The Art of Social Development

In recent times, there are numerous social ventures that have propped up. Most of them have the noble idea of empowering the needy. A close examination of certain models in the society reveals an association with the patterns of nature. Such models have a greater impact on bringing about sustainable changes in the society.

Agasthya Foundation in India, is one such example. The Agasthya foundation was established to lay more emphasis on science education in the villages of India. The children of rural India, lacked exposure to science like the children in the urban areas. The foundation had a sole aim of narrowing the yawning gap between the rural and the urban areas. The seed for the foundation was laid in a village close to Bangalore in India. The seed that had been sowed, has grown into a huge tree with its branches across various cities in India. While bringing structural changes to the organization model, the founders ensured that a pattern similar to the 'Golden Mean' is implemented. The approach to ensure that people get on board was a centered approach, that had the capability to spread its influence across the various sectors.

From this example, it is evident that the art of developing the society lies in following certain patterns of nature. This would ensure the sustainability if the model in the long run.     

Is innovation grounded in generational theory?

Week 3: Solutions and Enablers to Deliver Basic Human Needs

When I am exposed to new, thoughtful social innovations, I am left feeling inspired and curious. The cynic in me wonders, why has it taken so long? The idealist in me sighs, at least we’re getting there.

After reading the articles about Solutions and Enablers to Deliver Basic Human Needs, a very strange thought occurred to me: is social innovation simply the interaction between technology and generational theory?

To start with, let’s ground ourselves in what I mean by Generational Theory. Here’s a seriously rudimentary breakdown: http://socalledmillennial.com/generational-cycles/.

Surely, innovation doesn’t have to be a specifically a brand new technical creation. It can be the repurposing of a process or system that exists, creating a unique end.  According to Prof. Zak—innovation requires an element of novelty.

So with the advent of technology, of course we would find ways to repurpose the technology that exists to meet new needs. But I wonder—is there a trend between the era you were raised in and the kind of social innovations you will be pre-programmed to conceptualize? As a millennial, am I predisposed to want to find ways to ‘clean things up’ or ‘rebuild institutions’ (socalledmillenial.com)? Moreover, is the focus of GenX on finding solutions regarding basic human needs and survival? It leaves me wanting to run an analysis on the number of social innovations out there and what kinds of problems they hope to solve. 

For example: I know that from the way I think, I am clearly a millennial—I always think in terms of systems, institutions, and impact. Things I aspire to create will almost always be in the context of fixing systems and correcting processes within institutions. Khan—he would be on the cusp of GenX and Millennial—is the Khan Academy just a focus on reframing educational institutions or is it a chance at redefining quality of life through access to basic education at your own pace? 

Surely, I acknowledge that this is a loosely applied theory in this situation, which leaves room for loose interpretation. Of course—I think there’s a lot more that can be unpacked, especially all the other elements of social location (See: Feminist Standpoint Theory and Subjective Social Location) that contribute to your lived experience. Nonetheless, I can’t help but to wonder if there is a correlation between trends in innovation and the shared experience of a generation.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/#H3

Subjective Social Location

http://socalledmillennial.com/generational-cycles/

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1673029/on-sale-for-150-one-laptop-per-child-is-now-a-touchscreen-tablet

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/11/02/one-man-one-computer-10-million-students-how-khan-academy-is-reinventing-education/

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2009-01-10/world/36786562_1_glasses-plastic-lenses-syringes

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/12/raspberry-pi-global-sales-spread/

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d5e6c520-ee71-11e2-816e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2eS3MLDYX

http://www.economist.com/node/16909923

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679719/build-your-own-civilization-with-the-global-village-construction-set

One question that constantly ran through the back of my head when reading the various articles that were assigned this week was: Why isn't there more thought placed into HOW these innovative products are going to reach people in developing countries. In the article, Power to the People, the hurdle of distribution was briefly discussed but not to enough detail that warrants confidence that many of these innovative products / ideas will reach enough of the BOP population.







