Youth Venture

Javier Fernández-Han and Ashok Gadgil, 2003 and 2009 / Photos: Berkeley Lab News Center

One of the young inventors we met this morning was sixteen-year-old Javier Fernández-Han, who was both the winner and the youngest entrant of Youth Venture's Invent Your World challenge last year.

I sat with Javier and his wonderfully supportive dad Peter at the pre-conference dinner on Wednesday and again this evening. Not only is he already an extremely talented inventor; he's also among the very best at articulating and explaining his ideas, regardless of age. Javier's invention, dubbed the VERSATILE system, uses algae to treat waste and produce oil, oxygen, and food for humans and livestock. It's also completely greenhouse-gas neutral, even though it has a stove. In Javier's words, "Algae is nature's Swiss Army knife. It gets rid of many things we don’t want and produces many things that we need."

This morning's panel of young inventors from the Youth Venture program was one of the highlights of the conference. Youth Venture is a project started by Ashoka to encourage and reward invention among 16-25-year-olds. In cooperation with MTV and The Lemelson Foundation, Youth Venture produced a half-hour documentary on the inventors that's currently making the rounds on MTV in Latin America. Youth Venture has also produced two e-books with featured and interviews on the inventors and their ideas.

Charles Tsai and Marina Mansilla have spent the past year working with inventors from all around the world between the ages of 16 and 25. Interestingly, the conference was actually the first time Charles and Marina had met in person.

Lesson # 15: Capturing the Knowledge

Last week our fearless Tech4Society event team leader put together a day devoted solely to distilling all of the knowledge we have or think we have about the invention and technology space within social entrepreneurship.

It’s a brilliant idea and a rare opportunity here at Ashoka to turn off email for the day and reflect on how far we’ve come in our understanding of a space we just stepped into three years ago with the support of The Lemelson Foundation.

As is tradition here, everyone participates.  Interns, volunteers, senior leadership, junior staff—it’s an equal opportunity chance to share in some serious mind work.

We started out with a few presentations by the Ashoka Tech blog crew, the Youth Venture team, and a review of a recent flash dance in Chicago, just to keep things even more interesting.

The afternoon was devoted to free-wheeling brainstorming—first as a large group and then in small groups of 3 or 4. Ideas bounced round the room as people wielded smelly markers and Post-it notes like seasoned pros in the noble quest for Knowledge.

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