Toward a Universal Social Impact Metric for Engineered Products That Alleviate Poverty

Abstract

One of the purposes of creating products for developing countries is to improve the consumer's quality of life. Currently, there is no standard method for measuring the social impact of these types of products. As a result, engineers have used their own metrics, if at all. Some of the common metrics used include products sold and revenue, which measure the financial success of a product without recognizing the social successes or failures it might have. In this paper, we introduce a potential universal metric, the product impact metric (PIM), which quantifies the impact a product has on impoverished individuals—especially those living in developing countries. It measures social impact broadly in five dimensions: health, education, standard of living, employment quality, and security. By measuring impact multidimensionally, it captures impacts both anticipated and unanticipated, thereby providing a broader assessment of the product's total impact than with other more specific metrics. The PIM is calculated based on 18 simple field measurements of the consumer. It is inspired by the UN's Multidimensional Poverty Index (UNMPI) created by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The UNMPI measures how level of poverty within a nation changes year after year, and the PIM measures how an individual's poverty level changes after being affected by an engineered product. The PIM can be used to measure social impact (using specific data from products introduced into the market) or predict social impact (using personas that represent real individuals).

Integrated Natural Resource and Conservation Development Project: A Review of Success Factors From a Systems Perspective

“…A relatively simple such model may initially have maximizing profit as the optimization objective subject to operational, design, sustainability and conservation constraints. Recognizing the likely ICED21 trade-offs between conservation and income development, a more sophisticated model would need an objective function expressing an overall social value that includes conservation and sustainability as well as development goals (Kellner et al 2011), and include some a standard metric that measures social impact (Stevenson et al 2018). The framework must be constructed in a modular fashion allowing for tailoring to different projects in different regions or countries.…”

A computational simulation-based framework for estimating potential product impact during product design

“…The framework presented in this paper will focus on social impacts during the use of a product. Literature on measuring social impact has been growing and frameworks for assessing the social impact of products have emerged such as social impact assessment (SIA) (Fontes et al 2018), the social life cycle assessment of products (Benoît et al 2010), and the product impact metric (Stevenson et al 2018). It is important to note that these frameworks were largely built on assessing current products and not on estimating the social impacts of a future product.…”

The Personification of Big Data

“…The validation of the persona population is shown in the results section, Section 6. The authors of this paper have previously collected survey data for a study in the city of Itacoatiara, Amazonas, Brazil (Stevenson et al 2018). The purpose of the cited study was to measure the social impact of motorcycles, specifically on motorcycle taxi drivers.…”

“…One of the variables that was calculated from the aggregated data is the distance to clean water, which was obtained from UNICEF (2017). Figure 3a compares the survey results from Stevenson et al (2018) to the calculated values of the persona population for the distance to clean water 3a. Microdata from the 2010 Brazilian census and percentile group data were used to calculate relationships between income and other information, such as the number of children in a family and body mass index Minnesota Population Center (2018).…”

“…Income and demographic information of motorcycle taxi drivers in Itacoatiara, Brazil obtained from a previous surveys we create filtering the persona population (Stevenson et al 2018). Stevenson et al Stevenson et al (2018) to the calculated values of the persona population, the accuracy of the persona population can be observed.…”