Food for Thought: I’ve been keeping an eye on McKinsey Quarterly to see what business is seeing as spaces for innovation, just to keep my finger on the pulse.

The future is the great unknown – “I never think of the future,” Albert Einstein once observed. “It comes soon enough.” Well, the prevailing winds are strong forces, and why not use them to shape your course?

“Confronted by the economic, social, and technological forces shaping the global business landscape, most managers assume that their ability to sculpt the future is minimal. But systematically spotting and acting on emerging trends [that are reshaping business] helps companies to capture market opportunities, test risks, and spur innovations. A McKinsey team that explored the key global trends defining the coming era has identified five forces, or “crucibles,” where the stresses and tensions will be greatest and thus offer the richest opportunities for corporate strategies.”

cool.. luxuriate in these ideas here at Global Forces home.

Why Trendwatching could save your business:

McKinsey director Peter Bisson explains the value behind tracking those global forces and how to build them into corporate strategy. check it out

But what really caught my eye today and that I had to post was this:

10 Tech Business Trends to Watch

• Distributed cocreation moves into the mainstream
• Making the network the organization
• Collaboration at scale
• The growing ‘Internet of Things’
• Experimentation and big data
• Wiring for a sustainable world
• Imagining anything as a service
• The age of the multisided business model
• Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid
• Producing public good on the grid

read all about it here and listen to podcasts of experts.

What do you think? Let’s discuss how these ideas could impact public health..

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Kopernik: Connecting Innovative Technologies with Poor Communities
We are lucky to have a guest post today by Ewa and people like her in general who are doing what they can for global health. She and her team have just launched a new web platform connecting you with poor communities and technologies that might be needed there via an online store. I cannot emphasize enough that is this is long long overdue and that we should all be embarrassed that this hasn’t happened before. So major kudos to Ewa and her team for pulling this platform together and giving it a shot. Please visit their website and spread the word (you can also read there Tech for development blog here):

Guest Post by Ewa Wojkowska, a former UN worker, is the co-founder of TheKopernik.org.
As the rubble is cleared in Haiti, as a measure of stability comes to Sudan, as Sri Lanka holds a bitter peace and as Burundi faces its first election in the wake of massive civil war, a new development opportunity presents in some of the world’s poorest and most troubled places.

Online social entrepreneurship for the poor is one of the most compelling ways to fight poverty—and to reshape our development practices. Examples like Kiva and Global Giving are already leading the way, linking people anywhere in the world to better assistance and real results. The internet has created the opportunity for a transparent virtual marketplace: communities in developing countries identify their local needs, individuals anywhere in the world directly respond. Today our site—www.thekopernik.org—joins the force, connecting breakthrough technology to the poor through an online marketplace. It’s a simple, direct idea for real assistance to people in need.

Here’s our idea: Registered local organizations provide short proposals explaining their needs—simple water filtration in Freetown, Sierra Leone, self-adjusting eyeglasses in Manado, Indonesia. Any visitor to the site, anywhere in the world, can review the proposals and make donations to fund the plan of his or her choice. We connect these breakthrough technologies—water filters and drums, self-adjusting eye glasses, and solar lights, just to name a few—to the people who need them most.

What sets us apart is the focus on technology and a review mechanism for local organizations, or ‘technology seekers’, to rate the products. By including a feedback mechanism on the effectiveness of these technologies, Kopernik gives voice and choice to local communities and organizations – simple elements that are so frequently missed in international development efforts. We’re looking to take out the delays and to spark new ideas in international aid, one click at a time.We believe this is the new face of development.

If more people everywhere have safe, unfettered access to clean water, more efficient means of transporting that water, clear eyesight, and reliable light, how would their choices change? How would they see the world and their place in it? What could their empowerment achieve?

We now have the technology to improve everyone’s lives, and the internet is the window to get these life-changing technologies into people’s hands, directly and efficiently. We’re building a resource that those in need can access for themselves.

Ewa Wojkowska, a former UN worker, is the co-founder of Kopernik.org. The website launched this past week.

