Social innovation is seen as a wonderful thing. But we are starting to see things that make us believe providing assistance to struggling communities may provide new competitive advantage for organisations struggling to innovate.

Coping with oil prices here is bad enough, but in Tanzania it is crippling. In a country where people struggle to maintain the bare necessities, the rising price of oil is putting the cost of diesel (which is used to power diesel generators that provide electricity) and kerosene (which is used widely in lamps), firmly out of reach.

And even when they can afford it, the toxic fumes from the generators and the risk off death and injury from fire from kerosene lamps make it a less than desirable solution anyway.

One Australian company is doing its damnedest to turn this paradigm on its head. Barefoot Power is a relatively new company who are putting LED lighting, powered by solar panels, into homes and villages in a number of developing countries. Having done this, they are then linking these homes and the solar generation together into ‘mini-grids’.

The idea behind this micro financed social innovation is to unshackle these communities from the spiral of debt caused by rising commodity prices. Something we strongly support.

When we were hearing about Barefoot Power recently it struck us that this idea is equally applicable to developed societies as well. With climate change and the advent of carbon trading likely to force electricity prices up, the economics of solar power and local mini grids starts to look attractive.

One of the major arguments against this is that the implementation would be horrifically expensive. Yet this assumption is being turned on its head by the likes of Barefoot Power. Barefoot Power isn’t just providing an incredibly valuable outcome for the communities they operate in, they are also building what we think may well be a unique and valuable capability in developing and operating sustainable low cost electrification grids.

Assisting developing communities by providing ‘good enough solutions’ could well provide an opportunity for organisations to develop very real disruptive capability.

In this new world of climate change, saving the world may turn out to be a very real competitive advantage.