Source: "Power to the people" The Economist web September 2, 2010

More cases of inspiring social innovation ideas

We have seen some of the brilliant social innovation ideas during past lectures. If you're interested, like me, in more social innovation ideas, I recommend this article:

100 technological social innovations

http://www.trendhunter.com/slideshow/technological-social-innovations

There are familiar innovations we see during lectures and readings, such as #19 Focus changing Glasses, #20 energy poverty entrepreneurship, #25 Online education charities, #31 Life-saving baby bags, etc. This article lists 100 innovations from a global perspective. Every innovation is supplemented with videos and detailed illustration to help you understand the product or idea. Relevant readings or videos can be found below the description.

After reading through these innovations, I want to highlight a point here:

Most of the innovations intend to provide solution to big problems like poverty, lacking education, housing or energy. But not only tangible products are social innovations.  Social innovation could be as simple as an idea or a channel. Sometimes an idea could be more beneficial than a product that uses materials, create waste and has costs. A good idea can stay sustainable and absorb new initiatives. For example:

#29 Volunteer time credits

"Spice is a social enterprise that develops agency timebanking systems for communities and public services that engage and empower the many rather than the few," they write on their website. "Spice has developed agency time credits as systematic low cost and sustainable methodology for engaging many more people in communities as active participants, volunteers and in 'co-producing' public and community services."

This is an idea that volunteer time can be stored in a bank like currency. Volunteer credits can motivate people just as money can create huge motivation.

#48 Nigerian Entrepreneurship Incubator

"CcHUB is Nigeria’s first open living lab and pre-incubation space designed to be a multi-functional, multi-purpose space where work to catalyze creative social tech ventures take place," the website explains. "The HUB is a place for technologists, social entrepreneurs, government, tech companies, impact investors and hackers in and around Lagos to co-create new solutions to the many social problems in Nigeria."

Or it can be a social innovation that generates social innovations.

Social innovation products are essential in a way that they make people's life better with a low cost. But it's time to think about the non-product facet of SI&E like distribution channels. These factors determine how innovation can effectively reach out to people.

My question is: The world is never short of great ideas. But ask yourself of these 100 ideas, how many of them do you use or even know before there's an article like this or a friend telling you about it? Social innovations can have huge impacts on people in need, yet we may need to focus on the "marketing" of ideas more than we think. Facebook pages and youtube videos, reaching only the better half of the population, may not be the solution to reach needed areas. What is the "social innovation" to promote "social innovation"?

Looking at the big picture

It's amazing to read about the significant impact free online schools like Khan Academy, Udacity, and Coursera can have on people who may lack the resources to get an education elsewhere, and even those who just need a little extra help. The fact that anyone with internet access and a computer, anywhere in the world, can get a college-level education for free is quite impressive. Not only that, but these courses have the ability to let students learn at their own pace, and review the lessons until they have fully grasped the material. As Sebastian Thrun points out in the article “One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education,” his students at Princeton actually preferred his video lessons to his lectures, and even did better on exams after having watched them. Free one-on-one university classes in which students learn better than sitting in lectures? This truly seems like it could be the future of education. There are so many positive world-wide implications, that it's easy to see the why this form of education might be preferable to our current system.

However, it seems important to tie this in with concerns being posed in other areas of education. In a recent post titled “What Higher Education Should Be For,” Barry Schwartz, a professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College, shares concerns that higher education is becoming more technical and more specialized. He believes the current model of liberal arts education is in danger of being left behind by students who prefer to gain skills that will make them “more employable.” This seems to be a concern echoed throughout liberal arts campuses. My own undergraduate university is going through financial difficulties, and the administration believes it may be because this generation of students is shifting toward wanting to learn more marketable skills. In his article, Shwartz articulates a worry that is shared by many educators:

“If you get specialized training, in anything, you will likely be good at solving the small problems that other people hand you.. What you will not be able to do very well is decide for yourself what is a problem worth solving. You will not be very good at even recognizing the big problems, let alone solving them.”