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Post by David Van Sickle, guest blogger. Please see his very popular previous post: 7 Steps for Building Low-cost Open Source Technologies for Global Health. (Thanks to Andre of Pulse and Signal fame for cross posting this)

Missing Populations:
I’m currently in the United Arab Emirates, attending a conference sponsored by the UAEU in Al-Ain to raise awareness of global health problems in the Middle East and neighboring Asia, and to draw attention to the region and its populations and health problems among the global health community. As a result, I’ve been thinking about the scope of attention in global health, and about populations and settings that are, for some reason, out of focus right now; one group in particular has come to mind.

This group is among the poorest in their country. Just under one in three lives in poverty (more than twice the overall rate).

• They have, on average, the lowest per capita income, earning less than half the average income of the general population.
• Nearly a quarter of their households are food insecure and as much as half of the population is unemployed.

Their families inhabit some of the most substandard housing in their country.

• Nearly 40 percent of households are without electricity.
• More than 30 percent lack a safe and adequate water supply and waste disposal system.
• Households are often crowded. The risk of death from tuberculosis is 600 percent higher compared to the general population.

Populations are often geographically isolated, living many miles from communities, employment and health care facilities.

• More than 60 percent of households have no landline telephone with most individuals relying on cell phones for routine communications.
• Migration to distant urban centers for employment is growing.

Overall the group experiences a major mortality disadvantage and significant burden of chronic diseases.

• The group shoulders considerable decrements in life expectancy and significantly higher rates of infant and maternal mortality.
• They suffer from increasingly high rates of debilitating chronic diseases tied to negative social and economic determinants of health.

Given this set of circumstances, I have long expected that the attention of the global health community would land on this group. The problems are compelling and the potential value of existing and promising social and technological interventions are obvious. For example, with widespread access to mobile phones networks, mobile phones could be used to deliver education, raise incomes, or improve health and health care. There are a host of applicable technological interventions that could mitigate poor housing or provide electricity.

Yet, very few academic or applied global health organizations include the group in their research focus or activities. I’m ready to see global health efforts applied to aid Native Americans.

Cross post by Alex from over at Tales of Water in Africa:

Over the last year or so, I’ve encountered a tremendous push for innovation in the fields of development and disaster relief. Organizations big and small are looking for the ideas that will catapult millions of people out of poverty. The next clever gadgets that will cheaply and quickly filter water, prevent malaria, and stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. These ideas are almost by definition just over the horizon – because once an idea has been around for a few months, it’s not that innovative anymore.

And so what happens to those innovative ideas? What happens when the clever creator has received his fellowship grant and begins to work out the tricky details? From what I’ve seen, the funding organizations have moved on to the next ‘innovation’ and left the creator to work out the Boring Stuff on their own. My experience in Africa has pointed to the Boring Truth – 90% of what’s needed is not innovation but ‘capacity building’ – training, logistics, and equipment purchases. Building systems that can scale up to help thousands more people.

Take for example the work my fiancée does in health care. She is deploying an innovative new computer and mobile phone-based system to track and process health claim forms. It promises to reduce overhead and errors, increasing the rate at which health providers are reimbursed by funding agencies such as KFW (the German development bank). And yet the health providers she partners with, while supportive of her new claims system, are more excited by the equipment and training she is giving as part of the research. They’re excited about the opportunity to purchase laptops, check email, and learn how to track patients on Excel. And they want to do it on laptops, not smart-phones, as are being so heavily touted in development circles. They want to do things like we do in developed countries. Given the option, they’re taking the boring stuff before the innovative.

To a large extent I’ve found the same to be true in the work I do with water. The basic work – building gravity flow systems – has been done since the Romans! It’s not exactly cutting-edge technology. But the great improvements are coming from the Boring Stuff – GPS devices to mark pipe and tank locations. Creating a database to manage the hunt for new sources of water. These behind the scenes changes are making it much easier to build and manage a water system.

