Just watched this great video on practical problem solving, but it’s really a video about how to innovate.

Paul Polak has lifted 17M people out of poverty with his treadle pump invention. His process started with asking two simple but powerful questions:

• What causes poverty?
• What can someone do about it?

We’ve been applying these two questions in our business:

• Why don’t small businesses grow their revenues faster?
• How can he/she create more revenues from his/her customers?

His process includes 12 steps, many of which are similar to Intuit’s Customer Driven Invention process. Here’s a few of my favorites:

• Get out of your office and go visit your customers - Obvious? not quite. So many tech products are designed in a bubble. We’ve visited 25 businesses since inception a few months ago.
• Understand the specific context – In Paul’s case, poor farmers had a tiny farm, poor soil, and no irrigation. Can you be as clear as that? We can: Smaller retailers spend on advertising but don’t get their money back, and don’t even know, so they turn to non-traditional methods like co-op advertising and hosting events in their store. They develop a mailing list but don’t use it because they’re not marketing experts.
• Listen to what customers say – Poor farmers in Bangladesh didn’t use fertilizer “like they should” so the agricultural experts created classes for them. What they didn’t know is that the farmers didn’t apply fertilizer not because they didn’t think it’s effective, but because they couldn’t afford to lose it in a 10 year flood. The “experts” thought they knew the issue but sitting in their offices it was clear they never asked anyone.
• Follow your customers – When farmers invested their treadle pump savings in their childrens’ education, he invented a solar lamp for the kids to read at night (they don’t have electricity.)