[MUSIC] When a social entrepreneur goes out into the world and tries to solve a problem, they actually have to do some homework before they can actually come up with a solution that's powerful. In our stories, Carlos actually starts by going out into a rural village in the Philippines, collecting a group of villagers, sitting around a campfire, and talking to them about their struggles and needs when it comes to energy. He's not coming in there with ideas about what they should want, or what they really do want. He's listening to them and asking them to talk to him about how energy could be powerful, how it could be useful to them, and how they'd like to have it in their homes and in their businesses. So an important part of good social enterprise involves listening and sitting down with the end user and understanding the world from their perspective. Now, in Africa, Coco actually went out into the village, where she was planning to launch her venture, and she followed a family with a video camera, tracking them for an entire week, and to understand deeply, how this family wrestled with the challenge of moving and mobilizing water to grow their crops. She tracked them as they carried water, as they poured it over the fields, as they struggled to irrigate. And she did this because she really wanted to understand the challenge of effective irrigation, not from an outsider perspective, but from the perspective of the farmer. Listening to the local community is important, but Carlos and Coco went one step further. They tried to understand the field in which they were operating, and understand what best practice might actually already be out there. So Carlos made a trip to the annual conference of alternative energy. There he met dozens and dozens of people who are working the field that he wanted to enter, to try to understand what else is going on in this field. This is a critical part of being a social entrepreneur, is listening not just to the local community, which is absolutely critical, but also to the experts and the people who have done the work before. Coco went and did in depth research online to understand all of the many existing irrigation systems. She built an enormous catalog database of solutions that are already out there so that she would understand, before she started her own venture, what was already in existence and what she could learn from the best practices in the field. So taken together, these are critical moments for social understanding. When they listen to the community, when they hear from the authentic voices of end users what they really want. And then, when you go into the field of research and talk to the experts and understand best practice in the field. Those are two critical steps, I think, putting yourself in a position where you are actually now well informed and ready to come forward with new ideas for solving a problem. In our discussion of design thinking, we mentioned the concept of empathy maps and mind maps. What I want to do now is show you Carlos and Coco's use of these tools in their own work. First, take a look at Coco's empathy map. Here's the result of her talking to, listening to the local farmers. What has she done? She's asked four big questions. What does she see? What are the people feeling? What is she hearing? And what are the locals thinking? And as she did her fieldwork, she started to write down on small post its, her observations and her notes on what she observed. And then, in this empathy map, she's organized it into the four quadrants. I think that's a powerful tool for a social entrepreneur. It makes the fieldwork real. It takes it and sorts it into these four big categories, and gives you a real clear sense of what it is that the local customer and user is feeling when it comes to the problem you're working on. Now, if we look at Carlos's empathy map we notice something a little different. What he's done is, he's broken it in part into two different empathy maps. One for residential energy users, and the other for commercial users. Now, this is interesting, because what Carlos decided early on was, as he talked to people, is that there's a fundamental difference between families and how they want and see energy, and small business operators in the villages. So what he's developed is two different empathy maps that frame the perspectives of these very different groups. And I think that's an important moment for an entrepreneur. When you start to see that the world is not unitary, that there are in fact two big different classes of stakeholders, that's where you can start to get a much more fine grain take on what people are feeling and experiencing. So empathy maps, I think, are this tool that Carlos and Coco can use to really deeply understand the end user. After they've done their field work, it formalizes it and puts it into a clear context. But that's not enough. Good social entrepreneurs want to understand the broader field. So after they've done their research, after they've gone to the conferences, after they have done their online interviews with experts, it's important to develop what we discussed in lecture, which is, a mind map. So this is Carlos's mind map. What he's done here is, he's framed the challenge of rural electrification. And if you look at his mind map, and what you see, you see that he's got three big rings. The first ring are the five big concepts that he thinks are most closely connected to this challenge of world electrification. And then beyond that, he's build his mind that out to include all the other factors that are interrelated. And we can see in this web that he's constructed, a powerful picture of how this complex challenge of electrification plays itself out. Now, Coco, on the other hand, took a slightly different approach. She asked herself, how can I develop a way of thinking systematically about water in local villages? And her mind map, you'll see, is much more linear, is much more schematic, it's less figurative. That's fine. Mind maps can take many different forms. Here what you see is an attempt to bring rigor and simplicity to the kind of broad range of issues that she uncovered in her research. And so, she focuses in on ease of use, durability, cost, and effectiveness, as the four big issues she wants to really kind of drill down on, in terms of understanding what makes an effective irrigation system. I think this is a powerful, kind of, simplification and synthesis of everything she's heard and learned about irrigation. So taken together, an empathy map gives you a chance to formalize what you've heard and seen in your fieldwork. And a mind map gives you a chance to formalize and synthesize what you've put together in your research and your study of the field. Together, these tools help Carlos and Coco take an important first step towards making their enterprises much more real [MUSIC]
