Month: June 2013

As you can probably tell, we’re all very excited here at TechChange. Former TechChanger, long-time Ushahidi guru, and eternal Zen Archer Rob Baker has been selected as part of the second round of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. Yes, Rob will be contributing to Open Data Initiatives at USAID  where he will develop innovative solutions in areas of national significance.

For those who are unfamiliar with the program, the White House website has details:

“The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate during focused 6-13 month “tours of duty” to develop solutions that can save lives, save taxpayer money, and fuel job creation. Each team of innovators is supported by a broader community of interested citizens throughout the country.”

But don’t just take it from the White House. Have a listen to last year’s fellows about what their experience meant:

While we’re pretty stoked about open data in general (and even teach it as part of our course on Open Government) and this development in particular, the timing couldn’t be more perfect for our first-ever upcoming course on intrapreneurship. Intrapreneurship is defined as entrepreneurial behavior from within a large, established institution. But the truly interesting part of this program is that it shows an angle that institutions should consider: institutionalizing a process for insourcing innovative talent and new ideas. While most of our posts have thus far focused on the role of individuals in pushing their organizations forward, the truth is that forward-thinking organizations are looking just as hard for entrepreneurs to help rethink their business. After all, if ideas like this can deliver solid results for an institution as large as the federal government, then your organization is hard-pressed to find an excuse.

And so from the bottom of our hearts and the top our nerd attic, we’re sending our best to Rob and all of the incoming fellows! We know you’ll crush it.

Rob Baker Speaking at DUPictured: Rob Baker speaking at DU

 

If you’re interested in contributing to PIF projects, you can learn about current and future rounds of the PIF program at whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows, contribute code on GitHub, or visit Data.gov to help turn openly available government data into new products, services, and jobs. 

Want to change the world with socially minded and innovative ideas, but bills, student loans and lack of investment opportunities are pushing you away from entrepreneurship and towards jobs that are unfulfilling and not utilizing your education? According to Accenture, you are not alone.

A staggering 41% of college graduates within the past two years are underemployed, which means they are either in jobs that are not full-time or have nothing to do with their degree. The 2008 global financial recession changed the employment landscape, drying up credit for start-ups and diminishing confidence in large institutions. The tepid recovery makes them cautious in hiring. Yet there is a growing demand from within the large organizations for employees who help them remain competitive through new ideas and a start-up mentality. The need has increased the demand for intrapreneurs, innovators from within the company that will move it forward.

Nick Hughes is an example of a social intrapreneur in action. Hughes was a middle marketing manager for Safaricom, the largest mobile network in the East African nation of Kenya when he developed an idea that would help millions of disadvantaged people while driving the bottom line of his company. Hughes’ concept, which became M-PESA (m for mobile, “pesa” is Swahili for money) has become a wildly lucrative, socially beneficial, and intrapreneurial idea which has led Safaricom to become the banker for the poor and rural in Kenya who can not get accounts from traditional banks. As of 2013 the M-PESA service has 17 million members, providing a critical socio-economic service for Kenya’s poor and profits to Safaricom.

The idea of social intrepreneurship is becoming particularly enticing to young people who want stable careers, but care less and less about making a fortune in corporate America and more about making a difference in the world around them. Personally, intrapreneurship has been an incredibly rewarding career choice. In 2009 I lost my job, and spent a year trying to become a social entrepreneur, sleeping on couches, living unemployment check to unemployment check, and trying to launch a company that would deliver social purpose. In 2010, UNICEF picked up on one of the company’s ideas and offered me a short-term consulting opportunity to carry-out an innovative idea. Thus began my path to learning the process of becoming a strong source of new ideas and innovation for the established institution. Three years later I’ve been a part of an amazing international team, got the opportunity to travel to Rwanda, Zambia, and Brazil, and had a consistent paycheck.

Innovating from within UNICEF provided stability and opportunities that I would not have had otherwise. In 2011, from within UNICEF, I led the launch of unicef-gis, a mobile and web application for youth-led digital mapping of risks, resiliency, and vulnerability. The app was deployed successfully into countries (Brazil and Haiti) where I knew nobody and did not speak the language. Without the UNICEF network, the idea would have never come to fruition or realized the amazing social impacts.

I personally understand today’s harsh jobs reality for graduates, interns, and young professionals. The truth is that a six-figure education and degree is only enough to level the playing field, but not enough to secure you a rewarding job that allows you to be independent and pay back student loans. That’s why learning how to practice intrapreneurship in your field can become a novel employment option for those who will be entering the workplace or are already in it, looking to move up into more senior positions. These large institutions like the World Bank, United Nations, and Google are actively looking to hire these intrapreneurial individuals.