If we agree with this point of view, then it seems we must agree on the importance of classroom discussion for some contexts. It seems we must agree that, although tailored teaching can be most beneficial under some circumstances, there are still some lessons, such as the ones that a liberal arts education can provide, that can't be learned from a video. (Even if you don't agree, let's follow this train of thought.) In this new form of education through online videos, technical training would have a great advantage over humanities, and those lessons that lead to looking past the smaller problems might have to be sacrificed. So if we truly do make a shift to this new form of education, one implication might be that there will be fewer students who will have the ability to look at the society's bigger problems.

This would be a huge problem in the long run, because those people who look at society's bigger problems are most likely the same ones that are trying to solve those problems through social innovations. It would be a tragedy to think that by positively impacting the world as a whole through more availability of quality education, we could possibly hinder future generations of social innovators. One of the main goals of social innovation is sustainability, and there's nothing more important than the sustainability of the type of people who will be social innovators. It seems this is an important point for future educators to keep in mind. Perhaps it's a moot point, and video-teaching will merely supplement education with great results, but it's an important point to ponder nonetheless.

Skills for Living

           We can all recognize deficiencies in the current education system in America. In higher income neighborhoods schools and students are thriving. Graduation rates are higher than in those lower-income neighborhoods.  So what have Americans done in order to fill in those gaps, where the public education system cannot reach? Just like Khan Academy was formed to clarify concepts and make concepts available worldwide via the web, Lorraine Decker an entrepreneur has changed Houston area students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds.

           

            Skills for Living was formed to teach high school sophomores financial concepts for life. In the “Game of Real Life[1]” students learn about insurance, how to calculate their taxes and how much money they will earn if they choose to go to college, or choose to get a job right after High School. Students learn about decision-making and how to strategically plan for a financially secure future. As a former instructor for S4L, I can tell you that this is one of the most effective methods of positively influencing youth. I have seen the students that I taught graduate from High School and go on to attend college. These are kids that did not think they could attend a four-year university but after being involved in the Game of Real Life, they feel more empowered to attend a four year university. 

Watch this video where Lorraine talks about S4L: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlem6XWS22I&list=UUszNpnw_Mg1cJIDKIC6QQNw

            Entrepreneurs, like Lorraine Decker and Salman Khan[2] are changing the world. They are filling the gaps in the education system not just in the United States but around the world. I would be interested in seeing if the Khan method of teaching via the web could be used to teach Financial Literacy in the United States. 

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[1] http://skills4living.org/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy

A Critique to A Critique!

In this week’s series of readings I took issue with the many critiques of social innovations that have a for-profit focus or business model. It is at times disheartening to read articles that highlight new technological advancements that provide services to millions of people since being introduced, that then critiques these same innovations for not reaching billions of people. An example of this is found in the article, Energy in the developing world: Power to the people.

In this article it is explained that 1.5 billion people or more in the world have no access to electricity and that there has been some improvements in providing the “energy poor”[i] with reliable and sustainable energy, but then criticizes these same inventors like d.light design for not pricing their product at $5 instead of $10. While a reduction in price may allow for the casting of a wider net, we have to think about at what cost we are widening these nets. Do we wish to sacrifice the integrity and capabilities of the product to increase the number of homes a product or service may reach. Do we want to continue operating in a society where quantity is more important than quality or are we ready to shake things up?

I view this article’s critique to be one of the reasons as to why societal ills such as a lack of electricity still plague billions of people around the globe.  As a society we tend to look for one solution to everyone’s problems and negatively critique or discredit the impact of social innovators that do not touch all people that make up the base of the pyramid. Also as a society we tend to perpetuate this notion that capitalism is always bad, and in the same breathe fail to acknowledge that poverty reduction at its basic level is a product of capitalist interactions.  While it is always important to have a critical eye, in order for there to be great social change we must allow for difference in approaches that give innovators and the use of capitalism for social good a chance.

