After my last post on Kiva I had an interesting discussion with my friend and colleague Riccardo.

He never heard about Kiva and was impressed to hear about it.

After a few minutes we started talking about how small actions can have an impact on the real world.

Kiva is the typical case. It’s a collection of ‘microactions’ coming from different people around the globe that end up shaping a macroaction for someone else.

This is really something we should think about. A small action performed in one part of the world may turn in a big action in some other place. We have the power to perform microactions, everybody has the power to perform microactions in our continent.  This is a sort of unused  power that may prove to be very important in other continents.
In some way this may be a real revolutionary approach. I have always though I have a relatively low power in changing how things works both in my country and in other countries. At the end of the day the only power on general directions is expressed through the vote in elections.

Microactions can represent a bottom-up approach to changing things. Collect enough people with little power, aggregate power and turn it in something effective. This is what Kiva does, and in a very effective way I have to add.
This can easily be applied to the innovation process. Innovation does not necessarily pass through a quantum leap, but it can also come from a number of infinitesimal steps that will lead to the same result.

Why do I blog this? Well, the discussion I had yesterday really impressed me and I wanted to share some of the thoughts.