines to consumer goods and information source for new technologies. So on one side of the spectrum, we had these local retail shops that we were really interested in focusing on as our distribution channel. And then on the other side of the spectrum, we had all of these technologies that we knew existed and we knew that were inventions but they were lacking the whole commercialization bit or perhaps the dissemination bit because many of them had been manufactured. But there was this significant gap between the technologies and these local shops while more other goods like the fast-moving consumer goods were really reaching the local shops these products weren't. So our goal is to really fill those gaps. And our logo has three circles in it because we think about our business in three different ways. And sorry, the font is a little bit big here so these are all one words. But the three ways that we think about them are first demonstration of the products. So people don't necessarily know about these products and we have to physically demonstrate them in local shops. Second is the physical distribution, so the movement of goods from the suppliers to the local shops. And third is providing a guarantee that if anything goes wrong with these products they will ultimately be fixed. And that's the whole after-sales service piece. So in developing S&R's model we really tried to take into consideration a couple of the points that I mentioned before that we were looking at that current companies that have reached these small shops are doing well. So aspirational branding, physical movement directly to the shops. There were a couple things that we did have to invent for ourselves like the after-sales service, which current distributors really don't have to focus on as much. So ultimately we came up with S-Mart. And S-Mart's goal is essentially to put the world's essential technologies in every local shop. And we do this by really trying to create an S-Mart branded section in local shops and providing a catalog of these technologies and letting end users choose what products it is that they want to actually spend their income on and what products they value. And that way we're really focusing on the distribution piece of the puzzle. Our mission isn't to generate employment by creating a sales course. It really is to fill this gap in the supply chain. And that's how we came up with the idea for our model in the first place. One of the other, the last thing that I'd like to say before I finish and open it up to questions is that in creating S-Mart one of our big focuses is on bringing distribution into the spotlight. Oftentimes it is a very underfunded and under-recognized challenge. Technology inventors really recognize how important it is that they need distribution to get their product out to people. And so if any of you in the audience do work on the engineering side of these technologies I'm sure that this is a problem that you see every day. But unfortunately in the public space, be it the awards or the conferences or the competitions or just the articles and the recognition, we just don't see a lot of promotion of distribution as a problem. And I think that a big reason for that is that distribution is very difficult to explain or necessarily sell as a problem as opposed to a product. It's much more exciting to say like here is my thing that I invented than it is to say here is my very complex process that fills this gap in the global supply chain. And so something that we focus a lot on at S-Mart is trying to make sure that we're getting the word out there that distribution and dissemination is something that deserves to be in the limelight and something that people talk about because it's so big and so complex that we really need lots of people focusing on it. And whether that's through us promoting it or other people promoting it, we just love when distribution is brought into the spotlight as a big challenge that needs to be solved as the end in and of itself and not just a means to another end. So that is everything. Here our website is smart-global.com. You can also email us at hello at smart-global.com, warning our websites a little bit of how to date, and that's just because it's Diana and I who maintain the website and have been very busy with our operations lately. So I apologize if it doesn't have the most up to date information. Or you can reach me at Jackie at smart-global.com. Thank you so much, Jackie. This was an incredibly rich and fantastic presentation, and I think you're going to have quite a few questions to tackle. I saw already a number coming. For those of you who would like to pose a question, please be reminded that the Q&A window is where you would do that. It's located immediately below the chat window. So with that in mind, I'm going to tackle our first one, and it's a combo from one of our listeners here. Is there perhaps a difference in direct sales versus retail as it relates to push versus pole marketing? For example, if people aren't expressing a strong demand, perhaps it might be difficult to get them to go to urban retail shops versus creating demand at their home. Yeah, that's a great question about direct sales versus retail. And I think that you hit on a really good point in this question with push versus pole marketing. Is that many of the people that have gotten their products out to these shops are essentially relying on pole marketing? A lot of these products people know about, and they already sell themselves to an extent, whereas the technology for development space is more about push marketing. We have found that doing a direct sales, not necessarily sales, but a direct marketing to the end user in communities and in their homes is incredibly important. And so I don't think that we could skip over that because in a more push marketing campaign, we really want the end users to be able to touch and feel and understand and learn about the technologies and feel excited about them. That being said, that was not the type of model that we wanted to build because post those initial demonstrations, it would be very difficult for them to continuously get updates on these products unless there was a regular person that they could go to. And so a lot of our ideas behind going through the local retail shop is that it really is a transition between demonstrations at the community level to knowing that there's someone in your community who will always have the most up to date information. And that transition period from, you know, initially being introduced to the product at the community to knowing that there's a local retail shop that always has the most up to date information is something that we focus quite a bit on to help sort of bridge that gap a little bit more. Wonderful. And there's a number of questions here, so we're going