![Crowd funding [Photo Credit - Rocao Lara on Flickr]](https://technocapital.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/8661000014_cb0056d718_z.jpg?w=600)
Crowd funding [Photo Credit – Rocao Lara on Flickr]
Jeff McIntire-Strasburg from Sustainablog recently posted about 2 new technologies (Mwezi Light & SunWater) that are aiming to alleviate poverty through their simple, yet ingenious innovations. And they’re using online crowd funding to support it.
An earlier blog post on this site explored the rise of mobile payments and specifically looked at M-Pesa, Kenya’s highly successful mobile payment system that has surpassed expectations dramatically and been a huge success.
That post also touched on the problem that most other countries have not been able to replicate the service with anywhere near the same level of success as M-Pesa. The Brookings Institution, an independent non-profit research organization, recently released the above video describing the M-Pesa model in conjunction with a detailed report on the 2012 Brookings Blum Roundtable that can be accessed here.
The report outlines three reasons that came up during the roundtable that might help explain the challenges of replication.
Platforms for the Future: Lina Nilsson – DIY Lab Instrumetns from IFTF on Vimeo.
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
(Photo credit to user tixx on Flickr)
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.
It’s not just about the innovation!
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:
“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.
Bono
(Photo credit – User Ambr0 on Deviant Art)
It’s hard to say anything bad about Bono. The U2 lead singer and humanitarian has been very successful in creating a foundation to fight poverty and end AIDS in Africa. And in a recent interview with the MIT Technology Review, he mentions another priority: investing in technology to solve the world’s problems.
A recent article by Kat Ascharya on Mobiledia summarizes the interview and talks about how Bono has slowly built up credibility with his investments in technology towards social and economic justice as well as the impact made through his investment firm, Elevation Partners.
Professor Naeem Zafar (Photo credit: Haas School of Business)
Not many people can claim a record of having worked with six startups directly, coaching CEOs and being a faculty member at UC Berkeley within the Haas MBA program. However, Professor Naeem Zafar can.
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak with Professor Zafar and discuss his thoughts on the resources that entrepreneurs and startups have to succeed. Aside from teaching, his current titles include President & CEO of Bitzer Mobile (enterprise mobility solutions) and Founder of Startup-Advisor.com (providing expert advice for entrepreneurs).
My last article, Are Mobile Payments Feasible Everywhere?, found me diving into the field of mobile technologies and how they’re being used to create better solutions for poverty problems around the world. As part of that, I was looking into a UNICEF platform called RapidSMS, led by Erica Kochi.
Kochi is the UNICEF’s Innovation Unit’s co-lead and is also a frequent lecturer on new product design. In a recent article on TechCrunch, “How Do You Scale Social Innovation Startups”, Kochi describes in detail the difficulty any startup has in creating traction and builds specifically on how social innovators can grow their startups in the best way possible.
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