My Beauty Best Teacher

If you’re interested in education (which means you’re thinking abou the future), you should watch JSB’s keynote from the DML conference this week. “Entrepreneurial Learning isn’t about creating entrepreneurs. It’s about people having an entrepreneurial way of learning.” “Entrepreneurial Learners are Makers and Tinkerers.” Tinkering is a way of dealing with constant change.

“Because we believe that in economies driven by innovation and growth, populated by digital natives, and not indoctrinated with regard to controlling intellectual property, such behavior will become the mainstream, not the fringe—and will confer an important advantage. Is it a dynamic that will come to characterize the entire economy? It’s hard to tell. Surely much collaboration will continue to be done explicitly, with clearly delineated contributors joining forces to achieve carefully architected outcomes.”

This is the invisible handshake.This handshake has more power potentially in emerging economies, which is one of their main points. These new capitalist thinkers don’t have the US baggage of what a business or company should look like. This isn’t to say that some in the US can’t or won’t be as innovative, disruptive, and adaptive.

“It’s a little fanciful, but think of a 3-D printer as a seed. Plant one in a village. If it’s a RepRap seed (and you have the raw materials to fertilize it with), it will yield more seeds. And if there’s a network, the village can have access to all the designs in Neil Gershenfeld’s (MIT Center for Bits and Atoms) open source libraries—and everyone else’s. To sum it all up, if information can be free and if goods are just information plus resin, then goods can be pretty close to free.”

Michael Karnjanaprakorn CEO of Skillshare

Education is changing, and it’s changing fast. Anyone can put together a personalized educational experience via digital textbooks accessible by iPad, video learning from top university faculty, or peer-led discussion. People of all demographics are gathering their own seeds of education and cultivating lush sets of hybrid tools to deal with the rapid knowledge replenishment that’s essential in an economy where massive career specialization and constant innovation reign.This is the first piece in a Collaborative Fund-curated series on creativity and values, written by thought leaders in the for-profit, for-good business space.What we’re witnessing is a bottom-up revolution in education: Learners, not institutions, are leading innovation. This is an era of plenty. I like to call it the Education Harvest.

Image via interior-zine

Design is all around is. Try and black out everything that has been designed and you will be left with a black hole. It is the building block of our society, culture and even the most humble existence, past and present and will be the pacemaker and indicator of progress and changes to come...Design education should be a catalyst for prosperity for all, not just for a talented or elitist few

Prioritising design education and including design thinking in general and business education will have a far-reaching impact than just addressing challenges and obstacles that the design world is currently facing.

The advocacy and importance of the creative industry as a vital building block of any society and contributor to the economy should never be underestimated and asks for serious consideration and inclusion. Life skills identified to be lacking in society should be fostered from a young age. As a school subject, Design is not only relevant as a viable career option for talented creative learners, but it is also vital for the development and growth of a new generation who are strategic thinkers, creators and thought leaders in other fields – providing them with a mindset for entrepreneurship and innovation.

They call the Third World the lazy man’s purview; the sluggishly slothful and languorous prefecture. In this realm people are sleepy, dreamy, torpid, lethargic, and therefore indigent—totally penniless, needy, destitute, poverty-stricken, disfavored, and impoverished. In this demesne, as they call it, there are hardly any discoveries, inventions, and innovations. Africa is the trailblazer. Some still call it “the dark continent” for the light that flickers under the tunnel is not that of hope, but an approaching train. And because countless keep waiting in the way of the train, millions die and many more remain decapitated by the day.

“It’s amazing how you all sit there and watch yourselves die,” the man next to me said. “Get up and do something about it.”

...September 2010, international organizations, heads of state, celebrities and specialists gathered to review progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).As you may know, the MDGs were set in 2000 to achieve eight anti-poverty goals by 2015. In the midst of the coverage of these grand events, high profile attendees wined, dined and debated the relative merits of each MDGs plan, while the actual “poor,” were not invited to these elite events.
Via 2010 from Project Diaspora on Vimeo.
Project Diaspora decided to change perceptions about the poor by building the Villages in Action platform whereby the voices of the poor can be heard. On November 27, 2010, the first conference was held in a village outside Masindi, Uganda. The goal of this one-day conference was to showcase the grassroots efforts driving economic development and improving the lives of the community – all with little or no assistance from international aid organizations...[continue reading]

“Making more competitive products relies on a tight intertwining of design and manufacturing. And making it domestically keeps transportation costs low and creates short supply chains that respond quickly to customers.

“More significant, it offers the chance to empower factory workers with information technology, just as the personal IT revolution has empowered office workers. We can create tools for ordinary workers, with intuitive interfaces, extensive use of vision and other sensors, and even the Web-based distribution mechanisms of the IT industry.”

The World Trade Organization proposed new, enhanced intellectual property rights, patent rights, which means monopoly pricing rights, far beyond anything that existed in the past. In fact they are not only designed tomaximize monopoly pricing, and profit, but also to prevent development.That’s rather crucial. WTO rules introduced product patents. Used to be you could patent a process, but not the product. Which means if some smart guy could figure out a better way of doing it, he could do it. They want to block that. It’s important to block development and progress, in order to ensure monopoly rights. So they now have product patents.

Well if you take a look at, say, US history. Suppose the colonies after independence had been forced to accept that regime. Do you know what we’d be doing now? Well first of all there’d be very few of us here. But those of us who would be here would be pursuing our comparative advantage and exporting fish and fur. That’s what economists tell you is right.Pursue your comparative advantage. That was our comparative advantage. Wecertainly wouldn’t have had a textile industry. British textiles were way cheaper and better. Actually British textiles were cheaper and better because Britain had crushed Irish and Indian superior textile manufacturers and stolen their techniques. So they were now the preeminent textile manufacturer, by force of course.

