Lemelson Foundation

The judges' results are in and we have a winner for the Blog Your Way to Hyderabad Competition!

Congratulations to Elliot Harmon, who will travel to Hyderabad, India, to cover the Tech 4 Society Conference as AshokaTECH's official blogger this February 11-13.

We'd like to thank our six finalists and encourage you to read their entries here.  We'd also like to thank the more than twenty budding and established bloggers who submitted entries and encourage you all to keep up the great work spreading knowledge and advancing social innovation in all forms!

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.

So you have a knack for writing and social media, you are passionate about technology, invention and social change, and you want to travel to India and meet over 100 Ashoka Fellows?

If you said yes to all of the above, we want to invite you to participate in the AshokaTECH Blog your Way to Hyderabad Competition, supported by Ashoka and the Lemelson Foundation.

Check out the full details on how to apply here. Hurry as the application deadline is November 30th!

This post contributed by Paula Cardenau.

Today, what are the opportunities for social businesses? In theory, most of the population's basic necessities are not satisfied, and social businesses are profiled like a tool that has high potential to increase incomes, access to education, to health, to water, to housing and other basic rights for thousands of people. In this group of particular entrepreneurs, another opportunity is that they have a very specialized knowledge, validated by years of experience, to achieve opportunity equality.  The 23 social entrepreneurs gathered in Sao Paolo also talked about the trends of Just Commerce and Responsible Consumption as emerging opportunities.

At the Ashoka-Lemelson Mobile Tech gathering in Nairobi this past June I spent three days in conversations with 8 Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows working with, you guessed it, mobile technologies.

One theme that came up over and over was the belief that corporate and/or business partnerships are key to sustainability and spread in the world of social entrepreneurship.  Partnership in this case includes everything from co-branding, to donations, to revenue-sharing models and more.

The validity of this belief will make for a great debate in another post on Ashoka Tech; but the reality is, for all of the talk about business-social partnership, executing such partnerships takes a lot of work, communication, and alignment of values. The relationships can be confusing, frustrating, and very complex.

Some of the Fellows in Nairobi partner with or have revenue sharing partnerships with service providing businesses.  Some Fellows were actively seeking out partnerships at the time, but were unsure as to how to begin.  Others were dealing with businesses wanting to engage, but completely at a loss for how to best work with the social entrepreneurs.

Photo by: flickr/Andrew Davidson

The Headline from Wired Science: "Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag in Three Months"

Around the world we produce over 500 billion plastic bags each year.  These bags clog waterways and city streets, maim wildlife, and are believed to take over 1,000 years to break down.

People find ingenius ways to turn these environmental hazards, into useful products like musical instruments, yarn, and bricks. But no matter how many bags are reused and upcycled, there are still far too many littering our streets.  What if there was a way to get rid of them entirely?

Last week Ashoka's Changemakers hosted an online discussion with Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow, Howard Weinstein.  Listen to Howard's story in his own words, check out the Ashoka Tech discussion with Howard on Changemakers and see below for his top ten tips for aspiring social inventors and entrepreneurs.

10) Have a sense of humor

9)  Be stubborn and stupid

8) Know what you do not know

7) It is all about giving love

6) The project is not about YOU

5) Sports is the international language of business

4) Ensure your family is involved

3) Give credit all the time to others and in public, but criticize in private

2) The word " no" means "no for now," it does not mean eat sh*t and die

1) When you get sh*t from others, even though you feel you don't deserve it, learn not only to take it but more importantly, learn to enjoy the taste.

I’ve written previously about Jamii Bora’s biometric card and POS microfinance banking system, but I haven’t written about the amazing people we met there.  For as much as we talk about the power of technology, I think it’s important to remember that the power of technology often pales in comparison to the power of the people using it.  With that, here’s a story from our visit to Jamii Bora, one that I won’t be forgetting for a long time:

Jane* is tall, slender, and strikingly beautiful.   She walks and speaks with grace and with the kind of presence you feel around people who’ve figured out how to live in the moment for the most worthy of purposes.  Only with Jane, you get the sense that this peacefulness is still a source of joy for her every day.

Many years ago, married young with two children, Jane left her husband’s town for a few weeks to visit her ill and dying mother.  After her mother died, Jane returned home to find her husband had taken a new wife, leaving Jane penniless, homeless, and alone.

Driving through Nairobi to visit Senior Fellow, Ingrid Munro and her organization, Jamii Bora

Visiting one of Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow David Kuria's Iko Toilet market and sanitation kiosks.  The kiosks halt environmental degredation, create jobs, and improve health in Kenya's slums. From Left: Ashoka-Lemelson, Fellow David Kuria; Lemelson Program Director, Peggy Reid; Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows, Adrian Mukhebi and Vincent Bagiire.

An outside view of one of David Kuria's Iko Toilet kiosk.

Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows, Vijay Pradap Singh and Adrian Mukhebi, taking notes during a round-table Fellow discussion.

Driving through the outskirts of Nairobi.

Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow, Mathias Craig, posing with a revamped operation manual for local blueenergy technicians in Nicaragua.

As part of the Tech4Society conference on mobile technology held in Nairobi earlier this year, a group of us (Ashoka and Lemelson Staff, as well as Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows) were privileged to visit a branch of Jamii Bora, the largest and fastest growing microfinance institution in East Africa. "Jamii Bora" literally means “Good Families” in the language of Kiswahili, and was founded by Ashoka Senior Fellow, Ingrid Munro in 1999. We wanted to get an up close look at what made this organization successful, and we were not disappointed.

As we pulled into the parking lot, we were welcomed by a crowd of people including young men in dusty t-shirts, a beautiful and statuesque woman dressed in red, older women, and a short woman in a professional grey suit with a warm smile who led the group. It took a few minutes to realize they were dancing and clapping for our arrival and we stepped off the bus gingerly, not sure how to react. We shook hands, hugged, and let ourselves be swept inside.