ICT4D.at is happy to announce that we are about to start a second course within our Zanzicode project. The Incubator Course - a joint venture of ICT4D.at with Chembe Ventures - will run in parallel to our initial initiative, which we will refer to as Basic Course from now on.

The aim of the program is to provide talented young would-be entrepreneurs with the
tools they need to launch and maintain their own web ventures.

Here is the Incubator Course description as stated on the Zanzicode website:

The 12 month Incubator Course measures up to the entrepreneurial spirit of graduates of the Basic Course. Strong programming skills and the goal to set up an own real world online business are prerequisites for this course.

Students are guided through the process of realizing a business, from the idea to the running software and the working micro enterprise. We also stick to Open Source Software, but we optionally switch to Java and Google technologies as industrial standards. After the course the students will be owners of their own business. The course hosts 4 students.

Having conversations with our graduates and students, we got excellent feedback about their progress within the web development community in Zanzibar. The most rewarding statements for us are that graduates are working in the software industry and are keen to move on with their skills. They are searching for ways to educate themselves further. So the idea of an advanced course came up. We proposed approaches and got the commitment from possible future students.

After the experiences we gained so far, we agreed that the students should work on one big ongoing project during the course. The discussion with Sean Murphy (We got to know him at Africa Gathering April 2009 in London) led to the resolution that the best idea would be that students should not only develop plain software solutions, but also business models around the software and then eventually - at the end of the course - become business owners and run their venture. Sean offered to substantially fund this course through the company he is running, Chembe Ventures, which is specialized in seed funding and organizing tech events for African IT startups.

So after successfully acquiring complementary funding, the budget is set and the agreement with Chembe Ventures is signed. We are hereby going to the public and are very happy to announce this.

We are open for applications for this course via office (AT) zanzicode.com and are happy to send out detailed informations upon request. Applicants should not hesitate to call Salum Rashid (Zanzicode Lecturer) on his Zantel line: +255 777 755443 to get the details in Swahili.

Our project Zanzicode is a course on web application programming for the urban youth of Stone Town, Zanzibar. Our aim is to strengthen the local IT capacities and provide young people who might not be able to afford it otherwise with additional education.

It is the successor of our Zanzibits Support project, which four motivated young finished successfully at the end of last year.

One of these alumni - Salum - already had some additional experience and showed so much talent in teaching himself that we decided that we would hand over the teaching to him and concentrate on organizational issues and applications for funding. Furthermore we searched for organizations in the area to improve the project and better adapt it to local conditions, and have found a promising partner with Aidnet Zanzibar.

Now we have started the course with twelve new students and are happy to announce the first funding we received - the Austria Development Agency (ADA) is taking over more than half of the project costs for the first year.

We are very happy and we’ll do our best to make this project a success.

For Zanzicode itself, we are always looking for partnerships and collaborations with NGOs and the private and public sector - so if you happen to reside in the area, our project description sounds interesting for you and you think you can contribute something, just contact us!

Also, if you too want to support the project financially, please donate here. Thank you!

Just recently, via Thomas Strasser, I found out about Pioneers of Change - a coaching program for young Austrians with a vision to change the world, organized by Plenum.

It’s all about sustainability, ecology, positive change and such things. They have a great network with other organizations such as SocialBusinessDay, Weisssee - Sustainability meets Entrepreneurship, The Hub and many more. They offer a program with interesting lecturers, teaching the participants about project design and management, fund raising and public relations.

I applied with ICT4D.at as my project and was taken! I’m really looking forward now to the eight modules - first one already starting next week. I expect from the program to learn to manage ICT4D.at even better and get some projects in the ICT4D context going. Also I am certain that this will initiate a diverse networks of people with sustainable initiatives working for a better world - social entrepreneurs if you will.

Thomas was also taken - same as Georg Urschitz who together with Thomas built up the IT course at Don Bosco School Sunyani.

So - great opportunity, great company, looking forward to it and I’ll keep you updated on my advances.

In the context of the International Development Design Summit 2009 at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, yesterday (30 July) there was a public lecture on how a university can promote entrepreneurship of their students and faculty members by Paul Hudnut from Colorado State University - Technology, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development in an Academic Environment. It was quite interesting to see the “university start up” issue from another side.

Here some notes of the lecture.

.

Amy Smith - founder of IDDS

A lot of participants of IDDS are here - but others may not know what IDDS is:
IDDS is about innovation - bringing together people from different backgrounds & countries to be creative and innovative and design things
These things should improve the lives of people who live on 1-2$ a day
Everyone should be included in the process - also the people in the villages - the concept of co-creation to create new technologies
Working with villagers to identify technologies which might make a difference and share ideas
In 3 days the project teams will go back to the villages with prototypes and refine them

Important:

• collaboration
• people should become aware that they themselves created this solution
• improving creativity and problem-solving capacity beneath people

Paul Hudnut has been with IDDS for te past 2 weeks sharing insights into entrepreneurship

• how can you transform a prototype to a product
• thinking about the design process
• experiences in integrated academia and entrepreneurship
• founding member of Envirofit - doing wonderful work and has received a lot of recognition

.
Evo Koufou - professor at KNUST
Introducing Paul Hudnut

.

