Early Learning Innovation Fund Evaluation Final Report

This is a formative evaluation of the Hewlett Foundation's Early Learning Innovation Fund that began in 2011 as part of the Quality Education in Developing Countries (QEDC) initiative.  The Fund has four overarching objectives, which are to: promote promising approaches to improve children's learning; strengthen the capacity of organizations implementing those approaches; strengthen those organizations' networks and ownership; and grow 20 percent of implementing organizations into significant players in the education sector. The Fund's original design was to create a "pipeline" of innovative approaches to improve learning outcomes, with the assumption that donors and partners would adopt the most successful ones. A defining feature of the Fund was that it delivered assistance through two intermediary support organizations (ISOs), rather than providing funds directly to implementing organizations. Through an open solicitation process, the Hewlett Foundation selected Firelight Foundation and TrustAfrica to manage the Fund. Firelight Foundation, based in California, was founded in 1999 with a mission to channel resources to community-based organizations (CBOs) working to improve the lives of vulnerable children and families in Africa. It supports 12 implementing organizations in Tanzania for the Fund. TrustAfrica, based in Dakar, Senegal, is a convener that seeks to strengthen African-led initiatives addressing some of the continent's most difficult challenges. The Fund was its first experience working specifically with early learning and childhood development organizations. Under the Fund, it supported 16 such organizations: one in Mali and five each in Senegal, Uganda and Kenya. At the end of 2014, the Hewlett Foundation commissioned Management Systems International (MSI) to conduct a mid-term evaluation assessing the implementation of the Fund exploring the extent to which it achieved intended outcomes and any factors that had limited or enabled its achievements. It analyzed the support that the ISOs provided to their implementing organizations, with specific focus on monitoring and evaluation (M&E). The evaluation included an audit of the implementing organizations' M&E systems and a review of the feasibility of compiling data collected to support an impact evaluation. Finally, the Foundation and the ISOs hoped that this evaluation would reveal the most promising innovations and inform planning for Phase II of the Fund. The evaluation findings sought to inform the Hewlett Foundation and other donors interested in supporting intermediary grant-makers, early learning innovations and the expansion of innovations. TrustAfrica and Firelight Foundation provided input to the evaluation's scope of work. Mid-term evaluation reports for each ISO provided findings about their management of the Fund's Phase I and recommendations for Phase II. This final evaluation report will inform donors, ISOs and other implementing organizations about the best approaches to support promising early learning innovations and their expansion. The full report outlines findings common across both ISOs' experience and includes recommendations in four key areas: adequate time; appropriate capacity building; advocacy and scaling up; and evaluating and documenting innovations. Overall, both Firelight Foundation and TrustAfrica supported a number of effective innovations working through committed and largely competent implementing organizations. The program's open-ended nature avoided being prescriptive in its approach, but based on the lessons learned in this evaluation and the broader literature, the Hewlett Foundation and other donors could have offered more guidance to ISOs to avoid the need to continually relearn some lessons. For example, over the evaluation period, it became increasingly evident that the current context demands more focused advance planning to measure impact on beneficiaries and other stakeholders and a more concrete approach to promoting and resourcing potential scale-up. The main findings from the evaluation and recommendations are summarized here

Hacker Combat: A Competitive Sport from Programmatic Dueling & Cyberwarfare

The history of humanhood has included competitive activities of many different forms. Sports have offered many benefits beyond that of entertainment. At the time of this article, there exists not a competitive ecosystem for cyber security beyond that of conventional capture the flag competitions, and the like. This paper introduces a competitive framework with a foundation on computer science, and hacking. This proposed competitive landscape encompasses the ideas underlying information security, software engineering, and cyber warfare. We also demonstrate the opportunity to rank, score, & categorize actionable skill levels into tiers of capability. Physiological metrics are analyzed from participants during gameplay. These analyses provide support regarding the intricacies required for competitive play, and analysis of play. We use these intricacies to build a case for an organized competitive ecosystem. Using previous player behavior from gameplay, we also demonstrate the generation of an artificial agent purposed with gameplay at a competitive level

