Kentaro Toyama from MS Research India at the ischool

Last Friday, the head of Microsoft Research India, Kentaro Toyama, spoke at the ischool about his group's ICTD work.

You can read more about his talk at Nick's ICTD weblog.

This is the blog of one of our students; we asked all of them to keep a blog throughout the semester to share their thoughts about the class, readings, speakers and their projects. We will feature some of them in this blog.

As far as Kentaro's talk went, he seemed quite willing to consider some of the limits of ICT in development. What never came up in the discussion was that he is working for Microsoft, which has a definite business interest in the work of the lab. What would happen if this work did not, at least in the long run, contribute to MS' bottom line?

Paul Aoki from the Intel Research Lab in Berkeley asked an important question about the ethics of actionable research, as Kentaro defined ICTD. This is one of the things we have learned from our research into corporate ICTD programs, that they are often not aware of, or do not take into sufficient account, the effects they have one people's lives when they get involved in development work, which by definition means getting involved in people's lives in a way that is different from a standard corporation - paying client relationship. There are implications and obligations that come with such an involvement that corporations need to acknowledge but might be ill-equipped to do. This is one of the tensions of Corporate Social Responsibility programs that never really gets addressed.

Everybody is a Designer

Last Wednesday, we welcomed Matthew Holloway, the VP of the Design Service Team (DST) at SAP AG in our seminar. Matthew's cellphone kept going off because it was the launch day of SAP's SAP BusinessByDesign. Thanks for coming anyway, Matthew!

The DST was created by Hasso Plattner, one of the co-founders of SAP, in 2005, after he read about IDEO in a Business Week article about Design Thinking. It is unusual in a number of ways, working across all business units and reporting directly to the office of the CEO. The purpose is the get everybody at SAP to think about how they are designing and to design with the customers in mind

Important for our seminar, as students are just beginning to work on their projects, is the discovery-driven way in which designers work, as opposed to the hypothesis-driven way of many business people. If you want to come up with new and different solutions to old problems, and that is what much of Social Entrepreneurship and ICTD is all about, then you need to set aside your assumptions, suspend your judgements and search for many different perspectives to the problem. Keep your mind and your options open and don't fixate on one idea to soon. Never assume that you know why things are the way they are. Never stop asking questions.

Innovation = Invention x Execution.

Thanks, Matthew.

What is Social Entrepreneurship?

One of our first classes was a theoretical introduction to the emerging field of social entrepreneurship, to get a better understanding of its history, political context and content. One of the questions people are still trying to answer is around the boundaries of the field. According to the article by Sally Osberg, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation and Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review earlier this year, a narrow definition is important to keep the field effective and living up to its promises. Others argue that this unduly limits the field and the sample size for any quantitative studies of the impact of social entrepreneurs.

In our class, an animated discussion took place over the distinction between social entrepreneurship and social activism. Who is changing the world in what ways? Martin and Osberg argue that social activists are not social entrepreneurs because rather than taking direct action, they are getting others to act. The authors do allow for hybrid cases such as fair trade (their example is the Rugmark Foundation) that blur the boundaries between both areas.

One student suggested that social activists might be the ones impacting the system responsible for the roots of poverty more directly than social entrepreneurs, who are sometimes only addressing symptoms of the disease. We will have much more to say about this topic on October 10, when we will be discussing the potentials and limits of market-based models to bring about social change, with a high-powered panel of speakers.

In the end, we came up with a number of criterias that seem to be apply to all social entrepreneurs and their endeavours: committed, passionate, determined and resourceful people changing their own world through sustainable and scaleable programs that aim to change problems on a large scale.

New Seminar at UC Berkeley's School of Information

RiOS's Institute's Paul Braund and Anke Schwittay are teaching a graduate seminar on Social Entrepreneurship in ICTD at UC Berkeley's School of Information (also known as the ischool) this semester. We will be sharing our insights and experiences from the seminar on this blog.

For starters, we have confirmed a great group of guest speakers for the class, starting with Matthew Holloway, the VP of the Design Service Team at SAP AG. He will be talking about the design process and working with multidisciplinary design teams. Other guest speakers include Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and Jessica Flannery, the co-founder of Kiva.

We are also working with a number of leading ICTD organizations in the larger San Francisco Bay Area on projects that allow students to apply their learnings from the seminar, while at the same time designing social solutions to local needs. Among the organizations are MAPlight and the Seva Foundation, as well as the Global Alliance for ICT and Development at the United Nations and the Ravenswood School District in East Palo Alto.

Last but not least, the students taken the seminar bring with them very diverse backgrounds, from computer science to public health to public policy, and a wealth of international experiences. One of our students is working for the Clinton Global Initiative, while another spent the summer in a TB clinic in Pakistan. Two students were working in Africa over the summer on technology solutions for rural health clinics, while two others were involved in development projects in India. We are looking forward to having all of these experiences inform our seminar and its search for innovative project solutions.