Paul Hudnut

Quote from Obama’s speech when he was in Ghana: Africa doesn’t need strongmen but strong institutions -> applies especially to universities
society puts it’s trust in the job of faculties and students - training the next generations to be ready for the problems the current generation hasn’t solved
what is the university role in todays world?
how can universitys mission to teach, research and service

• develop useful technology
• foster entrepreneurship

in this speech economic development examples from Colorado State University will be provided:

• how to deal with research and intellectual property
• 2 company examples

some experiences what US universities have done to support technology enrepreneurship- maybe helps KNUST

definition entrepreneur: a revolutionary with a business model

Colorado State University:

• 25 000 students
• duties: research, teaching, service to the community
• Colorado state economy based on agriculture, tourism, high tech
• school: innovation programs in engineering and business schools

Framework:

• research university
• $300m annual budget, 80% from US agencies
• all inventions in the university belong to the university
• super-clusters - concentrated research on: infectious diseases, cancer, renewable energy
• CSU research foundation: provides technology transfer services & invests in start up companies

Strategy:

• university needs to be partner in innovation process with business (there’s things universities do well, others they don’t do well)
• research funding is a larger more certain revenue than licensing
• bias towards economic development over university compensation - start ups are more important
• bulk of inventions come from small % of faculty (80/20)

INNOVATION CONTEXT:

US Academic innovation:

• development: science & industrialization -> computing, communication, life sciences -> networks and systems (energy, environment, health)
• innovation now has the need not only for technology, but also for a business model

Innovation sources (various scholars):

• innovation happens with hard work - not genius
• disruptive (new world-view) vs. sustaining innovations (holding on to an old model)
• innovations happen throught networks
• intersections of cultures and disciplines

University paths: publish or patents?

• intellectual property vs. open source
• existing vs. new company

Stories about the 2 companies:

• university set up a new company with new invention
• university set up new company with new business model for old technology

Story 1 - Solix:

• biodiesel from algae
• formed at CSU in 2006
• new bioreactor patents
• university initial owner (5%), subsequent investments have been private
• $17m venture funding
• now: 60 employees

Algae can create fuel very efficiently, very few water is used to create the oil

• creating animal feed, energy, biodiesel

July 2009 production began

• 3000 gallons fuel/acre

from http://www.envirofit.org/

Story 2 - Envirofit:
more innovation context  - design for the other 90%

• large scale problems
• solutions need to be regionally adapted and scaled
• urgency

different types of problems need different types of innovation

• innovation shift from pure technology to business models
• people in the villages should be able to create the technology
• companies may find way to disseminate stuff inexpensively
• move towards open source & business models

Problem attacked- air pollution:

• sources: transportation, cooking, industry, fire
• kills millions of people
• health effect on mothers and children
• fixing air pollution may have a large impact
• every month there is a “preventable tsunami”

Examples:

• motor cycles produce like 5 times more pollution than cars
• people cook with open fire
• around the world biomass is not very much used - Africa & Southeast Asia have the highest dependence, also high death rates connected to that

household energy:

• 1/2 of the world’s population cooks with biomass cook stoves

Business model:

• what cook stove would the user want?

Envirofit:

• started in 2003
• funders: faculty & grad students

validating technology:

• number of student projects looking at stove design
• cook stove lab - fuel efficiencire, cumbustion point, …

business model:

• customers
• price
• market research
• …

result:

• 60 000 stoves sold in India in first year
• requires less firewood
• cook really well
• less smoke
• number of awards, now $1m in revenues
• now 50 employees

lessons learned:

• innovation can’t be mandated, but can be supported and facilitated
• creative business models and modes of partnerships needed (networkin between academia, industry & stakeholders)
• innovation may depend more on new business models than new technologies
• university based start ups can provide learning, research revenue and publicity

what’s next for a university to promote entrepreneurship:

• what are the institutions strengths?
• how can these be utilized in a changeing world?
• what are ideas or problems to start with?
• what networks do you need to build? (academia, business, NGOs)
• don’t wait to start, learn by doing

“The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state” - Kwame Nkrumah

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original” - Kenneth Robins

“Every institution was at one point just a handful of people in a room reciding to start something” - Paul Graham

.

Q & A:

Evoe Kuffou: most people don’t think of the universities as a business - what is a business model for the university?

