Burreland Case Study

THE CASE OF THE BURRO BATTERY BRAND, GHANA

Introduction
This study looks into the dynamics of open social enterprises. We analyse three well-known cases—the Burro battery brand in Ghana, grassroots innovation in India and microfinancing in Bangladesh—to understand how social enterprises maximise their social value via open innovation, and how they resolve the conflict between profit making and social service delivery. The term ‘social enterprise’ came about from the recognition that there were organizations using the power of business to bring about social and environmental changes without a single term to unite them. Social enterprises are businesses that tackle social and environmental challenges, creating jobs while prioritizing impact

Open innovation is forcing firms to reassess their leadership positions, which reflect the performance outcomes of their business strategies. Open innovation essentially refers to the use of external resources (knowledge, skills, funds, ideas, etc) to drive innovation within a firm (Chesbrough, 2003a). It embraces the benefits of openness as a means of expanding value creation for organizations. Open strategy also introduces new business models based on invention and coordination undertaken within a community of innovators. This represents an opportunity of social enterprises who can leverage on external knowledge, skills, connections and people networks to achieve their aims. In fact, it seems that the emergence and proliferation of social enterprises occurred in the wake of the diffusion of the open innovation strategy. For instance, although Freer Spreckley had since 1981 published a formal definition of social enterprise , the first academic paper that describes in detail the formation, functioning and organization of social enterprises was not published until 1993. The paper (Savio and Rhigetti, 1993) describes how Italian worker co-operatives function as social enterprises by lobbying to secure legislation that enabled their members with disabilities to work while fully recovering. Borzaga and Defourny (2001) report how the idea spread to the rest of Europe, the US and the

These are some of the challenges that Burro was founded to counter. Whit spent most of his twenties living and working in West Africa, especially Ghana, and he has always struck by the number of new devices and products that were out there. Most people would refer to these as innovations - the better mosquito net, the better lantern, the better corn variety, the better water filter etc. However, evolutionary economic thinking suggests that unless a new product is placed on the market and diffused, it is not yet an innovation. According to OECD (2005, p.