People often ask me, how do you become gainfully employed doing cool, innovative projects for a large international organization? The truth is, intrapreneurship is not something learned in the traditional classroom or from a textbook. It’s understood by trial and error, failing forward, and failing fast. These are skill sets that can be practiced and learned, and lead to rewarding and stable jobs. Interested in learning about intrapreneurship or know a student, intern or young professional that might benefit from learning about it? TechChange.org is providing a limited number of individuals the opportunity to learn about intrapreneurship from guest experts and interactive, self-paced online learning modules. Learn more:

TC108: Social Intrapreneurship – Innovation Within Institutions

It’s no secret that we’re passionate about the power of volunteer technical communities here at TechChange. We helped link volunteer communities with response organizations for the Digital Humanitarian Network procedures simulation, as well as streamed and assisted with online participation in last year’s International Conference on Crisis Mappers.

When a disaster occurs—an earthquake in Haiti or a landslide in Uganda—it’s often up to non-governmental organizations and volunteer groups to coordinate urgent emergency relief. Communication is the backbone of this disaster recovery, yet is currently limited to prohibitively expensive satellite phones and short range radios. Cell phones might work briefly if the towers are still up.

In response to these challenges, the web has been abuzz about two promising technologies that could change the way we connect in times of crisis: dependable ways to connect volunteers, refugees, and the general public in harsh environments and disaster zones.

The first technology is a new device: BRCK, a rugged cellular mobile hotspot. Roughly the size of its namesake, BRCK promises an eight-hour battery life, a powerful WiFi antenna, and Arduino-like extensibility. The Ushahidi team, the nonprofit behind the Kickstarter-funded project, dubbed it “[the] backup generator to the internet.”

While BRCK itself doesn’t present any new ways to connect to the internet, it improves and reinforces existing methods. The connection options make it a really powerful router; a business in Mozambique, for example, could use the BRCK’s redundant network connections to setup a WiFi router that had both Ethernet and 3G/4G backbones. However, while all these specs are useful, this device was probably not meant for crisis response (read: when cell service is unreliable). The weakness of this device lies in our current limited communication infrastructure.

To solve the need for a dependable remote cloud, Google unveiled just that: a mesh network of balloons. That’s right: internet-enabled balloons, floating in the sky, traveling with the wind currents in the stratosphere! A sort of hybrid of satellites and cell towers, Project Loon promises to set up highly flexible deployments of access points wherever they are needed. So, when an earthquake strikes New Zealand, Loon balloons can float over and beam an internet signal to the affected area on the ground.

In theory, this network is a wonderful idea. It’s portable, fast, disaster-proof internet. But the exact aspect that makes this project novel is the one that will create the most challenges. Google will become a sort of air traffic control for its own thousands of balloons, which require direction and maintenance. Users of Loon will also need a special Google antenna—the balloons unfortunately don’t transmit in the WiFi signal band. But for disaster situations, where the need for communication often means the difference of human lives, it appears to be a novel and practical idea.

Perhaps a comparison is in order. It costs an average of $150,000 to build a GSM cell tower with a maximum signal range of 35 kilometers (the effective signal radius is smaller, however). No one really knows how much a Loon balloon will cost—so far Google has been light on the details of the project—but we do know that each balloon has a coverage radius of 20 km. That means, to beat out the cell tower in terms of cost per square kilometer covered, each balloon needs to total less than $50,000. Likely a bundle of electronics attached to a solar panel hooked to a balloon will cost much less.

(The math: a GSM cell tower costs $150,000. Max radius of 35 km. Max area covered is π352 ≈ 3850 km sq. Loon balloon costs unknown. Max radius of 20 km. Max area covered is π202 ≈ 1260 km sq. Thus, a GSM tower covers about three times more area than a balloon.)

While these technologies might just be developing, they are really promising. Ultimately, I think both of these technologies could be used together; since you need a special antenna with Loon anyway, why not add one to the BRCK, so you can have a trifecta of connections: Ethernet, cellular, and Loon? This redundancy would be really powerful.

We won’t solve global internet infrastructure overnight, but these prototypes show us the way toward the future: creative solutions to fix real world problems in times and places where it’s needed most. Keep your eye out for new developments, it will no doubt get more interesting!

Are you interested in the future of our connected world? Join us for TC103, our exciting new course about technology and emergency management, starting in August.

 

When I graduated college two weeks ago, I thought I was done taking classes for a while. Yet, instead of hanging out with friends, finishing season 4 of Arrested Development on Netflix, or even going for a run, I spent my first weekend in DC back in a classroom.

Early Saturday morning, I joined Nick Martin, CEO, at George Washington University to assist him in teaching a two-day, graduate level course on using technology for crisis response and governance. This wasn’t your run of the mill course though. Rather than introducing theorists with lofty ideas, abstract from the reality of disasters on the ground, Nick crafted the course as a realistic, hands-on approach.