When it comes to the amazing wonders of social innovations and their impacts, one cannot forget about the issue of access. The six letter word that sheds a light on the haves and the have nots, and  the fortunate and the disenfranchised. And while we all socially give off the impression that we want everyone to have the same level of access, it is important to ask the question; is universal access the “correct pathway” for social innovators,  and is this a fair standard to hold innovators who are creating and distributing viable and life changing social innovations to? Why can’t a for-profit business approach to social innovation be adopted and regarded as not the be all end all, but as a source for further restructuring of social services and eradicating inequalities?

.   

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[i] Energy in the developing world; Power to the People. (2010) The Economist. 

The Raspberry Pi, Community Development, and Equitable Growth

This week’s social innovation topic is “Solutions and Enables to Deliver Basic Human Needs.” Natasha Lomas’s April 2013 article in TechCrunch titled “Where in the World are the 1.2M Raspberry Pi Microcomputers?[…]”[1] is one in a series of articles on the Pi Foundation’s innovation and its potential in the world’s emerging and developing regions.

Lomas’s series focuses on the Pi Foundation, a U.K.-based organization that initially created the Raspberry Pi microcomputer in an effort to fill an educational void in the U.K. computer science space by providing a learning platform for those interested in learning how to code. As Lomas cites in her April article, the Raspberry has experienced widespread adoption with more than 98% of global sales recorded in the world’s developed and wealthiest countries. This makes sense to a large degree as the device was created to cater to higher education audiences, or at least to populations who have regular access to ICT technologies. However, Lomas also highlights that the Foundation’s initiative may have contingently provided a low- cost computing solution for a range of learning communities throughout the developing world.

Priced at $35 a piece and used to power spreadsheets, word-processing, games, and deliver high-definition video, the Pi Foundation may be an enabler of real change in developing countries. Combined with new educational curricula like Salman Khan’s Khan Academy learning platform, the Raspberry may still be able to “disrupt the living rooms and schools” of those in the U.K., but also those in the rural communities of sub-Saharan Africa. Lomas cites a Belgian volunteer project that recognizes the enormous potential of the Raspberry and has used it to bring computing power to rural Cameroon.[2] What we are seeing here with the Raspberry is the scale of social innovation. Where one organization sees a local or regional social issue and decides to tackle it with an affordable, innovative approach, it provides an opportunity for others to become enablers of change.

One example of how social entrepreneurs build on initiatives and solutions like the Pi Foundation’s initial vision for the Raspberry, is South Africa’s RLabs. Marlon Parker is the founder of RLabs, an organization that empowers and reconstructs communities through innovation (www.rlabs.org). After learning about social innovation and the Raspberry Pi through President Obama’s Young African Leaders Initaitive (YALI) in 2011, Marlon returned to South African to help communities connect, learn, and grow with the aid of a number of mobile and internet solutions. For Marlon, the Raspberry Pi concept provided the model for community engagement and learning that his organization uses to bring communities together and drive social change with the use of technology.

Both examples above show us how technology is dramatically changing lives – or has the potential to change lives – in developing countries where possibilities used to be scarce. With a range of technologies from mobile phone applications, new farming aids, solar technologies, and mobile medical devices, it is clear that technology will play a transformative role in the developing world. Here is the question to ponder; Is technology the solution to equitable growth in the developing world or will it only widen the divide between vulnerable populations and those who learn to use technology in their daily lives?

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[1] Lomas, Natasha. “Where in the World are the 1.2M Raspberry Pi Microcomputers […]”. Friday, April 12^th, 2013.

techcrunch.com/2013/04/12/raspberry-pi-global-sales-spread

[2] Lomas, Natasha. “Turn the Raspberry Pi Microcomputer into a Low-Cost Laptop […]”. Monday, May 27^th, 2013.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/27/pi-laptop

It's time to change our education

Education shapes the way of formation, delivery and evolution of information, knowledge and wisdom to a large extent, which directly influences people’s mind and abilities and even defines the future development of society. Human beings' development can't be achieved without education, nor will our society.