• academy shouldn’t be a business, but needs to encourage this type of activity and has to develop a business model for that

started manufacturing traffic lights - but there is a central financial administration and everything takes too long, how did COL do that?

• sometimes COL does it well, sometimes not so well - grants for research, sponsoring agency;
• maybe at the point when demand is there, a new company has to be started

can a faculty which is not tenured also jump into business?

• difficult, some departments at COL did that but not the university as a whole; that chapter is not finished yet
• at KNUST there is no such issue, people are just not fired here; business activities provide opportunities here

what about technology parks? have you had this idea?

• COL doesn’t have one, other universities have, city of COL has a technology incubator, often it ends up with people having different aims and no real outcomes & it’s often hard to kill a company

I am back from Barcelona and as I already stated it was a great event.
Not only did I meet Ismael Pena-Lopez and Ethan Zuckerman, two people which were very influential to me while I wrote my thesis. Also the quality of the talks was partially terrific.

A very broad range of subjects were covered - the speakers were from areas like journalism, art, politics and technology of course.
For me it was very interesting to see the different levels of adoption of new technologies in different fields. While the more tech-savy people were all assuming, that blogs, twitter, facebook and likewise are state-of-the-art, other people only now discovered the power of these tools. While some speakers pointed out the potential of new technology to support existing structures (parties, newspapers, …), others preached the sissolving of these structures and the formation of totally new organizations and networks.

The whole course had the tagline to connect the “connected minority” with the “disconnected elite” and I think from that viewspoint the event was a big success. Much of the dicussion was Spain-centered (I guess 90% of the people attending were Spanish) so it’s difficult to apply the drawn assumptions to Austria, but I agree on that there is a great need in Austria, too, to connect “geeks” and decision makers.

Especially in the ICT4D field, the collaboration of traditional development assistance organizations with more tech-savy people would be crucial. As I learned in some informal talks, many organizations are still hostile to change and modernization, and even the academic community in this field doesn’t have the most modern approach - Christian Kreutz subsumed his thoughts about that already some time ago.

It’s substantial to make decision makers and traditional organizations realize the potential of contemporary technology, and the easiest thing for that is just to sit down and do something - like Tom Steinberg with his amazing projects in e-democracy and transparency. Also Ethan Zuckerman pointed out (link to his talk), that this is the way things are happening in Africa - people just do things. Folks there are remarkably innovative and another important thing to do is to show people here how creative and ingenious inhabitants of lesser developed countries are - to also change the perception of these people in public opinion (like Ethan does with Global Voices Online or Erik Hersman with AfriGadget). For changing the world to the better, we must include lesser developed countries in the emerging “networked society” and to do this it’s necessary to first perceive them as equal partners.

They don’t need our pity, old computers or spare crops, they need public attention, transparency and equal opportunities - may it be economical or technological - then they will help themselves.
In this context we, ICT4D.at, try to inform people - this blog and the ongoing film-project are our first steps.

Ethan Zuckerman presenting

Another subject I heard a lot about this week was the election campaign of Barack Obama and how for the first time a politician at least partially understands the power of new technologies. While most politicians recognize the internet just as a tool to raise money for their campaigns, Obama uses it to create a community around his claims. He can focus on providing his vision, which is then disseminated by his followers. That way he creates an own channel which transports his views, he is no longer reliant on mainstream media. The implications of this fundamental change in doing politics for democracy as a whole are yet to be seen, the people I talked to had very different and interesting views on this topic.

Besides the sessions, I talked with Christian Kreutz about his ICT4D delicious-feed. It’s a great project to keep track of news in this field and combines several blogs on ICT4D. I will take a look on it and make efforts to improve it.
Also I talked to Adrien Mangin from Cyber-Volunteers. They are organizing a workshop on technology for social change in March and I hope to attend that.

For more detailed information of the different speakers I once again point to Ismaels blog - ictlogy.net.

This Wednesday until Friday the course “Network Society: Social changes, organizations and citizens” is taking place in Barcelona.

“A massively connected society, with an almost continuous access to information, higher mobility and speech freedom, more urban, more free time, and more technology available to create, remix and share … is the adequate medium to transform the information society to the network society, a new model redefining concepts as identity, community, citizenship, authority and power, participation or property, and affecting greatly to every institution, being business, markets or governments. [from here]“

The question for me now is, where the lesser developed countries are placed in this process. How can we integrate them into this society, how can we avoid that they will be, once more, left behind?

The list of speakers includes interesting people like Ethan Zuckerman (Global Voices Online), Tom Steinberg (mySociety) and many more - details on the program here.
The course is organized by the CUIMPB and Ismael Peña-López is one of the chairs.
I am really looking forward to this event - also to have the chance to see beautiful Barcelona.
I will try to cover most of the talks and upload short summaries - never tried live-blogging before so I’m curious if I’ll manage.