I had the opportunity to sit down with Lina Nilsson, Founder of Tekla Labs and Innovation Director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley, to talk about the resources that innovators should take advantage of and discuss the unique idea of do-it-yourself laboratory equipment.
Tekla Labs is an effort to develop low-cost and accessible lab tools that anyone around the world can use in order to conduct research and build their own equipment. This is highly relevant to social entrepreneurs and innovators as these tools are generally extremely expensive to use and hard to access.
Morten Lund, repeat entrepreneur and investor for many successful startups including Skype, BullGuard and Zyb, recently published an article in which he talks about how entrepreneurs tend to place too much emphasis on venture capital rather than on building their business.
He acknowledges that the most pressing need for those that start their own companies is generally funding but argues that it is more important for them not to lose sight of their main goal – making their business work.
This brief photo essay makes the argument that social entrepreneurs and innovators must make a conscious effort to include local perspectives in their designs for poverty solutions in order to have the most effective results. The inspiration for this video came from a symposium on New Development held at UC Berkeley.
The Event:
Is There A New Development? The promise and politics of provincializing experts, models, and knowledge in the 21st century.
“The “Is There A New Development?” spring symposium brought together scholars from both the STS and the development studies communities and provided a forum in which some of the most contemporary ideas of ‘development’ and expertise could be debated. Symposium participants came together from the broader Bay Area, within the United States, and from across multiple continents. The two day event held eight sessions and approximately twenty individual paper presentations and a special session dedicated to a broader discussion. Emerging themes ranged from ironic perceptions of local knowledge or the ‘dialectic of confirmation and critique’ that is embodied in all; the usefulness of thinking of southern- versus northern-led development projects; social science researchers as experts in practice; the future of critique; and new entanglements of experimentation, politics, capital, bureaucratic logics, and the material. Our keynote speaker, Professor Richard Rottenburg gave a wonderful address that was both accessible to a wide audience and conceptually provocative, in which he suggested a new post-critique approach to social inquiry that embodies compassion, responsibility, and an acceptance of uncertainty. In all, approximately 75 people shared differing notions of science, technology, and expertise over the two day event. Highlights included a robust debate on the existence of a division between the global south and north, comments and discussion representing multiple departments on Berkeley campus, and the continuation of the conversation well after the formal conclusion of the event on Saturday afternoon.” [1]
The event was held on April 5-6, 2013, at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the UC Berkeley campus.
TechnoCapital 