So is our educational system really effective? To better our world, should we simply spread the current education system to developing countries or should we stop and think about a dramatic reform?

                          

Professor Ken Robinson really brought me a shock when he addressed the talk of "How schools kill creativity". There is an illustrative example of a girl who can't concentrate on classes without moving her body. Her teachers said that she had disabilities in learning and advised her to go to see a doctor. Fortunately, the doctor she met with was an excellent person who totally changed her life, because the doctor managed to see her unlimited talent in dancing and encouraged her to develop it. At last, a superstar in dancing emerged who worked in collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber in the famous musical play "Cats".

By analyzing this real story, Robinson threw light upon his belief that "We grow not into creativity, but out of it." Children are born artists but few children survive after being "comprehensively nurtured" by our education.

After watching this video, a thought gradually formed in my mind that in the century of social innovation and entrepreneurship, we must reform our hundreds-of-years-old education system both in contents and ways of presenting.

First, in terms of the contents of education, I think we should provide contents that really cater to students' talent, interest as well as the most urgent social needs in local areas. 

For example, the XO laptop for children doesn't force children to learn,but pull and motivate them. A child would see a question appear on the screen asking" what do you want to be?" instead of "what you must learn". In fact,in the slums of Rio De Janeiro, lots of students drop out of schools and start drug business because schools are too boring to attract their attention. So instead of pushing students into our current education system, it would be better to pull the students' intrinsic motivation and provide them with things they exactly want and need.

                         

Apart from this, according to Charles Leadbeater's talk, addressing the most urgent social needs in local areas is also important. As we all know, there are numerous villages in Africa with hundreds thousands of people desperate for food, water and energy. At this point, teaching students there about economic theories may not make sense at all. Instead, the main focus of education there should be helping students to acquire most needed knowledge and abilities about survival.If you have seen the video about an African teenager named William Kamkwamba who built a windmill out of debris to provide electricity to his village, you would find it easier to understand my point. 

As a result, spreading the exact British or American education system to other parts of the world especially developing countries may not be effective, because these systems may not be useful in different situations.In conclusion, a personalized and localized education may be the right direction.

Second, ways of presenting. At present, Internet technology has brought so many creative ways of teaching, like Massive Online Open Courses(MOOC), online one-to-one tutor system and Khan Academy, and the "one computer per child" goal of many social enterprises also brings many hopes and inspirations to education development in poor areas. And more excitingly, these technologies also enable us to design and adjust education contents without too much cost. With more accessible, affordable and interactive means of education, combined with personalized and localized contents, our education system in the future may change the world beyond everyone's imagination.

Of course, it's easier to come up with a thought than a successful implementation. This destructive education reform would receive lots of resistance and encounter many difficulties due to limited resources and depressing conditions in poor areas, but that's where social innovation and enterprises arise, right?

Sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X-8TA4RBog

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/11/02/one-man-one-computer-10-million-students-how-khan-academy-is-reinventing-education/

http://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_on_building_a_windmill.html

Open Source and D.I.Y.

One article that struck me this week was the profile of the non-profit Open-Source Ecology (OSE) and its Global Village Construction Set. By freeing information and making it available to the public at large, the GVCS creates the ability to create your own tools to solve the problems at hand. This is to me what social innovation should embody. It’s not about pushing a product on a developing market and calling it innovation. It’s about letting those who own a problem also own the means to solve the problem by their own designs, and often more affordably.

The idea is exciting, but the question is how to create more interest and participation in growing the database as well as creating access to these ideas and designs in the developing world. Other challenges would be to translate these designs into the languages of the regions where they are needed most and to collaborate on alternate designs where the material needs for construction cannot be readily met.

