Catalyzing Capital for Invention: Spotlight on India

The Lemelson Foundation has observed first hand a number of obstacles limiting the impact of India's scientists, engineers, and inventors. The resources these entrepreneurs need, such as financing and mentorship, are limited and often difficult to identify. As a result, many of the invention-based ventures The Lemelson Foundation supports struggle to identify sources of funding and business assistance to suit their unique needs.To understand the scale of these challenges and how to meaningfully address them, the Foundation, with assistance from Enclude, undertook a field study to examine India's "impact ecosystem," which is what the Foundation calls the broad network of businesses, funders, and intermediaries that enable social enterprise. The study hones in on the "invention ecosystem," the Foundation's term for a subset of the impact ecosystem that includes "invention-based entrepreneurs."Detailed observations and data collected from interviews with more than 60 investors, entrepreneurs and intermediaries are presented in this report, along with actionable solutions for addressing challenges. While the study focused on India, lessons are applicable to evolving ecosystems in other developing countries

German and Israeli Innovation: The Best of Two Worlds

This study reviews – through desk research and expert interviews with Mittelstand companies, startups and ecosystem experts – the current status of the Israeli startup ecosystem and the Mittelstand region of North Rhine- Westphalia (NRW), Germany. As a case study, it highlights potential opportunities for collaboration and analyzes different engagement modes that might serve to connect the two regions. The potential synergies between the two economies are based on a high degree of complementarity. A comparison of NRW’s key verticals and Israel’s primary areas of innovation indicates that there is significant overlap in verticals, such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), sensors and cybersecurity. Israeli startups can offer speed, agility and new ideas, while German Mittelstand companies can contribute expertise in production and scaling, access to markets, capital and support. The differences between Mittelstand companies and startups are less pronounced than those between startups and big corporations. However, three current barriers to fruitful collaboration have been identified: 1) a lack of access, 2) a lack of transparency regarding relevant players in the market, and 3) a lack of the internal resources needed to select the right partners, often due to time constraints or a lack of internal expertise on this issue. To ensure that positive business opportunities ensue, Mittelstand companies and startups alike have to be proactive in their search for cooperation partners and draw on a range of existing engagement modes (e.g., events, communities, accelerators). The interviews and the research conducted for this study made clear that no single mode of engagement can address all the needs and challenges associated with German-Israeli collaboration

The changing face of innovation policy: implications for the Northern Ireland economy

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Sanitation as a Business: Unclogging the Blockages

The first Unclogging the Blockages conference took place in Kampala, Uganda in February 2014 with the aim of putting on the table some of the major challenges facing the scale up of sustainable sanitation as well as collaborating towards innovaive soluions. This report summarizes the discussions and takeaway messages from the conference, including concrete action plans developed around a number of thematic areas. [KEY FINDINGS]Market based approaches are key to addressing some of the main barriers for scaling sustainable sanitation solutions. Participants came away with a much richer understanding of the principles and key tenets of sanitation as a business. A push for greater integration in sanitation programming between the housing, energy, business, health, and education sectors will allow for sustainable city and district-wide sanitation services.Unlocking finance for businesses and households and embedding monitoring within all work is critical. One interesting outcome of the group work was a suggestion to form a Global Sanitation Financing Alliance.Supporting sanitation businesses to be successful in the realities of the market requires on-the-ground, real time, market-focused technology development and R&D. A variety of these technologies were on display at the meeting

Fields in Motion, Fields of Friction: Tales of Betrayal and Promise from Kangra District, India

Over a period of five decades, Kangra District, located in the mountainous northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, has been continually si(gh)ted within different development imaginaries that have evolved at particular configurations of scale and time and been given shape within a succession of international bilateral projects. These development flows into the region have in turn fostered a plethora of competing institutions and practices, contributing their own sometimes divergent flows within an inherently mobile and “developmentalizing” terrain. While this dynamic and multi-textured terrain offers rich opportunities for partnerships forged across disparate sites, there is, I argue, a need to revisit “collaboration” as a key feminist tool for facilitating social justice and change. Widely lauded for its empowering, equalizing and transformative potential by feminist scholars, collaboration is also viewed prescriptively in terms of “success” and “failure.” Consequently, “strategies and solutions” are sought to negotiate its minefields and to resolve, often futilely, the friction that repeatedly erupts within them. In this paper, I suggest a re-viewing of friction as a valuable methodological frame within feminist collaborative research and praxis. In place of the prevalent emphasis on containing and resolving friction generated at border crossings, I contend that feminist-oriented “location work” that engages with friction and follows its routes through the fluid and fertile space of a “developmentalizing terrain” can provide promising avenues and detours for empowerment and social justice. Drawing on Tsing’s (2005) discussion of the creative role of friction across global connections, I reflect on some of the ways in which it played out as a creative source of production, interruption and mutation within two of my collaborative ventures in Kangra. In doing so, I demonstrate how an attention to the sometimes unanticipated and diversionary routes that are generated by friction within collaborative efforts, and the vistas of “betrayal” and promise that they reveal, offer valuable insights for encounters at the interface of feminist praxis, anthropology and development practice

A gender perspective on entrepreneurial leadership:female leaders in Kazakhstan

The paper proposes a conceptual model to understand female entrepreneurial leadership through an exploration of the perceptions and experiences of women entrepreneurs within their leadership roles. The paper addresses an existing knowledge gap on entrepreneurial leadership by bringing together three key constructs of gender, leadership and entrepreneurship. We apply Stewart's model of role demands-constraints-choices (DCC) to women entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan in order to understand their perceptions of the demands, constraints and choices they experience within their leadership roles. The results of in-depth interviews with women entrepreneurs present deeper conceptualization of their leadership enactment as a co-developing, co-constructed relational activity between leaders and others in their wider business environments and context

Enabling Innovation across the Enterprise through Mashup-oriented Collaboration Environments

Nowadays enterprise collaboration is becoming essential for valuable innovation and competitive advantage. This collaboration must be brought a step forward from technical collaboration till collective smart exploitation of global intelligence. The Internet of Future is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable Web Services accessed from all over the Web. This approach has not yet caught on since a global user-service interaction is still an open issue. This paper states our vision with regard to the next generation front-end web technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the Future Internet. This approach will enable the massive deployment of services over Internet in a user-centric fashion. Having this in mind, the rationale behind EzWeb, a reference architecture and implementation of an open Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Platform that empower its users to co-produce and share instant applications is presente

An Overview of the Feasibility of Achieving Level 2 Building Information Modeling by 2016 in the UK

The aim of this study is to investigate the current status and feasibility of achieving Level 2 BIM (building information modeling) usage that is to be made mandatory by the UK government on its projects by the year 2016. This study assesses the level at which organizational and practitioner knowledge of BIM is currently positioned. The UK government, being the largest public stakeholder client, has realized the benefits and advantages of BIM when used in procuring projects across their lifecycle in the built environment. A critical review of the BIM literature was carried out and the evidence base was created in relation to government targets for 2016. At the current stage, Level 2 BIM adoption is achievable by 2016 for large construction firms but not for SMEs (small medium enterprise). Also, from evidence in this study, the technology needs to be properly tailored to meet SME variables if Level 2 status is to be achieved for the entire industry