A few weeks ago I met with an entrepreneur who started an Affordable Private School (APS) in Hyderabad, India. He had beautifully painted murals decorating his space, with images and English words – like giant flash cards demonstrating that, yes, learning happens here. The next school I visited had the same murals. It turns out that these entrepreneurs were friends. One originated the idea, the other quickly followed. It’s something I notice time and time again, particularly in these extreme environments – innovation born from necessity is abundant, and good solutions spread fast.

These schools are great examples of emergent innovation. With a largely ineffective public system stunting growth, more and more people are postulating that they can do better by building it themselves. Creating a school is complicated enough, but providing an effective education is even harder. Most entrepreneurs are not equipped to address the breadth of what it takes… expertise in content, materials to help convey content, benchmarks to know what to drive toward, services to help them and their teachers continue to learn, ways to include (and often educate) parents, and so on. Basically, they need an ecosystem of partners and providers with tools and services to help increase their effectiveness. And, they need them built through the same mindset of extreme affordability of the APS themselves.

Can we help spark that marketplace? Now that APS have appeared in such quantity, how might we inspire entrepreneurs to start businesses that supply these schools with effective support systems? How can we inspire big companies to serve this market? Essentially:  How might we increase the availability of affordable learning tools and services for students in the developing world? 

IDEO (www.ideo.com), the global innovation consultancy, is partnering with Enterprising Schools to explore this question. We decided that together, we can design better than we could alone. We’ve posted this challenge on our public innovation platform – openIDEO.

The first phase of this work is to gather inspiration. We’re asking our crowd to share:

• low-cost materials across the globe already focused on improving educational outcomes;
• products/services that have been adapted for extremely low-cost distribution;
• creative business models that allow people to gain access to services they otherwise would not have access to;

There’s some amazing inspiration up there. Did you know that there’s a $20 device that stores all of Wikipedia without requiring Internet access? Have you heard that in order to reach rural Bangladeshi children, Sesame Street equipped auto rickshaws with TVs and DVDs and trained the drivers to help kids understand what they were watching? Did you know that in Cambodia there’s a service where a wifi-enabled motorcycle will drive by a school to connect them, temporarily, to the Internet?

During the next phase, we will ask the community to create tangible, relevant ideas for potential enterprises. After the community generates and evaluates these solutions, we’ll share them back at the Enterprising Schools Symposium, and will, of course, share them on this site with you.

We know that ideas alone do not create the marketplace. It’s an experiment in ways to inspire local entrepreneurs to see new opportunities. We’ve taken inspiration from the way that the APS themselves continue to emerge – someone catches wind of a way to earn money that allows them to extend their know-how and thinks “Hey, I can do that.” And we’ve theorized that creating a catalog of “steal-able” examples is a great first step to get more people saying just that.

So far we have over 170 people signed up to contribute to this challenge, and visitors to the site have come from 105 countries!

We’d love your participation. Add inspirations, comb through the 230+ nuggets up there and comment, or applaud postings you feel have resonance for the APS context. Pair with a local entrepreneur you know and help him/her participate. Or, just spread the word to your peers with big ideas. Clearly, there is a lot we can learn – and create – together.