Charles Weiss and William B. Bonvillian Complex, Established “Legacy” Sectors The Technology Revolutions That Do Not Happen Americans pride themselves on the scientific and technological prowess that has given rise to a steady stream of innovations in information and communications technology, along with medicine, agriculture, military, aerospace, and many other fields. For a quarter century, innovation policy in the United States has focused on the

Jon McPhedran Waitzer and Roshan Paul Scaling Social Impact When Everybody Contributes, Everybody Wins Over the last decade, the notion of “scaling what works” has emerged as a broadly shared priority across the social sector. Ancora, the challenge of making powerful social innovations travel to where they are most needed continues to stymie social entrepreneurs and their supporters. Many frustrated attempts to scale social pro-

Marc J. Epstein and Eric G. Bing Delivering Health Care to the Global Poor: Solving the Accessibility Problem Each year, approximately 8.1 million children around the world die before they can celebrate their fifth birthday.1 A child in a developing country is 33 times as likely to die before age five as a child in the industrialized world, and up to 60 percent of these

Aneel Karnani Reducing Poverty through Employment Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish, and he will be able to feed himself for the rest of his life. This is an old cliché, and like all clichés it has an element of wisdom. Ma, it does not go far enough. A fisher- man with a simple rod

Robert Klitgaard Designing and Implementing a Technology-Driven Public-Private Partnership Innovations Case Discussion: India’s Project Aadhaar Vijay Sathe’s superb presentation of India’s Project Aadhaar is fascinating and instructive on many levels. At the policy level, the case invites us to consider the benefits and costs of a unique national identification number (UID). At the imple- mentation level, it explores the design and management of public-private partner-

Vijay Sathe The World’s Most Ambitious ID Project Innovations Case Narrative: India’s Project Aadhaar In July 2010, Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), reflected on the progress made in the year since he accepted this cabinet-level position at the invitation of the prime minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh, whose Congress Party and its allies had won the national gen-

Bill Drayton Collaborative Entrepreneurship How Social Entrepreneurs Can Tip the World by Working in Global Teams The world, for 10,000 years, has been run by just a few people. This pattern is so archetypal that it is very hard for people to imagine anything different. Tuttavia, this pattern is dying. It does not work. As the rate of change acceler- ates, and as change comes

Jan Chipchase and Panthea Lee with an Introduction by Bill Maurer Mobile Money: Afghanistan INTRODUCTION by Bill Maurer Money and banking services are taken for granted in western countries. The trust and confidence we have in our currency, as well as in our savings and checking accounts, goes largely unquestioned. And yet, in much of the world, that kind of security is unknown. Over half

Ben Cohen The Definition of Business It all started in seventh grade gym class. Jerry and I were the two slowest, fattest kids in the class. All the kids would run around the track, then half a lap behind the others the coach would see Jerry and me. He’d yell, “Gentleman, you have to run the mile in under seven minutes! If you don’t run

Maryann P. Feldman and Nichola J. Lowe Restructuring for Resilience Economic crisis is compounded when structural change is amplified by cyclical downturns. Many governments respond to this situation by focusing policy initia- tives on technology and innovation as a way to generate economic growth. These initiatives often result in new organizations for managing technology-based eco- nomic development that function outside the mission of traditional government

Menekse Gencer The Mobile Money Movement Catalyst to Jump-Start Emerging Markets Whenever I travel to other countries, I like to conduct informal primary research around mobile payments with my taxi drivers. Are they familiar with mobile money? Do they use it? How important is it to their daily lives? In the United States, when I tell people that I work in mobile payments, I am

Anne Nelson Ground Truth from the Grassroots Innovations Case Discussion: Map Kibera The projects run by Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron, Map Kibera and GroundTruth Initiative, have been properly lauded as new media projects. But their greater accomplishment lies in executing media projects in a way that is both modern and ancient: by working through community. The history of media development is littered with big,

Robert Richards Open, Generative, and User Centered The Potential of SMS-Based Legal Technology for Development Innovations Case Discussion: mLegal mLegal seems to be an especially promising means of improving access to justice in developing countries. The significant potential of its approach to legal client technology stems in part from its consistency with several current trends in devel- opment policy: e-government, and legal informatics. First and

Sean Martin McDonald The Case for mLegal Innovations Case Narrative: mLegal The law touches everything we do. Whether it’s getting married, buying a house, or starting a business, chances are the law has something to say about it. And yet, the majority of the world never gets to hear it. According to a 2008 United Nations report, four billion people worldwide lack meaningful access to

Tim O’Reilly Government as a Platform During the past 15 years, the World Wide Web has created remarkable new meth- ods for harnessing the creativity of people in groups, and in the process has creat- ed powerful business models that are reshaping our economy. As the Web has undermined old media and software companies, it has demonstrated the enor- mous power of a new approach,

Ken Banks, Sean Martin McDonald, and Florence Scialom Mobile Technology and the Last Mile “Reluctant Innovation” and FrontlineSMS There are now more than five billion mobile phone connections worldwide, mak- ing them the most ubiquitous communications platform in human history. Communications technologies are unique among many other types of innovation in that they fundamentally change how we interact with each other. As mobile phones grow

Fadi Ghandour The Age of Timidity Is Gone Address delivered at the Skoll World Forum Oxford, U.K. April 1, 2011 For decades, bad news has crowned us in the Arab world, much like an epitaph on a tombstone. And it is the very sad story of squandered youth that stands at the heart of our region’s epic tale of failure: • 40 percent of youth

Regine Barjon, Philip Auerswald, Julia Novy-Hildesley, and Adam Hasler Truly Grassroots How Agricultural Entrepreneurs Can Lead a Haitian Renewal Farming employs two out of every three workers in Haiti. Di conseguenza, the successes and failures of Haitian agriculture translate directly into rising and falling prosperity for the majority of Haiti’s population. Today a critically debilitating combination of market distortions (originating from inside and outside