The US would never have had a textile industry. It grew up around Massachusetts, but the only way it could develop was extremely high tariffs which protected unviable US industries. So the textile industry developed,and that has a spin off into other industries. And so it continues.

Most academics work alongside other academics in the same field to arrive at the deepest possible understanding of a particular subject. At the MIT Media Lab, researchers focus on breadth, not depth, of knowledge.“The world is full of expertise,” says Joi Ito, Executive Director. “What it lacks is agility and context.” Watch here:The mission of the Media Lab - symbolized by its glass walls - is to mitigate the isolating effects of specialization by creating a common space where brilliant people in every field can share ideas, English major to mathematician.

You won’t learn about it in business school, hear about it from Wall Street, or see it in Palo Alto. But if you spend time in Bushwick, Brooklyn, or on Rivington Street in Manhattan, you just might detect the outlines of an emerging “indie” capitalism. This new form of capitalism is not just about conventional startups and technology and venture capitalists. If you add up all the trends under way today, I believe we are beginning to see the start of something original, and perhaps wonderful. It may prove to be the economic and social antidote to the failed financial capitalism and crony capitalism that no longer delivers economic value in terms of jobs, income, and taxes to the people of this country...[continue reading]

The new African middle class will flourish in knowledge centers that are connected to the global economy. The seeds of such growth can be found in places like Ikeja, the nascent computer-based industrial district of Lagos, and emerging knowledge-based industries such as Nigeria’s movie production network (“Nollywood”) will produce a new crop of entrepreneurs ready to shape the character of the next generation of middle-class Africans.

...tells us about life in the informal economy, what French culture classifies as System D. 1.8 billion people on the planet subsist through economic transactions that happen outside legal spheres and, by 2020, two thirds of our planet will be doing business in this domain. The future is the free market vs. the flea market.

"When you're winning, you keep doing what you're doing until it doesn't work any more."

Image courtesy of NLE

...within such ‘chaos’, or apparent disorganization, the system works. Somehow it does, and nowhere is this more exemplified than in Makoko, Lagos’ water community. Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ works is doing some very interesting work in this community and I am enthusiastic. Not only does the community provide 33% of Lagos’ fish supply and a high proportion of its timber, but it is also the city’s cheapest
dwellings...The fact that this community is existent after 100years shows that there must be a way around this. A form of collective intelligence that goes into how the residents co-habit successfully, how they build, how they plan their dwellings. I find it interesting and exciting. Excited to learn more about it, to understand it, and know how this intelligence can be replicated across the city in terms of intelligent and effective urban planning.
This is intelligence.

BRT is a transport option, which relies on the use of dedicated ‘interference’ free segregated lanes to guarantee fast and reliable bus travel. The BRT buses run on physically segregated lanes and thus make them run faster in a situation where there is traffic congestion.It is one of the several options available for tackling the huge public transport predicaments of Lagos.

Uncle Joe's roofing sheet fabrication facility

At first glance,there’s nothing extraordinary about the shed sitting next to Uncle Joe’s mud brick home in the coastal Ghanaian village of Atabadze.Inside there’s a certain familiarity about the clutter – tools propped up against stacks of roofing sheets and machinery – the kind of organized chaos you’d find in tool sheds and workshops anywhere in the world. But the sheer ordinariness of it of all belies the fact that this is the birthplace of a remarkable and important technology.Those roofing sheets – Uncle Joe made them,out of local river sand,using only his own ingenuity and the electric vibrating table in the corner – he made that too.
Uncle Joe is an innovator.He has brought his community something they never had before:a roofing material that is both sturdy and affordable.Before his intervention,his neighbours had a hugely unsatisfactory choice between using expensive,often imported, manufactured materials, or local unprocessed thatch, at a fraction of the price,but at the cost of durability;there was no middle ground.But Uncle Joe was not so sure this was necessarily a matter of ‘either or’; why couldn’t there be an alternative that was both manufactured and local, he wondered.
So he set about answering his own question,experimenting with local environmental inputs and different manufacturing processes.And through his efforts he developed a process to produce roofing sheets from river sand – a sturdy,high quality product The poor need opportunities to generate income and work themselves out of poverty manufactured from a sustainable local resource. To produce these sheets,Uncle Joe even had to build his own electric vibrating table,a vital piece of machinery that blends the sand with a small quantity of cement (added as fixative),enabling the mixture to set.All in all,an unlikely triumph of innovation considering the poor infrastructure and extremely limited availability of capital and manufacturing know-­‐how in his rural locality.
Uncle Joe is a prime example of the creativity and dynamism that are blossoming in Africa; one of the manyindividuals and communities championing innovative technologies that,by mobilising local resources to provide essential goods and services,and create income generation opportunities for the poor,can deliver sustainable and equitable ‘grassroots’development across the continent.And yet his story also illustrates the uphill task they face.
For all the originality of his idea and his dedication to implementing it,Uncle Joe cannot currently make ends meet manufacturing tiles – he simply cannot afford to hire the labour he needs to produce viable volumes.Without capital,his operation will not reach a level at which the technology can really impact the livesof the poor.

For the global development community (donors,NGOs,etc) Uncle Joe’s story is one of opportunity: it highlights an opportunity forthem to create the opportunities the rural poor need to work their way out of poverty.To date the governmental and multilateral institutions with the resources and clout to change the lives of those living in poverty have favoured...To make meaningful inroads into poverty reduction in Africa,the development community must foster the growth of robust local industries that mobilise the continent’s substantial environmental resources to meet local needs and create opportunities.Technologies like Uncle Joe’s manufacturing process are the foundation on which such industries are built,and donors should support their development,whether by investing in the entrepreneurs pushing innovative local solutionsor by providing the tools and training rural communities can use to unlock the developmental potential in their local environment.