Op-Ed: Reinventing the Trickle Down Society

Modern western democracies and free-market economies are in crisis. The theory of trickle down, that highlighted how the benefits of growth and prosperity eventually benefit all members of society, is failing the masses, as a growing number of households are struggling and vulnerable. Redistribution of wealth through taxation or philanthropy prove insufficient to address this crisis, which enhances political instability and radicalization. Thus, in the present USA primaries, nearly three of every four Americans support a candidate that is blatantly anti-establishment. The writing is on the wall: we need new radical ways for thinking about shared prosperity in the twenty first century society.

Last week, Google announced awarding a major grant to an Israeli project called TOM, standing for Tikkun Olam Makers. On the face of it, TOM creates extremely affordable solutions to unmet needs of people with disabilities. But underlying TOM are some radical new ideas about inclusive prosperity in the 21st century and a bold vision to improve the lives of a quarter of a billion people within a decade.

TOM focused on addressing society’s neglected problems. In some cases neither a market solution nor a government one exist for these problems, because they are invisible, rare or those suffering from them are poor. In other cases solutions exists but are too expensive for many to afford.

Yet affordable solutions are feasible if the right incentive structure is put in place. In many cases, every such need can be exposed and understood, so that an affordable solution is created for it. That specific solution must then be made available and accessible to all other people who have a similar need for it.

And this is exactly what TOM does: TOM allows for teams of skillful people, many of them engineers, programmers and product designers, to each solve one specific neglected problem of one person with disabilities. Multiple teams are then brought together within makeathons, which are three-day marathons of design and innovation, when the teams collaborate and compete to in creating such innovative and highly affordable solutions. These solutions, created for free and with no intellectual property, will then be placed in a web-platform so that they are accessible to all other people around the world who need them. The final phase of distribution takes place via local maker communities, primarily in schools and colleges that customize the solutions and deliver them within their communities.

The vision of TOM is to replicate these interactions many thousands of times, thereby inspiring and supporting a global movement of innovators creating thousands of TOM products and delivering them to many millions of people. Hence, in its essence, TOM is a platform and

a process that potentially allows millions of good-hearted engineers, programmers, product designers, occupational therapists and other skillful people to each donate a small fraction of their time, yet together to unleash an unlimited amount of do-good energy. That energy is then focused on drying the ocean of unmet needs. In other words, TOM is a clearing mechanism between the demand for attention and talent, coming from people with disabilities, on the one hand, and the supply of talent, coming from millions of hitherto unidentified do-gooders.

TOM has proven that the audacious goal of improving the lives of 250,000,000 within a decade is attainable. Indeed, since its inception in July 2014 TOM has seen tremendous growth, spreading to many nations within less than two years beyond its nation of origin in Israel, to the USA, Brazil, Canada, and soon to Australia, Argentina, Vietnam and others. To date, more than 120 prototypes of such products have been created. It is a remarkable achievement, yet likely to grow exponentially as the infrastructure of TOM begins to mass-produce new products and deliver them to their yearning users.

With the Google grant TOM can now go to scale: First, inspired by TEDx, TOM will modulate its makeathons so that entrepreneurs the world over will be able to run them. Consequently, we anticipate an exponential growth in the number of unmet problems that will now have a solution. Second, TOM will modulate groups of developers who will take its prototypes and turn them into full-fledged products;

and third, TOM will build a web-platform to house all products in the cloud so that they are available to anybody anywhere who wants to download and use them.

Yet, the vision of TOM extends far beyond solving the needs of people with disabilities. The approach of TOM can be applied to any neglected problem in society, and the structure and process of TOM are benefiting humanity of massively untapped resources now effectively and efficiently deployed to solve many of humanity’s unmet needs.

TOM offers a new way for inclusive prosperity that could have emerged only in the twenty first century. The three traditional ways for societal prosperity to be inclusive have been through the benefits of markets, taxation and philanthropy. TOM now offers a fourth way by allowing for a massive transfer of the benefits of innovation and prosperity from those who enjoy them to those that need them, thereby holding the promise of bridging the growing societal gaps in all developed societies and trickling down the benefits of prosperity and innovation.

Gidi Grinstein is the Founder of the Reut Institute Group, an Israeli non-profit specializing in societal innovation.