Sharon Chang, left, is the founder of an intitiative to become a talent agency for social innovators. Photo: bryanesque (Flickr)

It's an unlikely romance, fit for Hollywood: social change meets corporate marketing. Now, one of Tinseltown's most successful inventions is about to join the cast.

Enter the first social-entrepreneurship talent agent.

Meet Sharon Chang, founder of Yoxi.tv. The former chief creative director of 19 Entertainment, the company that produces American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance, Chang has jumped into nonprofit entrepreneurship with a totally original business model.

Yoxi, her startup, is a pro bono talent development agency for "social innovation rockstars" … sponsored by corporations looking to market themselves as do-gooders … that happens to be shooting its own "reality" show … in Liberia.

It's so complicated it just might work. A company like IBM, for example, might ask to sponsor a social innovator working on putting "big data" to use in the education sector. Yoxi might sift through their roster of promising entrepreneurs and suggest Heather Hiles of Rrripple, whose project is aligned with IBM’s brand interests. Yoxi would then use its media savvy to help Hiles and her ideas hit the big time—with IBM attaching its brand to reap marketing benefits and tap fresh ideas.

Last month, Chang explained to a Forbes columnist that she'd once toyed with a more conventional TV show along these lines, presumably an Apprentice-like contest for social innovators. But she concluded that the for-profit mass media model wasn't right for her mission:

I wanted to find fresh approaches to distribution. ...Even when you have a powerful story, it’s difficult to find an equally powerful channel. I don’t think employing celebrities should be the default and/or the only answer.

Yoxi's answer, at least for now, is to design a rigorous selection process for "social innovation rockstars"—their word for the sort of ambassadors who can catch the imagination of the public and push new ideas into the mainstream. People with great ideas and the charisma to match. Here's Yoxi spokeswoman Kasia Reterska, in an email to Global Envision:

Selection of SIRs [social innovation rockstars] happens via our research process where we rate about 14 metrics around a social entrepreneur. We measure typical attributes like the success of their organization, etc., but also focus on things like a person's charisma and media savvy. Like the notion of casting a TV show or play, we feel it's essential to find entrepreneurs who, along with a great idea, are passionate and effective communicators. These are the people who will stand out in the crowd and expedite their work in the social innovation space.

Brands can sponsor specific Rockstars. … We're just as focused on finding SIRs to help a brand via shared-value ideals as we are to harness influencers around a specific topic/entrepreneur.

In other words, Yoxi's goal is to recruit, package and promote a stable of fresh-faced innovators with useful ideas, then match each with a corporation that'd fund it in exchange for the marketing benefits. If it works, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Adapted from a report by Lisa Hoashi, Mercy Corps Senior Internal Communications Officer.

Mohammed Gawdat.

Creativity means doing something new. Innovation means doing something differently.

Our world of scarcity needs both.

That's the argument mounted last week in Cairo, at Mercy Corps' bi-annual Global Leadership Gathering, by Mohammed Gawdat, Google's Vice President for Emerging Markets. The set of principles Gawdat laid out matter as much to social entrepreneurs and innovators as to more traditional ones.

Gawdat reviewed four types of innovation:

Product innovation, when someone improves an existing product. For example, Apple's iPod is a product innovation over the MP3 players that came before it.

Process innovation, when an existing process is improved to be more efficient. Toyota innovated when it began to use "lean manufacturing" to make cars.

Service innovation. With stores that feel like "home," Starbucks focuses on selling an experience, rather than just a product, coffee.

Business model innovation. This type of innovation focuses on improving the way that a product is delivered. Amazon.com's online store, which virtually sells everything, fundamentally changed the way that consumers shop and make purchases.

Everyone is born creative, Gawdat said, and has the ability to innovate. "Surprisingly, all you can really do to innovation is block it," he said. "Leadership just has to know how to get out of the way."

Google's nine rules of innovation

1. Start with a clear, simple vision. Gawdat's example was Google's: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

2. Hire the best. Gawdat showed this clip from the movie Ratatouille, where a rat tries to prove that he knows enough about cooking to be accepted as a chef. "Just because he's a rat doesn't mean he doesn't know what he's doing," Gawdat said. The "best" employees are whoever are "the best at the mission," he said, regardless of who they are and what credentials they have.

3. Find ideas everywhere. When you come up against someone or an idea that you don't like or find odd, ask "Why?" You never know where it might lead you.

4. Share. "Sometimes the truth hurts," Gawdat acknowledged, "but it's important to share it." At Google, information is thought to be better shared than hidden. Projects in development are shared across the company, and anyone can comment on them.

5. Morph ideas, don't kill them. Don't make the mistake of letting an idea stop at step one: let it shift. Google developed three social networking platforms before arriving at Google+.

6. Speed matters. Fast is better than slow.

7. Data trumps hype. At Google, Gawdat said, "every claim is backed up by data." Solid data drives all decisions.

8. Users come first. (And second, and third, and fourth...) Focus on what the customer wants, and then put resources toward addressing that.

9. Give permission to innovate. At Google, employees are encouraged to use 20 percent of their work time on any project of their choosing that's approved by their manager. "If [a Google employee] says they want to use that time to make a better car, then that's O.K.," said Gawdat. "No one is allowed to say, 'That is not what we do.'"