But unfortunately the Boring Stuff isn’t sexy enough to get funding. The truth is, nobody wants to fund it because they can’t put their names on it. The funding organizations can’t brag to their peers and donors about the Boring Stuff – “look we gave $10,000 to train X health practitioners on how to enter and process data!” But when they put out $10,000 to fund the Next Big Thing, out come the press, book agents, and dollars.

This trend points to a glaring fact – we in the developed world are more interested in creating a system that makes us feel good rather than creating a system that provides the resources people in the developing world need to succeed. And I will be the first to confess of this – I want to feel good about myself just as much as anyone else.

Now, all this is not to say that innovation is inherently bad – far from it. It is only to say that innovation should not be the absolute focus, or even the primary focus. We need to support the Boring Stuff, the physical and educational infrastructure that will be the foundation on which the vast majority of people are lifted out of poverty.

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We are really glad to have another guest blogger. Kriti from Epidemiology Tales: Stories Exploring Public Health & Life
is the author of the post below. We look forward to more posts in the future, be sure to check out her global health blog for more information.

Female Feticide: from Motherland to Diaspora

Up- country: Diya, an activist who educated women on female feticide, was recently married. She was 20 years old, and about to give birth. She was riding in a car hurtling over potholed roads toward the town hospital. Although at home, they claimed they would be happy for any child, “We like girl-children as much as boy-children,” her father-in-law would say, but she knew the reality was far different. Her mother in-law was next to her, looking tense with anticipation. She lived with her in-laws, customary in rural India, and did not have good relations with them: they were angry she had a love marriage with their son and a mind of her own.

“You had better give birth to a boy,” her mother-in-law hissed to her, as Diya’s labor pains intensified.

City: Jassi, the wife of a successful, well-known Bombay businessman, and already mother of two beautiful daughters, was pregnant with a third child. The women in her society (apartment complex) were anything but congratulatory. They admonished her, “why don’t you have a test done?” implying that she should make certain not to have yet another girl.

I was shocked to hear these stories. Both of these women, loosely based on women I’ve known, had healthy baby boys. But their problem is real, and getting worse: the number of girls for every 1,000 boys (sex ratio) went from 962 in 1981, and with the improvement of sex-testing technology, dropped to 927 in 2001. It was as low as 814 in Delhi.

At first glance, it seems like this is an economic issue, as some middle class families claimIn Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India, he talks about a woman from such a wealthy family, that her dowry included a Mercedes and Switzerland vacation. Even she was forced by her husband’s family to abort her baby girl, although many women themselves believe in this practice.

Shockingly, this practice continues in the US. Census data shows that for every child born subsequent born after the first in Chinese, Indian, and Korean families, the likelihood of that child being a boy increases.

Female feticide is because of many traditions and perceptions, as well as economic and social factors coming together. Girls are seen as economic liabilities destined to leave their homes, as they traditionally go live with their husband’s family after marriage. Male children, who never leave their parents (and doing so would raise eyebrows), support them in old age. Male children earn money for their parents through jobs and dowry. Female children, however, do not. Many are not allowed to work nor offered education, and dowry continues, even among educated, well-traveled, urban elites – furthering an already insidious gender bias.

There are some successful interventions, like empowering women through education, economic power, and allowing them to take greater control of their lives – and this is where I’d like my life to focus. Before translating and preparing training materials at CORD, I never realized how deeply rooted this practice is in Indian culture. To me, Indian culture is laced with quirks, visible and invisible, but I always felt some pride and loyalty in my heritage. But this level of hypocrisy and brutality is astounding. A sign in Mumbai reads, “It is better to pay 500 Rs now than 50,000 Rs (in dowry) later”.

Though the topic makes periodic appearances in international news, and many interventions are taking place, ultimately it rests on changing social norms: At weddings, including mine, there is a prayer to bless the new couple. It states tellingly, “May you have sons”. But Babaji (my grandfather-in-law), the eldest person at the event, added “or girls, because everyone is equal now.”. Andhra Pradesh, a more progressive state, offers hope with a girl-favoring sex ratio, closer to natural patterns. – but female feticide is rising fastest among wealthier couples. In Edward Luce’s

–
Thanks for checking back to this blog after a long time! I’m getting re-started, and continuing to explore issues in public health that pique my interest (or deeply sadden me, like this one). You’ll notice some changes in the look and layout, all to be easier for you. Would love your feedback, or forwards this if you know someone interested!

