Idea: Social Entrepreneurship MBAs
Look, rather than trying to start up in-house social entrepreneurship degree programs, and the accompanying fellowships, higher education institutions would be much better off aligning their endowments, entrepreneurs, and educators with real social purpose:
Finding quality candidates interested in this sector and, in exchange for equity, enabling them to borrow against an education loan from the endowment.
That is, if the degree costs $100,000, and they want to attempt their venture with $50,000, the company gets that (staggered), and the school ~10% of equity with the understanding that:
- If the venture succeeds (measured against certain benchmarks – $X Revenue, X constituents affected), all of which is facilitated by access to educational materials (including classroom, professor time + lectures etc), then the student earns their MBA.
- The school can keep the revenue stream or exit. The company essentially absorbs the $50k out of the student’s pocket, covering a big chunk of their education cost. + an MBA. + the experience.
- If the venture fails, students go about their traditional MBA and are responsible for the $100,000 + whatever they actually took out without interest. (I.E. If the loan was $50k, but only $10k was actually paid out.) Instills discipline in capturing the funding and spending it.
Of course, this kind of risk isn’t for everyone, but I’d jump at this in a heartbeat.
Fooling Twitter
LOL. The application of social bots to game social networks.
One team in the competition decided to test their bots on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, which is based on swarms of humans performing simple tasks very cheaply. As Ackerman explained, “so a bot would get a message on Twitter, post that message on Mechanical Turk, and ask (say) 25 different people to respond to it for (say) three cents each. The bot would then pick one response and use it, and there you go, you’ve got clueless humans talking to clueless humans.”
The Future of Development
Madeleine Bunting posts two possibile scenarios.
One outlines what happens if we approach development in a linear fashion:
African countries are crippled by the challenge of adapting to climate change; huge resources are channelled through the Green Fund from industrialised nations, but the money has repeatedly gone astray, and on several occasions, corruption has ended up bringing down governments.
The politics of many African countries continues to be the single biggest factor determining development. The youth bulge has been responsible for unprecedented instability because of highrates of unemployment for young people. Urbanisation has seen a rapid and unmanaged expansion leading to mega-slums across Africa and Asia; the lack of access to basic resources such as water and healthcare in these slums has built up immense frustration. Several countries have been rocked by coups and subsequent civil war.
Most European nations have largely shut down their aid operations, their electorates became cynical that aid achieved little, and they argued that many poor countries were receiving billions in climate finance already, money that came out of their taxpayers’ pockets. What remains is a celebrity-driven “good causes” model, whereby millions can be raised for particular projects through web donations once it gets the backing of stars such as Justin Bieber, who has now inherited the position once held by veteran campaigners such as Bono back in the noughties.
The other points out what happens if we embrace social enterprises (though I think it strays too much in the direction of philanthropy):
It’s 2031 and my daughter checks in on her family twinning over breakfast with her children. She has linked up with a family in a village outside Dakka, Bangladesh and another family in Burundi. Her kids chat to their counterparts on a virtual site; they are going to help each other with homework tonight and her son wants to play a game of football with his Burundi friend. She checks the payment for the family’s microloan has gone through smoothly, and then signs a petition demanding reform of the local water-user fees system. These are her adopted communities.
Bilateral aid from western countries has been abolished but in its place there are generous tax incentives for families to sign up to schemes whereby they can donate and then follow what happens to their donation over the web. They can get involved in local communities and get to know the people benefiting from their donations. Aid has shifted from a state business to global people power.
Millions of people are connected across the globe, exchanging ideas and spending time together on the web, playing and chatting, and the money follows through huge flows of remittance payments and donations. Alongside this, many companies now have engagement schemes in which they transfer expertise and mentor start-up partners; business plays a much bigger role in development and these corporate partnerships are carefully tracked on dedicated websites.
Most countries don’t need big inflows of aid such as the west used to provide. Countries such as Ghana, Rwanda and Ethiopia now have their own aid programmes in which they help spread good ideas and best practice in their regions; the emphasis has shifted from the north/south model to one of regional networks.
The three really big players in development are now China, Brazil and India. Europe and the US were overtaken a decade ago, their models of development too tangled up in conditionality and heavy-handed control and interference. What the Big Three concentrate on is knowledge transfer and intellectual property; they demonstrate what worked for them. The biggest challenge across the “developed south” (as it is known) is inequality.
Huge efforts have been made to engage the growing middle classes across the developing world in ways to tackle poverty. Many people donate “web time”, offering expertise and support to local campaigns on all the accountability issues now tracked online, from school achievement to maternal mortality.
There are still some countries that are very poor, and there are ongoing major humanitarian assistance operations in places of conflict, such as the Congo and southern Sudan, still suffering after decades of war; they are usually run by coalitions led by one of the Big Three. European nations, focused on their own economic problems, are now very marginal in Africa.
Looking back, the big breakthrough for Africa was the mobile internet, which proved a spectacular boost to business. It also opened a new era of accountability so that the days when governments could squirrel away billions became a thing of the past.
There is a third option that riffs on the second. One where we build an equitable, global economy without a reliance on donations (money or time).
Amazon vs. Apple Is Really Zehr vs. Ive
Of course Amazon is gearing up to launch the iPad alternative.
To succeed though, they need a world class designer. (This is where Motorola, Nokia, Sony are all screwing the pooch, big time.) I don’t think Amazon can beat Apple. (It does not have design innovation hardcoded into it’s processes – if you can, buy an Amazon engineer a beer. Absolute horror stories.) It can, however, hit the market directly below the iPad to some success. Think Microsoft vs. Apple.
If the studly folks at Lab126 can skip directly to the third generation, they’ll be fine:
Sufficiently low price point – $200 to start with, access to Android apps without the crappy interface that Google been plodding along with, battery life, screen etc and we’ve got ourselves a real player. Fall of this year would be nice.
Goofy Radicalization Get-Together
If you were a maladjusted kid, were exposed to an alternative social system that condoned/encouraged violence, pursued that route for the social mobility it provided, left it for something better, and have been exploiting your former status as a ‘radical’ for a paycheck and the ultimate in self-validating study, Google/CFR are setting up in some sort of bizarre group therapy just for you.
The event will bring together about 50 former extremists who used to be members of inner city street gangs, white power groups, Muslim fundamentalist groups, and other violent youth organizations. Over 200 experts from academia, civil society groups, tech companies, victims’ groups, and private corporations will also join.
Think of how many of these cases they could have prevented (via economic, community development) with the money they’re blowing on this Davos-For-SnakeOil.