Exploring Tomorrow’s Opportunities

Applied research and incubator services to explore emerging technologies, pilot innovative solutions, and establish collaborative ventures.

Innovation Lab is the research & development (R&D) lab for the NGO and NPO sectors. It is the ‘Skunk Works’ that has the freedom to explore completely uncharted territories. It searches for innovative, cross-functional, and cross-sectoral solutions to long-standing social issues. It will function as the testing center where NGOs can pilot new ideas with the aim of identifying and investing in those that work. Innovation Lab is envisioned to serve as an incubation center that will help scale successful solutions and assist in bringing them to market by finding collaboration partners and alternate funding sources.

Areas of exploration include:

• Social Franchising: There are many examples of social entrepreneurs who have successfully implemented a path-breaking idea in their communities. AI will replicate and scale some of these using a social franchising model, borrowing from the for-profit sector that uses franchising as a growth strategy.
• Emerging Technologies: AI will explore how emerging technologies like Web 2.0 or games for social change can help organizations in the Global South promote their messages and find new advocates for their causes.
• Technology Convergence: AI is investigating innovative ways to combine existing and emerging technology solutions like the internet and mobile telephony to solve access issues for the former and content issues for the latter in the Global South.
• Prototyping & Commercialization: AI will assist NGOs to prototyping and/or licensing technologies for the purposes of benefitting from commercializing it (and therefore create a new revenue source) while also training their constituent groups in it (and thus teach a marketable skill).
• Collaborative Ventures: AI will work with social change organizations in creating partnerships with educational institutions, for-profit corporations, and other non-profit organizations to create new ventures.
• And a few more are on the drawing board.

If you are interested in partnering or sharing your ideas, please email info@appropriateit.org