“What I really want to know is: are things getting better or are they getting worse?” – Laurie Anderson

Driving back from the Lesotho border, my eye caught the last brilliant light of the day on a young man carrying wood he had gathered for the fire. I thought back to the teenagers who guard cows all day, of the women waiting, waiting by the side of the road, sitting in the tall grass for hours with small children in the hot sun, waiting for a lift.

And in a world where anything is possible for some of us, is that really true for all of us?

Yes, we can now have video night in Kathmandu, but television only allows you to receive. The real catalyst is the internet, where you become a global citizen – you can learn and participate and create.

You can always just read the news to fall headlong into THINGS THAT ARE GETTING WORSE: “Dubai Debt Woes Raise Fear of Wider Problem”, “Traumatized Russians View Their Dead After Train Bombing”, “Afghans Detail Detention in ‘Black Jail’ at U.S. Base”.

But what the soul needs to live is hope, and dreams.

Innovation Journalism brings us ideas that can change the world by reporting on people, processes and practices of innovators, as well as risks and opportunities. It is a ‘horizontal’ beat, reaching across politics, technology, health et al to report on how innovations arise, and helps shape our future by giving us new language to talk about new ideas.

Crowdsourcing is harnessed brilliantly by Innocentive, the innovation marketplace, where Seekers pose challenges they are having difficulty solving on the internet. A stunning 50% of these questions are successfully solved, and Innocentive has just publicized a study on how successful Solvers tackle problems – which can help us all problem solve better!

But what if you live in rural Uganda, and the roots of your cassavas are rotting? Question Box to the rescue! You can ask a question in your own language that can be answered by someone with access to research, the internet and a question archive informed by local knowledge. If you want to sell those cassavas in Ghana you can text TradeNet (and in Zambia, too) to get the current market prices, so you don’t sell yourself short.

In Mozambique, Village Reach decided to extend services to the last mile.. all people should have access to essential medicines, and they decided to bring in energy sources to preserve the vaccine cold chain. By creating an energy market, now fishermen could refrigerate their catch, and the entire local economy improved.

But how to create social change? We can improve the essentials of life, but to start movements, we must collaborate. Witness the effect of Twitter on the Iranian elections. My cousin’s post on Facebook alerted me to Open Access Week, which encourages the immediate sharing of published research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement of science and society. But social change must also come from the grassroots, like City Year, which brings young people together for a year of citizen service, to find their place in the world, and to break down the barriers of race, class and education to change our future. Nelson Mandela saw the potential of these young leaders when he visited Seattle, and asked City Year to come to South Africa to help heal the country. But it shouldn’t be up to one person to spread the word.

Ideas this good shouldn’t be kept to ourselves, they should be shared. And then we can say, “Yes, things ARE getting better.”

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public are hosting Tech 4 Society, a conference exploring technology, invention and social change, in Hyderabad, India, in February 2009. Find out more about the conference here. This blog post is an entry in their competition to find the official blogger to travel to and cover the event.

Prizes, innovation, creativity, south to north information  exchange, and web 2.0 where almost anyone can participate, perhaps a budding social entrepreneur, cool story. Is this an example of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody?

NEW DELHI: Think out of the box. It pays. This is what 15-year-old Sarojini Mahajan is happy to realise after her idea of using human pulse to charge a cellphone was picked up by Stanford University on Wednesday. Sarojini had sent her idea as an entry to IGNITE 2009 — a nationwide contest of innovative ideas. Though she won a consolation prize in the contest , Stanford University will now work on her idea.

Anil Gupta, vice-chairperson , National Innovation Foundation (NIF), which conducts IGNITE every year, Stanford University has already given a token amount of $1,000 to develop a prototype if feasible. ‘‘ The girl has provided the idea. But we need technical assistance to make it work. Stanford University has come forward to try out if human pulse can be used to charge an e-book they have developed.’’

