James Brown, founder of Red Button with co-director Amanda Jones, joined us at the festival of ideas on poverty on November 16th – which was also the first day of Global Entrepreneurs week – so we were truly right on the button!
People found James’ in-put inspiring and informative, so here’s some notes of his presentation for those who couldn’t be there.
The idea grew when James and Amanda read that 1.2 billion people don’t have access to clean water – as he said, it’s a difficult thing to get your head round. It’s been a two year journey of learning and exploration to find out what the problem is.
‘Poverty is all about access’ – their market research showed that people may have the money to buy water: they’re paying twice what people pay in the west, but there isn’t water close enough to where it’s needed. People live 1-2 k from the source and making several journeys a day, can walk up to 20 k daily – work that’s often done by children who might otherwise be at school. Not only is the problem one of transport, the water is also dirty by the time it reaches home, so there’s a problem of filtration. The third problem is one of storage – at home it gets dirty again.
The design of a simple wheelie filtration system that solved all three problems was, in James’s words, embarrassingly simple. Whilst studying for their degree, Red Button founders also spent a year developing and site testing the prototype – ‘get it out there and get it tested!’
The real development happened as part of that process: meeting up with people from Malawi to Nigeria who would both use and manufacture Ross (their mobile water filtration system), brought them into contact with an incredible number of innovative people with ideas and local know-how to make dozens of different varieties of the original prototype to meet locally specific needs – so now, not one product but potentially, an infinite number of unique designs.
Deciding to maximise the benefits of local production led to more ideas – why not use the workshop in the evenings for classes? Why not set up co-operatives to make sure the profits get shared fairly? ‘the benefit isn’t in the water carrier, it’s in the small scale manufacturing.’
The value added through working collaboratively is impressive. Selling the idea to NGO’s has been another journey but Red Button have been able to prove that clean water has a 1-6 cost benefit ratio so for every £1 of aid that goes into Ross, £6 gets returned – a good argument for investment.
‘We’re problem driven!’ says James and it was clear from what he said that every problem was an opportunity to learn, widen the network and develop new solutions.
‘We could have spent two years perfecting our product and then gone to market – only to discover that there were already lots of competitors and that our model wasn’t in fact perfect’. By testing Ross in the market place, James and Amanda opened up a world of relationships and opportunities, developing ways of working that help to fight poverty. They looked at the barriers people have to overcome in order to beat poverty themselves and then worked with them to help them do so.
Of their partnership James said: one of the reasons we’ve come so far is because we have completely different skill sets. You need three people to make a company: one to make, one to market, and one to count.
By the way – according to James, Red Button are short of someone to count…could that be an opportunity?
You can read James’ blog here
group brought along their shouts about learning – why are we fixated on qualifications? Why do we have to make choices so young? Why is the academic way the only way? We want to change DIRECTION! We want learning that meets the needs of individuals…we want learning that recognises the knowledge within.
the environment, how to stop wasting food, how to grow your own – and almost every issue involved increasing social cohesion. Being creative folk, solutions were plenty, ideas buzzed and more than one potential business concept got aired.
