Innovation + Community = X

Mr Nick Kendall called me up the other day, as something had just crossed his path that made him think of (as he put it) the two realms of what he perceives I do, namely innovation and community.

(I’m glad someone has a more precise handle on this, because I’m never quite sure myself…)

He’d been listening to this Radio 4 programme on ‘Bread for Scotland‘, and he’d started thinking about the different sort of innovation that can evolve from getting all sorts of different people involved in an economy that surrounds something.

I’m off for a listen now, but in exchange I told Nick about my new friend for Barcelona, Anahí.

Anahí owns Onna Café in the district of Gràcia. We met on my first day there, when I was scouring the city for the best coffee shops I could find.

Of course, great coffee shops are becoming an indicator species for any city nowadays – find the really good coffee places, and they’ll be in the heart of other interesting things.

What’s more interesting than usual about Onna, and Anahí, is that she’s not come into the business just through a general love in all sorts of coffee from everywhere. She’s originally from Costa Rica, and is using Onna not just as a venture for herself, but to improve the way the coffee economy works for all the people throughout the supply chain of her home country.

She works with everyone from the farmers who grow the plants and look after the soil right through to the wholesale customers she supplies with Costa Rican beans, to establish an understanding of exactly where the cofee comes from, how it’s processed, packed, shipped, roasted and so on.

What it means I think is that everyone becomes visible to each other, all along the supply chain, and it’s helping Costa Rica step away from the commodity stock market approach to coffee beans (where price is dictated by the market), and help everyone realise greater value for the product through understanding how and why to make great coffee.

It all means that the coffee economy for Costa Rica is changing – so much so, Anahí pointed out, that the very first Latin American winner of the World Cup Tasters Championship was Juan Gabriel Cespedes of Costa Rica (who apparently had never been outside the country before heading to Gothenburg to compete).

Which is another interesting thing about the visibility throughout the supply chain; it’s not just one way.

It’s not just the wholesale or retail customers at the end of the chain understanding how the coffee is grown, processed, and delivered to them in their businesses and homes, but about the farmers and shippers at the other end what and how people value the coffee. If you need to grow and ship coffee that stands up well in a coffee cupping test, well, you need to learn how cupping works.

When I think back to what Nick was describing, the crossover of innovation and community, I think more about this sort of business, and what businesses of all sizes can take from it. How do you make everyone visible and valued by others along the supply chain? How can they change the conditions in the chain for mutual benefit? And how do all these stories leak out to add to to a complex, compelling, authentic brand?

• Category: economics, making