‘‘ I can’t believe it’s true. I had thought of this idea last year but never told anyone till Neena ma’m once asked for crazy ideas in the class. It was just an idea which has become so big now.’’ Sarojini recalled that she was just sitting once when she thought of watches that run on the human pulse. ‘‘ I wondered if mobiles could be charged using the pulse too.’’

Sarojini teamed up with her teacher to develop her idea further who had by then decided to send her entry to IGNITE this year. They both worked for nearly four months and conceived a charging system in which sensors would be placed on the cellphone. Holding it in hand in a particular way would charge it using the heat of the palm. Sarojini’s recognition has got other students thinking too.

‘‘ Students have a lot of ideas some of which are absolutely crazy. Many of them will be motivated to share them now. I have already started getting new ideas from students,’’ said Punj. Agreed principal Anjali Agarwal. ‘‘ The fact that a 15-year-old student’s idea is being taken up by Stanford University will definitely inspire other students.

Full article here.

Just happened upon a great discussion about making data make sense quickly on the Innovation in Evaluation Blog over at good.is

What happens when we put people at the center of evaluation (as Jocelyn Wyatt puts it)? In this context, it means recognizing that people are preoccupied with more important tasks than spending long amounts of time in front of dashboards and data visualizations.

This is true in any setting, and in our case it was driving. The role of visualization should not be to demand full attention, but to support the priority task and improve it through feedback loops. The challenge is not just to display how you are doing right now, but also to figure out how you could do better. So, what does this mean for the visualization itself?

Every form of visualization should tell a story. Unfortunately there is limited attention and time to process all the stories. So the gist of the story, or its immediate impact, should be visible right away. The term I like to use for this principle is “glanceability.” What does a visualization tell us before we take time to analyze it? I invite you to look at the following chart and image for 10 seconds each and compare. What did you see? What did you feel?

Modified from Azar Askin’s reproduction of a poster by Muenster Planning Office, Germany

A followup post talks about understanding how data is presented. How can you tell what is fact and what is fiction? What basic questions should you ask of the graph? How do you know if you are being taken for a ride?

Super-cool. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go curl up with some of the other posts here – How Can We Measure What’s Most Meaningful? and In Non-Profit World, Numbers Don’t Tell the Full Story.. (something a friend of mine always used to tell me).

Read all about it! @ Innovation in Evaluation.

Nota bene: These are a few highlights from CGI – please do add your inspirations/ideas in the comments!

Clinton Global Initiative – Making things happen through Commitments

Action speaks louder than words. At CGI, you’ve got to commit – and that has an amazing impact.

What will your commitment be?

CGI was the birthplace, in past years, of projects like Matt Damon’s water program (water.org, expanding this year to Haiti), the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Initiative, and so many more. In the five years of CGI, there have been 1,400 commitments made (participants are required to make commitments to existing projects or commit to creating new projects), valued at $46 billion dollars, and impacting the lives of 200 million people in 150 countries. This year’s meeting will give birth to 30 more of these programs – more by Andrew Mersman over at Passport Magazine/ Change by Doing blog.

Check out CGI Commitments here.

Innovation!

Business Week highlighted innovation as a top priority for the global economy, and President Obama announced a new strategy for innovation: A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs. Download white paper.

Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation identified innovation strategies that could be applied to social problems – user-driven innovation, crowd sourcing and collaborative competitions reported here by Alexandra Cheney at Fast Company.  And Innovate Today: 8 Ways Business can End Poverty - superb post by Steve Enders over at tonic.

A few people – including Muhammed Yunus and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of the World Bank at CGI had an Innovation Wish List. Yunus talked about the edible yogurt pot, and Judith Rodin announced a new initiative to help the poor – the Global Impact Investing Network. This gets my vote for one of the most exciting developments to come out of CGI – read the Economist article.

Investing in Women and Girls

Women make up half of the world’s population, but do 2/3 of the world’s work, produce 50% world’s food, earn 10% world’s income, own 1% of world’s property.

Read the rest of this entry »