In closing, Gawdat showed Apple's classic Think Different ad, which ends by saying that "the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

"At most organizations," said Gawdat, "it is the few crazy people that are the ones that drive it forward ... If people are passionate about something, then you should allow them to move forward."

Sanergy (sanitation+energy) is an MIT-based start-up with a mission: Employ sewage. Produce jobs. One glorified outhouse at a time.

Forty percent of the global population lacks access to adequate sanitation. Where poverty is endemic, so are sanitation challenges. Sanergy’s answer is to tackle both issues at once. Recent winner of the prestigious Echoing Green Fellowship (pdf) and the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Business Plan Contest, their method is simple: build, collect, convert.

Sanergy sells inexpensive, green, pay-per-use or membership-based sanitation centers to local entrepreneurs. Waste deposited into airtight containers is collected and exchanged daily for clean containers. It is then transferred to a central plant where the waste is processed into energy and fertilizer to be sold to the national grid and local farmers, respectively.

In addition to a focus on sustainability, Sanergy has an eye on immediate returns — the company projects their franchisees will make back their investment in about four months, according to NPR.

Sanergy has already scaled to 60 sanitation sites in Nairobi and begun converting waste into fertilizer. They hope to eventually expand to every block of the city’s slums, and ultimately, to all of sub-Saharan Africa and India, turning a socially sticky public health crisis into economic opportunities where they are needed most.

Check out Sanergy's video for more details.

Sanergy Overview from Ani Vallabhaneni on Vimeo.

Could Wall Street's bull charge for good? Photo: iHeylen (flickr)

If Wall Street's excesses contributed to the decline of the nation's economy, could the same profit-driven environment really spawn a new generation of do-gooders?

Absolutely, says Wall Street Journal columnist David Weidner, and it's a process that's already begun, exemplified by those who seek profit by selling to poorer consumers. (I wrote about this general trend for Global Envision in "Slashing Health Care Costs, and Slashing, and Slashing", "How to Irrigate on a Shoestring", and Selling to the Poor, On Terms They Can Afford".)

Such entrepreneurs may be guided by a social conscience when they choose the products to fund and invest in and they may be willing to wait a little bit longer to turn a profit, but profit is still the end goal. "This new breed of Wall Streeter has turned the maxim 'greed is good' into 'greed can do good,'" explains Weidner.

A paragon of this model is The Acumen Fund, a non-profit venture fund that invests in business and entrepreneurial solutions to poverty. Its projects include replacing kerosene lamps with the safer and more affordable LED lamps, and pay-per-use toilets in Kenya.

Heidi Krauel, The Acumen Fund's founder, goes further "This is one of the new faces of capitalism," she says. For those just beginning to enter the world economic system, this is certainly good news.

A new, low-cost water filtration system will make it easier for poor Indians to access clean drinking water. Photo: Jackol (flickr)

Here's some conventional marketing wisdom: People who live on less than $2 per day simply aren't a worthwhile target demographic.

But recently, some Indian companies are challenging such ossified thinking with innovative products designed to fit the needs of India's poor, reports The Wall Street Journal:

Such inventions represent a fundamental shift in the global order of innovation. Until recently, the West served rich consumers and then let its products and technology filter down to poorer countries. Now, with the developed world mired in a slump and the developing world still growing quickly, companies are focusing on how to innovate, and profit, by going straight to the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

As the Wall Street Journal explains, Indian companies started to change the way they looked at impoverished consumers after they snapped up low-priced cell phones. Then companies began to design products that they hoped would find a similarly huge demand. Soon, Tata Motors released the Nano car, a small $2000 vehicle that made car ownership a possibility for a whole new slice of Indians since it sold for less than half the price of the next-cheapest car on the Indian market. Tata plans to export a more luxurious version of the Nano to Europe — providing an example of how the goods designed for local markets could increase global competition between Indian and Western companies.

There are several other examples of products redesigned with the poor in mind. Cheap battery-powered refrigerators are a huge help to families without electricity in their homes. The solar-powered cell phone base station won third place in The Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovation Awards earlier this year. And the introduction of mobile banking is revolutionizing banking and money transfers in rural areas via cell phones in many poor countries.

It's a newer way of thinking about poverty, and one driven by bottom-line concerns: How can firms sell the poor what they need now, rather than waiting until they have the money to buy what others already have?

Paul Polak leads a talk on affordable technology design for developing areas KrisKrug (flickr)

"Most of us look at the 1 billion men, women and children in the world who live on less than a dollar a day and see poor people," writes BusinessWeek. "But Paul Polak sees market failure."

Paul Polak is a 75-year-old former psychiatrist who founded a non-profit called International Development Enterprises. He calls himself a "Global Poverty Fighter."

For the past 25 years, Polak has worked with small farmers in developing countries to provide low-cost products that support self-sufficiency — drip irrigation products for small farmers with limited access to water, rice fertilizer to increase yields, and water-storage products that can be used in extreme temperatures.

An entrepreneur at heart, Polak believes in approaching the poor as customers — not charity recipients. He says 17 million people have climbed out of poverty thanks to his inventions.

Watch to learn more about Polak's entrepreneurial approach to fighting poverty.