As a fun beginning to the day, Nick broke the students into small groups to learn how to use Twitter. Tasked with creating accounts that impersonated celebrities, some of the students crafted hilarious Tweets and interactions. Among my favorites:

From there, we examined a series of potential solutions for crisis response. We considered how mobile phones could be used to collect and analyze data, how we could use CrowdMap and OpenStreetMap to visualize data and dynamically respond to changing geographies, and how social media could be leveraged in conflicts to raise money or locate survivors. This overview of the different platforms allowed us to focus on both the benefits of each solution and, more importantly, the limitations.

The second day of the course featured more hands on implementation of technologies and zombies.

Yep. Zombies.

In this simulation, we were preparing for an inevitable invasion of zombies in Washington, DC. New York City had already fallen, so the students had to design and implement plans for both alerting citizens of the apocalypse and ascertaining how prepared they were. By trying to implement tools such as FrontlineSMS, Magpi, Open Data Kit, and FormHub in a disaster scenario, it quickly became apparent that certain tools were preferable for certain scenarios. For instance, while FrontlineSMS would be fantastic for disseminating information, it would be challenging to run a survey on it. Open Data Kit and Magpi work wonderfully if you have an Android phone, but falters on an iPhone. Formhub, while offering both an Android app and a web-based form, can only accept surveys created in a .xls file type—definitely not prohibitive, but it does require an extra layer of expertise.

After we saved the world, or at least DC, from zombies, we explored a few tools in the sector of finance, health, and governance. Among the highlights for me were m-Pesa, a fascinating mobile-based money transfer system started in Kenya; MAMA, the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action, which sends valuable information to pregnant women concerning caring for their child; and CrowdHall, a rethinking of the town hall meeting for the digital age.

Both the breadth and the depth possible in these two days impressed me. The number of tools we used demonstrated the tremendous advances and potential of technology to address crises as they arise. Despite my belief that I could avoid a classroom for a few years, exploring these potential solutions was the best possible foray back into education.

Is it possible to be an entrepreneur AND work for a large organization? Intrapreneurship, defined as entrepreneurial behavior within an established bureaucratic organization, is offering new graduates, young professionals and those working in the international development field a new way to drive innovation and increase social returns on investment in their work. The importance of the “start-up” mentality for aide since the recent global financial uncertainty has ignited a rapid growth in social entrepreneurship. Now large institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank and academia are hiring former entrepreneurs or those suited to become intrapreneurs.

I became an intrapreneur in early 2010. After taking a public bus ride from Kampala Uganda to Cape Town, South Africa I attempted to launch a network that would screen live World Cup games on inflatable screens and deliver educational content before, between and after matches. The process of starting up the program and getting the brand visible was incredibly difficult. Even when someone liked the concept, they questioned if we had the capacity to carry out the logistics and security of bringing hundreds of people together in rural villages without electricity.

Fatefully, I connected with a team within UNICEF New York Headquarters called the Youth Section. The Youth Section (now the Social and Civic Media Section) was filled with creative and innovative risk takers who were pushing the envelope in social media and digital engagement within the organization. The Youth Section picked up the World Cup idea and with their support and vision a version of the concept called World Cup in My Village was able to reach thousands of young people in Rwanda and Zambia

Without the UNICEF network of offices providing financial resources, security, and technical support, the project would have never been realized. Since the completion of the project, I’ve been working with the UNICEF Social and Civic Media section team to form innovative technical partnerships and helped start-up a growing youth led digital mapping initiative.

Intrapreneurship is a perfect option for international development professionals  and those aspiring to work in the field who feel the need to unleash their creative talents and satisfy their urge to create something new, but without risking everything as an entrepreneur. Intrapreneurship is also becoming more and more valuable for companies who are looking for people that take initiative to drive innovation and add to the company’s competitive edge. Accordingly, intrapreneurs are now some of the most valuable and sought after employees to an international development organization.

New and emerging technology is giving millennials, social entrepreneurs and bureaucrats the opportunity to become invaluable intrapreneurs and generate new and sustaining value for their companies. The intrapreneurs borrow from the principles of entrepreneurship and adapt these principles to fit within their organization. A limited group will have the opportunity to be a part of the first ever Tech Change Summer Mini Course which will teach the essentials for intrapreneurship and discuss about the latest strategies for becoming and working with intrapreneurs . Guest speakers will range from academic experts to practicing intrapreneurs from UNICEF and the World Bank.

To learn more about the power of intrapreneurship and to unlock your intrapreneurial potential, apply now to our Social Intrapreneurship: Innovation Within Institutions online course with Ashoka Changemakers. The course runs February 24 – March 21, 2014.