Infinite Model

iDE uses Infinite to guide the creation of market ecosystems, impacting people’s lives through agricultural improvements, enhanced sanitation, resilience to climate change, gender equality promotion, and many possible future applications.

Explore the interactive graphic below.

Infinite possibilities for entrepreneurs

To be infinite is to be unlimited, endless, and without bounds. As the continuous cycle of planting, watering, and harvesting is without end, so too is the nature of human endurance and possibility. But for developing world entrepreneurs to succeed and overcome challenges they must participate in market ecosystems that are economically competitive, inclusive of all people, including marginalized populations, and resilient to shocks such as conflict or changing climates. At iDE we believe our Infinite Model provides a roadmap for how individuals seeking to participate in the market can move through a process of growth, promoting profitable livelihoods and, ultimately, escaping poverty.

What is the Infinite Model?

Infinite is a comprehensive technical framework that packages all of iDE's diverse, sophisticated program activities into simple, standardized formats that allow us all to rapidly develop, assess, and implement project strategies.

How does Infinite add value?

Infinite improves iDE’s work product in a number of ways:

Collaboration

Enables us to collaborate across countries by "speaking the same language" when we compare and contrast our contextualized programming within our own office to others within iDE

Project development

Helping us to design projects during business development much faster by using standardized components and drawing from a catalog of past project designs

Project startup

Enables us during project startup to rapidly deploy guidance, tools, and processes from a global knowledge management repository

Project implementation

Provides a method to continually review and adapt our project strategies throughout implementation

Best practice

Improves our ability to catalog how our best projects are set up for success, so that we can replicate winning combinations of activities and project resourcing

Networking

Accelerates new and exciting partnerships with donors and other implementers by using common selling tools that tell the stories of iDE's approaches through a simple framework.

Infinite describes a model of implementation that distinguishes the key steps for results within an iterative, cyclical process delineated by different phases of stakeholder engagement and best practices for market actors or project staff.

Infinite’s phases

Assess

Assess situations and take stock of environments to ensure future program design conforms to local contexts. iDE staff conduct interviews with the local farmers, market participants, such as suppliers and vendors, and regulatory authorities.

Availability

Ensure products, services, and information are made available and meet the needs of bottom of pyramid market participants. For example, iDE staff determine what agricultural inputs, such as certified seeds, fertilizers, and tools are required by smallholder farmers.

Acceptance

Behavior change is key to the success of market ecosystem creation. Smallholder farmers need the motivation and capacity to buy into new systems and processes. If they are unable or reluctant to change, new value chains risk breaking down.

Ability

Provide end users with the training and know-how to utilize new products, services, and information. A smallholder farmer must know how to maintain a drip irrigation system, for example, to be able to scale up and increase yields.

Access (Back and Front combined)

Ensure products are services are physically, financially, socially, accessible for bottom of the pyramid end users and microenterprises before production. Make sure users are linked with buyers, such as aggregators, who will purchase their outputs following production. 

Advocacy

Demonstrate the efficacy of iDE’s approach to market ecosystem creation, and link market actors and customers to wider, particularly national-level, actors and influencers in the private and public sectors.

Adapt

Note lessons learned from creating market ecosystems and feed back into subsequent iterations, continually adjusting and improving our approach, maximizing competitiveness, inclusion, and resilience.

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