to try and tackle all of them. Is there a difference in doing this work for a large bulky technology? You talked about solar home systems, for example, in your presentation and smaller, more portable products, such as an individual full-enter that might make it more difficult for a retail shop to handle. Absolutely. And I think that space in a retail shop can actually, it's prime real estate. And so one of the things that I didn't mention, but I will mention now, is that we run also the catalog model. So we do have demonstrations in products, but we use a catalog with pictures and specs and detailed product information to help address that problem a little bit, because some of these shops will have space to have these larger systems and some of the shops simply won't. And so the catalog is how we address it. Another issue is pricing around that. It's actually something that we simply haven't had the bandwidth to address, but one of the things to be concerned about is that the more lab at the system is the higher the prices, we personally don't provide financing, because we simply don't have the bandwidth to do that. But it's something that I think will definitely be necessary in the future as you get into bigger and bigger systems. And I guess pulling off of that, we're talking about bulky technology, but also one user wants to know if you look at the definition of innovative medical devices as part. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the scope of the catalog. Maybe some of them may be areas you cover to date. Yeah, so our catalog specifically focuses on any products that we like to call are essential, and so we call them essential technologies, mostly because we don't like the terms appropriate technologies or intermediate technologies or things like that. Our sort of a criteria is that it has to improve someone's life in some way, shape, or form, be it through improved efficiency or increased productivity or improved health incomes, et cetera. We haven't focused on medical technologies in the sense of clinical medical technologies. And that's because I think medical devices that usually are traditionally disseminated through a clinic are like a whole different ballgame, mostly because they are expected to be given away for free and come from the clinic and be provided by the clinic. So we do focus on health technologies that are typically household devices, be it water filtration systems or something like that, but not actual medical devices that go through a clinic. That is sort of the one thing that we've chosen to leave out of the catalog because we don't distribute to clinics. That's a very good point about consumer expectations. So a few other questions have come in regarding distribution. Do you see any major hurdles in managing logistics, moving physical goods to such a large number of local retail shops, for example, if the customer knows that there are approximately what, maybe 12 million in India alone? So he'd love to hear more about how smart is tackling this challenge and do you see challenges with scale distribution? Yeah, absolutely, actually. So one of the things that we always get feedback on is, you know, the fast-moving consumer goods companies have sort of built this massive, massive distribution network, be it of shops or motorbikes, like do you plan to do the same? And I think that that's a great question about the physical hurdles of managing logistics. We have a partner that we're working with for our logistics and supply chain management system, but I think building distribution networks in and of itself can be resource-intensive. We start off small. We start off with, you know, motorbikes, moving products around. We will invest in small trucks when we need to. We've talked about the potential about leveraging some of the existing networks, but the thing is also that some of these existing networks don't really reach the last mile anyways. So to an extent, yes, we will be building a major distribution and logistics network. And yes, that is going to be challenging. And we just got to recognize that. So one of the challenges here that's been brought up by a listener who is located in India, or I believe located in India, where it is from India originally, he notes that he's aware of high literacy rates in India. And when you're talking about your catalog and, you know, bringing it to the demonstrations, how successful has your venture been up until now in dealing with this particular hurdle of alerted customers? So actually, we have found that most of our catalog right now has limited written information. We have some specifications in the catalog, but we haven't seen a literacy to be a huge problem. It's something we'd love to sort of address. That could also be the region that we're in in India. So we're starting in Tamil Nadu, which has relatively higher literacy rates. We'd love to sort of be able to address it with videos in the future, but it's not something that we do right now. Frankly, a lot of the demonstrations happen with physical products there. So that makes a big difference in sort of overcoming the hurdle of a literacy. And I think a really pertinent question that has come in and is very fair, I know you talk about the notion of the products that make it into your catalog being essential technologies. How do you create the boundary conditions around that? How do you select which products are included? That's a great question. We are asked that pretty much all the time. So I think we have these relatively big boundary conditions. We leave them purposefully big. It's not that we just ran out of ideas and didn't realize it anymore. We did that on purpose. So part of it, it's really a combination of choosing products that are in the catalog. We do research ourselves. Our team has a fair amount of experience in this area. So we will research the products ourselves. We'll ask our customers, the local retail shops, if they have suggestions for products. But ultimately, I think what it comes down to is putting a product in the catalog and seeing it itself. So there is an initial amount of market testing and research. I personally think that market testing can normally get you so far and someone telling you they're going to buy something is way different than someone actually buying it. So it really is a combination where we start off doing a bit of research and then we pretty much do it ourselves. I think that's a really valid point and such an important point, especially if you think for folks listening on the webinar today, is that it's one thing to survey and get a little bit of that bias included in the answers versus actually getting it out there and trying to sell. So one practical question here that's come in is who delivered the product according to the retail shop or who arranges the transport or