Innovation in other parts of the world

http://vimeo.com/52711779

I watched this video this summer, which prompted me to enroll in the class Social Innovation Incubator. I have always wanted to start a business. Even as a young child, I use to host lemonade stands, where I would sell home made lemonade as well as other snacks, which I would purchase from the local grocery store and resell at the stand. During my time at Carnegie Mellon, I have taken many classes that dealt with Entrepreneurship. However, it was this video, which led me to Social Innovation. This video tells the story of passionate children in a poor town in Paraguay. These children have a deep admiration of music, but no money to purchase musical instruments. They talk about how music helps them in their every day life - it is a important part of the way they live. Since they can't afford instruments, they take trash from the local landfill and construct musical instruments. It is truly amazing. After hearing this story, one would think that the music they create must not be very good, given they are making instruments out of garbage and have very little instruction on how to play, if at all. However, if someone were to think that, they would be very wrong. The music they play is awesome. After watching this music, it helped me become passionate of social innovation. If you think about this one story, there must be countless of other stories. There is a huge disparity in technology all over the world. There has to be a way to take some technology that we take for granted here, and make small changes to help poorer people and even make a profit for it. I think about the Nokia example we heard in class about how Nokia sold "dumb phones" to people in another country, because they only needed the phone to do basic things. I know that if I look around the world, there has to be a way to create a business that takes technologies for granted and transforms the technologies to be helpful to people in another country and make a profit out of it. I think, and granted I may be wrong, that when most start a company, they are thinking about starting the company for the US, so there has to be an opportunity in other parts of the world and hopefully through this class I can come up with some good ideas to use.

-Mike Hahn