Sunday 26 May 2013

No Business Is An Island

John Kluge, Contributor
When English poet John Donne wrote his famous line “No man is an island,” some 389 years ago, he was forecasting the future of social innovation. Donne was thinking metaphorically of course, but his point that we are all part of the larger fabric of humanity applies to a much more literal trend I discovered in recent travels to two island nations—Japan and Iceland. That old mantra of think globally, act locally is out. Japanese and Icelandic businesses are replacing it with think globally, act globally, and they are doing it in the pursuit of
 No man is an island: not just a metaphor anymore
double, if not triple bottom lines.
While in Japan this month to speak at TEDxTokyo, I met with Imai Shigeo, an inventor who leads the R & D department for the Japanese company Lixil, a global leader in the building materials and housing equipment industry. Their holdings include both Inax and American Standard toilets companies. Imai-san had just returned from a visit to Nairobi, Kenya to learn about the city’s current sanitation, hygiene, and water infrastructure. Here’s what he found—that in Nairobi, a city of 41.6 million people, 28 million people are without access to sanitation. Kenya as a whole faces frequent droughts & water shortages and is considered a water scarce country. The sanitation and water crisis is especially worrying in urban slums and informal settlements, which are only becoming more populous with recent urbanization. Lack of access to sanitation is a devastating blight on humanity that affects some 2.5 billion people worldwide. In Nairobi, water, sanitation and hygiene related illnesses and conditions are the number one cause of hospitalization in children under age five.

Kibera is the biggest slum in Africa and one of the biggest in the world
Imai-san had a sense of urgency about Nairobi’s water and sanitation situation; he was convinced that because of both rapid urbanization and a recent commitment by the Kenyan government to install toilets in Nairobi, the next two years are crucial to building a sustainable infrastructure for Kenya’s capital. As of now the Kenyan government plans to install traditional, water-consuming toilets in Nairobi, which would seriously increase the water problems of the already drought-prone capital. Heavy water consumption would result in ground water being absorbed, which could endanger neighboring water sources vital to nearby animal reserves. While delivering water and services to fast-growing cities like Nairobi will boost the growth of local economies, for these economies to thrive these services must be delivered intelligently and sustainably—Imai-san believes Lixil might have an opportunity to work with Kenyans to show other similar African cities the right path to providing sustainable sanitation infrastructure that could help solve the water issue.
From June 1-3 at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD V), Lixil will showcase an “infrastructure-free” micro-flush toilet and compost facility powered by renewable energy that also includes a built-in rainwater purification system. For Lixil, and its incredible innovators like Imai-san, this technology represents more than a new product—it’s an answer to the water and sanitation crisis half a world away and one that I hope Toilet Hackers, the social enterprise I co-founded last autumn, will find a way to implement in partnership with Lixil in the months and years ahead.
Having left Japan with a renewed sense of optimism, I flew to Reykjavik with my girlfriend Katherine for a short weekend respite. Katherine and I both enjoy meeting other entrepreneurs taking on wicked problems, so it was a pleasant surprise to meet Tanja Wohlrab-Ryan, the co-founder of Start Up With Purpose, who is kickstarting the Icelandic social enterprise movement, while exploring Reykjavik. Tanja told us that while Iceland’s social enterprise community is still in its infancy, it already has a strong precedent for double bottom line companies—take for example Össur, a prosthetics company that has done work all over the world- providing prosthetic limbs, training, and equipment to people maimed by landmines from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Afghanistan. Ossur also supports countries recovering from natural disasters—since the 2010 Haiti earthquake they have partnered with the University of Miami’s Project Medishareto contribute critical orthopedic products and prostheses to thousands of survivors and before that in Sichuan, China.

Ossur & Project Medishare have helped over 10,000 patients with access to prosthetics and rehabilitation following the Haiti earthquake of 2010
Össur reached a milestone in 2011 by formally committing to the UN Global Compact principles in the areas of human rights, labor, the environment and anti-corruption and has since made these principles part of its strategy, culture and day-to-day operations. Össur’s s commitment to innovation and advanced technologies has helped to give new confidence to millions of people with impaired mobility—for this company, and for new, double-bottom line Icelandic companies yet to be founded, the future is bright.
Change doesn’t happen over night, but if we think of ourselves less as individual islands and more as part of the whole, as John Donne’s poem reminds us, then perhaps some of the world’s most wicked problems might get solved after all. Remember, we’re all in this together.
“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” –John Donne, 1624

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