Open Collaborative Mechanical / Product Design - User as Developer A New Design Methodology for Internet Era Business Innovations and Entrepreneurship

In product design and development projects, the most important part is identifying user needs. Traditional methods such as surveys, focus group studies and interviews are expensive and sometime inaccurate in identifying those needs. Inspired by the open source software development, along with the research that has been done on the lead user method, the method of using collective customer wisdom to modify old products or even develop new products has become an emerging new design method and is starting to get popularity and success. However, the effectiveness of such method comparing to the traditional face to face close development method is a question that keeping established businesses from apply such method. At the same time, failures of early attempts to use such methods also cast doubts about the quality of this method. We set up two experiments to compare this method and the traditional face to face method, and found out that the effectiveness of both methods were about the same. Problems of implementing such method also emerged from the experiment, possible solutions are discussed, and future studies are also identified. Comparing this method to the open source software design, there is one stage of the development that is unique for mechanical products. The prototyping and manufacturing of mechanical products involved cost and quality control issues that don\u27t exist in software development. We conducted an experiment of applying a collaborative open design approach to test the possibility and necessity of applying such design method during prototype fabrication. Our results showed that open collaborative design is necessary to identify true customer needs. A product prototyping and manufacturing method is also proposed for real world practice. The open collaborative design method is new and is not easily adopted by established businesses, as they are often reluctant to implement new approaches. Entrepreneurs can usually take advantage of this situation and establish their share of the market, even possibly driving out the established businesses later on. We argue that the open collaborative design method is one such technology. Future research and practice is proposed and discussed

THINGS FROM THE FUTURE How can we crowdsource innovation foresight with games?

In the current world uncertainty is more dominant than it used to be. One of the key forces for constant change is innovation. Innovations can be radical and create surprising effects. Can there be ways of anticipating these unforeseen effects of innovation? Or can the course of future innovations be managed somehow? Innovation foresight processes are required to communicate between different stakeholders on an extensive scale to be able to build comprehensive and understandable future options. Knowledge on future and innovation is no more the exclusive right of experts. This study tries to find new ways of engaging people with the innovation foresight work as well as get new audiences to participate in it. Games and crowdsourcing are two possible solutions to this. Theories covering innovation, foreisght and crowdsourcing are plentiful but scattered, and do not form a coherent framework for innovation foresight. Study is approaching the research topic from two perspectives: what kind of innovation foresight knowledge can we create with games, and what innovation foresight activities can we crowdsource with games? For these targets study has used two different methods, an innovation game case study experiment and a questionnaire targeted to Finnish innovation experts. Game case study consisted of a foresight analysis of 310 ”future thing” ideas generated with an innovation card game. The results revealed that games can enhance the creativity of the players and generate many unexpected uses of future technologies and services. Ideas were also rich with future hopes and fears and they had multidimensional content including different PESTE-variables. Questionnaire was targeted to map views related to the usability of games in different phases of the innovation foresight process. According to responses gaming can be used to observe weak signals, to form wild cards, perceive hopes and fears, and to develop new visions for the future. But games are not seen as suitable for decision-making nor forecasting future trends. Crowdsourcing can enhance the ”crowd wisdom” of the foresight process. Crowd wisdom means that groups are often smarter than the smartest people in them. This phenomenon is based on the thought that “no one knows everything, but everyone knows something”. The challenge in crowdsourcing is to motivate people to participate and engage. Games can be a powerful solution to innovation foresight motivation challenge, and they may also generate different solutions than other methods. But games cannot replace the foresight process. To subject foresight to games and gamification would take too many resources, be expensive, difficult to manage, and results would be risky. Crowdsourcing innovation foresight can often be carried out more effectively when using existing social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter etc. instead of games. In any case, crowd wisdom is too valuable resource not to be exploited in foresight.siirretty Doriast