Furthermore, the argument can be made that a product or design engineered for profit may be more efficient and durable, but can it be made at a reasonable price, and can it be accessed in developing regions? If so, great. How long would it take for the designs available now to catch up to industry standards? Would they be able to? I would imagine that an open-source hub of ideas would evolve on its own in much the same way that we have seen open-source software take off. One of the exciting prospects of accessible information is that it would open up growth of localized businesses, especially those with specialized skills, to expand their repertoire of products and services.

As for sustainability of a resource like the CVGS, I would propose that the model be a based on suggested donation, in much the same way that people, groups, and other non-profits have done. For example: Both Louis C.K. and Radiohead have pioneered independent distribution online, and have proved that the model has been successful. In the same way, Humble Bundle has sustained itself and partnering charities off of the donations it receives from sales of digital content. Alternatively, they could also launch donation campaigns for content and money in the same way that Wikipedia does. In the end, these schemes allow the consumer to decide directly the value they assign to the goods they receive. Some may not be able to pay and others will donate much more.

Source:

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679719/build-your-own-civilization-with-the-global-village-construction-set

Take a look at the designs offered by Open Source Ecology:

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page

And the cool things Humble Bundle offers:

https://www.humblebundle.com/

Iron Fish-Saving Cambodia?

Week 3 of our course focuses on "Solutions and Enablers to Deliver Basic Human Needs," and the readings look at individuals or solutions that address basic human needs in seemingly simple ways.  These are great innovations, as they help underserved people and groups receive goods and services that improve their standard of life in significant ways.  Two innovators who deserve consideration in this section of this course, Chris Charles and Gavin Armstrong are profiled in the FastCoDesign article titled "This Iron Fish Offers Relief from Anemia" and found at http://www.fastcodesign.com/1673101/this-iron-fish-offers-relief-from-anemia. 

Charles and Armstrong travelled to Cambodia as PhD students to look into the high instance (44%) of anemia in Cambodia.  Anemia, caused by an iron deficiency, can cause significant health complications, including exhaustion and birth complications.  One of the main reasons for the high rate of anemia in Cambodia is the high rate of poverty, which makes it difficult for citizens to purchase red meat or dietary supplements necessary for a healthy intake of iron.  Seeing this problem, Charles and Armstrong introduced the idea of cooking meals with a piece of iron thrown into the pot.  By cooking with a piece of iron, the food's iron content by nearly 92%.  Charles and Armstrong did find one flaw with their idea-the people of Cambodia did not want to toss a chunk of iron into their food.  So by going in to the community and learning more about Cambodian society they learned that the fish is a symbol of good luck.  With this information, they designed fish-shaped iron, which the people of Cambodia accepted as a supplement to their cooking.  The fish-redesign has greatly increased the frequency with which iron is used when cooking, and has decreased the instance of anemia in Cambodia. 

This profile provides to very valuable lessons for our class.  First, it shows the simplicity of social innovation.  A piece of iron is cheap to acquire, and has incredible health benefits for those who use it, as it has made great strides in eradicating anemia in Cambodia.  Instead of needing a dietary supplement or more red meat each household needs only to acquire an iron fish.  Doing so is an affordable and easy way to improve the health of the country.  This solution is interesting because it approaches the problem in a less-traditional way, for instead of looking at something that could be consumed, it looked at something that could add to any and all food.  the second lesson of the iron fish is the importance of understanding the culture in which you are working.  In a more utilitarian society, placing a piece of iron of any shape may have been accepted, but in Cambodia, to do so was frowned upon.  Only after the shape was standardized to resemble the fish of good fortune did the people of Cambodia incorporate the innovation into their daily life.    Bearing this in mind, could there be other examples of innovations that failed to take hold not because of their function but because of unappealing design?  Are we setting ourselves up for failure by not paying enough attention to cultural norms?  I believe this is an area that could be of significant importance as smaller scale social innovators continue to work around the globe.  

