I love the One Laptop Per Child project, it’s a brilliant initiative. I’ve banged on about it before, but was just reading this NYTimes article that made me splutter tea over my keyboard…
Of course, the project is laudable, but there are so many lessons from this project for driving and shaping the _mentality_ of innovation in big, western organisations:
*The $100 price tag*
This was, quite frankly, a stroke of genius. I saw Nicholas Negroponte on a Ted Talk explaining that a $100 price point was the _goal_ but, critically it didn’t matter if they didn’t quite hit it (yet) – this clear goal galvanised the entire project and importantly shaped the_mentality_ by creating a fantastic coralling theme of reducing costs to the absolute minimum. It was always a pragmatic and credible goal as well, because falling component prices observing Moore’s Law, mean that the $100 cost level will be reached within a few years anyway. So the $100 price point was a metaphor, a key goal that underpinned the entire philosophy of the project and a credible end goal, even if not immediately realisable.
But perhaps the most important factor for the $100 price point was that there was an inbuilt acceptance that it was ok to _fail_ to reach this…the same kind of ‘reach for the stars, get to the moon’ mentality. The project absolutely went for the psychological goal of perfection (the $100 price point), but remains pragmatic and happy to not absolutely achieve it…and yet understanding and embracing all the reasons for having the goal.
Pure brillance.
*The detractors*
Loads of people/organisations tried to shoot this project down. Interestingly, one of them was Intel. Here’s a quote from the NY Times article:
bq. “…The detractors include two computer industry giants, Intel and Microsoft, pushing alternative approaches. Intel has developed a $400 laptop aimed at schools as well as an education program that focuses on teachers instead of students…”
That’s an interesting response for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s easy (and probably correct) to write that response off as typical of a threatened party (why can these be built so cheaply compared to Intel laptops? They don’t use Intel chips. They potentially threaten the emergent education markets for Intel, etc.).
But also, look at what Intel are proposing as an alternative – firstly a ‘solution’ that’s 4 times the cost, and a engagement program that targets teachers, not kids. That’s so bloody typical – focus on the ‘manager’s not the actual users…
I think the specific focus on kids, and importantly, the idea of letting kids take these things into their own homes could be a powerful, transformative tool. It’s about building, distributing and ultimately, ‘letting go’ and empowering individuals with the tools…
bq. ” if young people are given computers and allowed to explore, they will “learn how to learn.” That, Mr. Papert argues, is a more valuable skill than traditional teaching strategies that focus on memorization and testing.
bq. The idea is also that children can take on much of the responsibility for maintaining the systems, rather than relying on or creating bureaucracies to do so.
bq. “We believe you have to leverage the kids themselves,” Ms. Jepsen said. “They’re learning machines.”…”