“How do you know when to pull the plug on your idea?”  That’s the question Kiwanja.net’s Ken Banks posed to me after swapping stories one afternoon about our respective startup organizations. Nurturing and implementing ideas demands a level of physical and emotional investment. Once you’ve put that much into it, it becomes hard to know when it’s appropriate to throw in the towel.

The lack of financial capital isn’t a concession factor for most social ventures. Successful social ventures were born before the availability of seed funding for these ideas, and some of the coolest new organizations out there are funded by friends and family.  For these organizations there is no drain of funds that signifies the death of an idea.  When organizations are fueled by personal capital and sweat equity, the finish line gets hazy.

It’s an increasing dilemma. Consider the growing number of student classes working on social impact design projects. Stanford University’s Design for Extreme Affordability is one of the more renowned programs for graduate students in design, engineering, and business that connects student teams with a non-profit “client” for five months to develop a product solution serving the needs of bottom of the pyramid consumers. The class is responsible for spinning out a variety of social entrepreneurs – Ignite Innovations, d.light, Embrace, Driptech, to name a few.  Each of these organizations came into existence because their “client” was unwilling or unable to take the final idea forward.  Five months of work wasted?  It’s not hard to see why many student teams decide to implement the solutions themselves.

In addition to student teams, there are thousands of individuals and groups out there with ideas, solutions, or prototypes.  Each often building new organizations to support their solutions, some with more concrete plans than others.  The problem arises after these teams/individuals/groups develop a solution, but then become unsure what to do with it. Solutions, after all, still need to be implemented. Roadblocks prohibit these organizations from getting their solutions into the hands of people who need them. The usual culprits: lack of funding, on-the-ground presence or implementation partner, or the time and motivation required to drive activity.

A great case in point is the Pepper Eater, a device produced by Samuel Hamner and Scott Sadlon.  Their aluminum prototype uses a hand crank to crush chili peppers into chili flakes.  The prototype processes one kilogram of dried peppers in about thirty minutes, a fraction of the time required to do it by hand. The women in Ethiopia who’ve field-tested seem to like it, and have even purchased the prototypes.

But the designers behind the project are not ready to quit their day jobs to make pepper grinders.  They’re not interested in the complexities of building a company around this technology – they just want to see it end up in the hands of people that can and will.  But funders don’t give money to ideas without implementers.  Investors don’t fund ideas without a foreseeable return.  As a result, the Pepper Eater sits in development purgatory waiting for something to happen.

How to help them?  The only thing I could think of was to feature them in this blog to let everyone reading it know that they’re looking for partners to manufacture and distribute the design in Ethiopia. (Any takers?)  But it brings back the core issue Ken Banks raised in our conversation:  how do you know if you’re forcing an idea? And is there a place for the solutions that don’t make is past the roadblocks?

The irony is that a lot of people with ideas or interest in this field are asking how to get started. My answer for folks is usually fuzzy and unhelpful, but the most forthright answer I’ve heard came from Sally Osberg of the Skoll Foundation. She said, “If you’re asking that question, then you’re not ready. Get some experience, learn from those who are doing, and put yourself out there.”  It’s true. But now that we have many people getting started, the harder question to answer is: how do you know when to stop?

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This post also appears on NextBillion.net, a community of business leaders, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy makers and academics who want to explore the connection between development and enterprise.

Have you ever had to pick out a gift for someone you didn’t know very well?   Felt the pressure of selecting something for a stranger without knowing what they already have or what they need?   And have you ever been on the receiving end?  We all have the wool socks, random ceramic mugs, and piles of coffee table books lying around.  Wouldn’t you rather receive something you actually want and need?

Designing an object for a stranger is similar to the thought process behind buying that person a gift.  Ideally, you give them something they want, something they’ll use, something they maybe didn’t know they needed.   A successful design meets these same criteria.  And lucky for us, there are existing frameworks and methodologies designers have used for decades to guide product development. You’ll even find that the same strategies you use when trying to figure out what to buy that stranger are represented in these frameworks.   For example, your first instinct might be to ask someone who knows the person for whom you’re buying the gift for suggestions.  Or some insight.  Similarly, most design methodologies are rooted in the understanding of your end-user.

It’s unfortunately not as easy as plugging variables into an equation, and like most things it takes practice and experience to build your success.  But you can help yourself and your team by using the multitude of resources available.  There are a glut of books on design process and methodologies, IDEO’s HCD Toolkit, and workshops (such as Catapult’s) available to help get you started.

To start, here’s five quick principles that I hope will aid your design project:

1.  Don’t be afraid to get specific.

“Let’s solve the energy crisis” has way too much ambiguity.  Good design comes from creating constraints.

2.  Design is a conversation, not a monologue.

It’s also multi-lingual.  If you find you’re the only person in the room, make an effort to surround yourself with a multi-disciplinary team to balance your perspective, consider cross-cultural issues, or build a business model.  And don’t forget that this conversation includes stakeholders and users who are in-the-field.

3.  Beware the solution in search of a problem.

Spend at least the first quarter of your timeline, whatever it may be, avoiding generating solutions.   Good solutions emerge when you have enough information to know why they’re good.  You know you’re in danger if you’ve developed technology without a place to field test your prototypes.  Or… you have no idea what I mean by “field test.”

4.  Create some context.

Remember the gift giving for a stranger?  Do everything you can to know more about who and what you’re designing for.  Because they are the ultimate decision makers on the success of your efforts.  If they don’t want or use it, then your efforts are in vain.

5.  We can’t assume one size fits all right off the bat.

Despite all the hype and uber-focus on “scaleability”, start with focused efforts and you’ll be surprised at how good design can translate and scale.

What do we most of us actually do when we have to buy a gift for a stranger?   We buy gift cards.  Gift cards empower the recipient to choose their own gift, which is exactly what we would want.   The power of choice.  Your end-user is the same – don’t convince yourself that they aren’t.