Disruptive Technology and Social Entrepreneurship
Social Innovation
Lessons From Chile About Doing Good For The World
Lessons From Chile About Doing Good For The World
By Vivek Wadhwa via linkedin.com
Why should poor people receive the most obsolete technologies—when their lives can be impacted the most by advances in technology? Should my education and talent be used to make rich and powerful corporations even more so—or to help those in need? These are questions that Alfredo Zolezzi agonized over after achieving early success as a scientist and entrepreneur.
Then he read a United Nations report
that said that 884 million people are without access to safe drinking
water and that 1.5 million children under five years of age die each
year as a result of water- and sanitation-related diseases. This pushed
him over the edge. He knew this was something that technology could
easily help fix—though no one had done anything about it.
Zolezzi
decided to stop working on products for the oil industry and to instead
repurpose his oil-extraction technology to eliminate microbial
contaminants from water. He had achieved great success by developing
technology that enhanced the recovery of oil from abandoned oil wells
using high-frequency, high-powered ultrasound waves. He had ideas for
new technologies that could reduce the cost of refining heavy oil as
well as its viscosity and sulphur content. Zolezzi could have made
billions by perfecting these. Yet he chose to use his technology and
talent for doing good for the world, because, as he said to me, he
wanted to “reach inner peace and be able to carry on living in this
world full of contrasts”.
Zolezzi was motivated by a desire to
help those in need, but also saw this as a business opportunity. He says
that profits, success, entrepreneurship, and social good can all go
hand in hand. He is determined to build a sustainable business that does
good for the world and brings in revenue and profits as any other
business may do.
He started development of a water-sanitization
technology in mid 2009. Eighteen months later, Zolezzi’s team developed a
breakthrough system that converts water into a plasma state through a
high-intensity electrical field and eliminates microbial content through
electroporation, oxidation, ionization, UV and IR radiation, and
shockwaves. They installed it in a Santiago slum in mid 2011 in which
people had lived for more than 20 years without potable water and
without bathrooms.
The technology changed the lives of the slum
dwellers. Before, they had frequently contracted diseases from the water
that they drank. Months after the water sanitization technology was
installed, no one had fallen sick.
When I visited in April 2012,
Rosa Reyes, community leader of the Fundo San Jose shantytown, told me
how grateful she was to Zolezzi and his team for changing their lives.
Her neighbors no longer had to keep borrowing money from each other to
pay for medical care. Their quality of life and dignity had improved
dramatically.
This technology was recently tested for conformance
to EPA guidelines by the leading U.S. authority, NSF International.
According to e-mails and test results that Zolezzi shared with me, it
not only exceeded NSF's highest standards, but killed 100% of all
bacteria and viruses in the heavily tainted samples that NSF tested.
Village-suitable
units of the plasma-based water-sanitization technology—which consume
less energy than a hairdryer—should cost around $500 when mass-produced.
At such a price, a technology developed by a small team in Chile could
make a valuable contribution to solving one of humanity’s greatest
problems. And it could easily be a billion-dollar-per-year business.
This
technology has applications for homes all over the world as well as in
hospitals, airplanes, and practically everywhere else where water is
consumed. Americans spend $12 billion every year on bottled water because they don’t trust the water from their taps. And this expensive water sometimes has a higher bacterial content
than tap water. Consumers would readily buy add-ons to their water
filters that provided them with 100% bacteria- and virus-free water.
So it is not only the poor who will benefit from the technology.
The
moral of the story is that entrepreneurs should focus on building
technologies that do social good. There is much less competition, and
the rewards are not only financial—they also include attaining the inner
peace that comes of helping others.
By Vivek Wadhwa via linkedin.com
Pictures: VIA AIC
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"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."
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