Sustaining Sustainability

The best social entrepreneur advice I heard came inside a Ted Talk video by Ron Finley, a guerilla gardener in South Central LA.  He said, in his distinct inspirational swagger tone, “I am not talking about any free s#$! Cause free is not sustainable. The funny thing about sustainability is you have to sustain it.” What Ron was referring to is that with all social entrepreneurship, one must focus on a sustainable business model in parallel to providing the solution to the social problem.  Many non-profits rely on outside funding, whether by funding foundations, grants, or individual donations to keep them going year-to-year.  The reliability on such funds can fluctuate year-to-year as economies fluctuate year-to-year.  A better model would be a hybrid of non-profit and for-profit such that the for-profit side generates funds for the non-profit movement. In short, become a self-reliable foundation as best as one can.

Last year, I along with three other Carnegie Mellon classmates formed a team to compete in the Hult Global Case Competition (HGCC, now called Hult Prize).  The HGCC was a business competition that crowd source from the top universities around the globe to solve “the most pressing social challenges on the planet.” My team and I competed in the education category which required us to develop a new business plan that would catapult the non-profit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which provided a low-cost laptop called the XO to children in the developing world, from the existing number of 2.4 million laptops in the developing world to 1 0million laptops within one year. A lofty goal indeed, but the purpose was to have each team create a new business model that required each team to think out of the box. 

Our solution in its most primitive form was to sell the XO laptop to children in the developed world and use the funds to subsidize the cost of the XO laptop to children in the developing world.  We asked ourselves “where is the money!” (think Jerry Maguire-ish) and then asked “is there also a market where the money is?”  We believed yes!  So did the HGCC judges and our solution won!

One Laptop Per Child recently announced they will be selling their XO tablet at Walmart in the United States.  OLPC goal is to “offset the cost of getting cheap computers into the hands of children who need them by selling the same computer locally to those who can afford to pay more.” Sound familiar? Though the CMU team is not credited with the idea, I like to think we had a influence - big or small - in this decision. Making OLPC one more non-profit understanding that sustainability must be sustained.

Watch Ron Finley on Ted Talks.  His video is full of information on food deserts of LA, plus if you listen to him closely you will hear good advice on how to imagine your business model for all social entrepreneurships. Change the composition of the soil.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_finley_a_guerilla_gardener_in_south_central_la.html

For more about the Hult Prize start-up accelerator for social entrepreneurship visit http://www.hultprize.org

Watch the video of President Clinton announcing CMU team winner 2012 Hult Global Case Challenge visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOjRx95LRM4

Social Entrepreneurs of the Year 2013

This week I did some search to see what kind of social innovations are appreciated in the developing world. I found “Social Entrepreneurs of the Year 2013” on the World Economic Forum’s website.

In developing countries, access to basic needs such as health care, education, energy and employment are not available to everybody. Even within some countries there is imbalance in access to internet and other sources of information. Some social entrepreneurs addressed some of these issues successfully and made an impact in some of these developing countries. Some of these noteworthy entrepreneurs are as the following.

Chapada Institute (Cybele Amado de Oliveira) focused on improving education in Brazil. Hybrid Social Solutions Inc. (Jim Ayala) tried to diminish lack of access to electricity and inconsistent power connections in Philippines. Enova (Mois Cherem Arana), improved internet and computer access for educational purposes in Mexico. World Health Partners, (Gopi Gopalakrishnan) worked on improving health services for rural communities in India. Youth for Technology Foundation (Njideka U. Harry) deals with poverty and unemployment, especially among youth and women by providing them life skills so that they can participate in the work force in Nigeria. B-fit (Bedriye Hulya), empowers women through exercise and entrepreneurship education in Turkey, which I attended for 6 months. INCLUDED (Jonathan Hursh) worked on providing better access to education, employment, social services and information for the migrants in slums in China. And the list goes on.

For more information about social entrepreneurs of 2013 refer to the following link:

http://www.weforum.org/pdf/schwabfound/seoy/Social_Entrepreneurs_of_the_Year_2013.pdf