to the consumer that arranges their transport for larger bulkier products. For example, there's group works with concrete machines. How would they go about that? Yeah. So right now we physically move the products like our employees do and we have products we've chosen, products that are more manageable to physically move. You know, will we ever be able to deliver something like a latrine or a much bigger bulkier product? One day I hope so, but right now we just don't have the bandwidth with that. I think that you see in many organizations that are out there that they sort of the size of their vehicles and the size of their trucks really depends on how big their products are. And so we've right now managed to keep it as small as possible simply because we're still relatively new. So with that in mind, someone else asked about, I guess, the size of your organization at this point, where are smart outposts available in what countries and can you give a little bit more information on your maybe target growth areas? Sure. So we currently have a couple of distribution centers located in Tamil Nadu in southern India. We have two physical distribution centers like physical locations and a third location that has yet to have a physical storage space. And we're starting our expansion in southern India and up in some of the states that are slightly north of Tamil Nadu. Ideally we would love to expand to other places in the world but I think that we want to stay focused because there's still many things about our model that I think we have to learn to get right before we really want to start expanding on a massive scale. And so we will likely stay focused in India for the near future until we feel really comfortable to go elsewhere. Cool. So it looks like as someone did a question, this individual works with Power Mundo in Peru essentially doing similar work as that's mine. So it looks like you have, I wouldn't take it better, but so much as someone who is on par in Latin America. And I would like to know, have you seen any combination between Salesforce and retail? I think that, yeah. So there's, good to see someone from Power Mundo here. There's only like six of us in the world that try to do this and Power Mundo is one of them. So great. And we're all in totally different regions. So we're all addressing different issues. I, you know, I haven't seen anybody combine the Salesforce and a retail model. I have seen people try to build their own physical retail shops and it's just incredibly resource intensive. But I haven't seen anybody do a combination of door-to-door salesman plus retailers before. Got it. So we have four minutes left, but I didn't do a product because I don't know if we're going to be able to tackle all of these, but we're going to try. So one question that has been asked multiple times, so we know it's really important to this person to know this, is how do you differentiate your products from other commercially available ones? So I guess maybe speaking a little bit more to your marketing efforts and some of the tactics that you find have been working for you. Yeah. So that's a great question. So I think actually right now we're focusing, so I talked about in my research, I looked at people that are doing distribution well and like your Coca-Cola's and Nokia's and, you know, things like that. We really are addressing products that aren't actually physically available. So I guess in terms of differentiation, most of the time these products just haven't been in these communities before, so it's actually quite easy to differentiate them because people haven't seen them. At the city level I think that it is a little bit more of a differentiation in terms of building a brand name, but really at the rural level, simply the product suite in and of itself is different than anything anybody's really gotten out there before. Got it. Cool. I think our last question here will be one that is related to our Webinar series and also to our audience here, the target audience that we've attracted and comes from another listener who wants to first come on to do any incredible work and is asking if you could provide a few pointers on how an engineering startup should tackle logistics and financial problems related to distribution to the end-users. So maybe you could give us your thoughts. Yeah, that's a great question. So how an engineering startup should tackle logistics and financial challenges? I think there's two sort of things in there. First, how do you tackle logistical challenges and then second, how do you tackle financial challenges? As far as logistical challenges go, my advice would be don't try to do it all yourself. There are a couple of us trying to start like starting distribution companies like we are because we have found that when engineering-focused startups also try to do distribution, one thing ends up suffering. And so I would say don't do the logistics by yourself. If you don't have the logistics expertise, partner with someone who does. The second thing about the financial challenge is this is just my advice in general. It doesn't matter so much about how expensive your product is as how good of a quality it is. So if you make a really, really good quality product with a good brand name, people will actually pay more for that. And we've definitely seen that. So financial challenges and adding in some sort of pay-as-you-go financing is definitely something that people talk a lot about. But I personally think that if you don't skimp on a good quality product, start in areas where people can actually afford your product and then the financing will come later. Those are such profound words and pieces of advice to end on Jackie. I can't agree with you more regarding the notion of high quality and the importance of all of us involved in engineering for global development on looking towards good for service ultimate products for this space and for a base of the pyramid consumer. So I thank you so much for ending on that really profound note. And I really am amazed by the number of questions that come in and continues to pour in. And I would like to thank everybody who is on our webinar today for engaging in this really rich dialogue. And I look forward to seeing and hearing you guys all on the next webinar. For those of you who would like to get your PDHs, the PDH code is currently posted on the slide in front of you. If you have more questions that we didn't tackle today, please do send us an email at webinars at engineeringforchange.org or if you caught Jackie's email on the previous slide, feel free to reach out to her. Jackie, thank you so much again for joining us today. For those of you who are looking to hear this webinar again, it will be available as a recording on the webinar's page in a few weeks. And thank you all again and see you all soon.