May 2012
56 posts
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April 2012
56 posts
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Empathy and leadership
Nice to see this article in Fast Company today.
It’s a wonderful headline, and the overall message aligns very well with what we know from our Fellows and from Everyone A Changemaker.
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Poetry in 140 Characters
Today is the last day of poetry month (who knew .. right?) NPR’s Tell Me More has been celebrating the month with a challenge to listeners - write a poem as if it were a tweet. So 140 characters or less.
Here’s my favorite …
“The page takes a toll. We download books to mobiles and we’re back to scrolls.”
Go to their website and read and listen to some...
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Lunch of the Future? →
Today during one of our weekly pipeline meetings we delved into the topic of carbon offsets, agriculture, food, and…. bugs. Given that commercial livestock industry is massively polluting, a greener direction would the super sustainable protein - insects. If push came to shove, I’m sure I could eat some bugs… but, as an everyday meal? As a southerner I have hard time with the...
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At the MediaLab
I’ve just seen so much creativity and talent today at the open house #MediaLabIO. Amazing. So much cool stuff.
But probably the coolest are the ideas of Joi Ito to transform the MediaLab with an amazing set of principles:
Resilience instead of strength,
pull instead of push,
portfolios instead of planning,
systems instead of objects,
compasses instead of maps,
practice instead of...
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How public policy can push the health insurance...
Fast Co.Exist just published a very interesting article about the increasingly consumer focused health insurance market.
- Hanae
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How the DIY movement could be a core part of...
(Picture taken from www.werepair.org)
About a year ago when I started working with this team, I became fascinated with the burgeoning Do It Yourself movement we started to notice. I am excited to see what the proliferation of 3-D printers will potentially mean for democratizing the means of production. It’s also fascinating to see how citizen scientists are using and spreading DIY...
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“this year’s extraordinary recipients,(…) have dedicated their lives and...”
– Dean of Kennedy School, David T. Ellwood when announcing the names of this years recipients of The Harvard Kennedy School’s prestigious Richard E. Neustadt Award for Public Policy: CEO and founder of Ashoka, Bill Drayton, and Nobel Prize Winner in economic sciences, Amartya Sen.
The portable foldable erasable techcrunchable...
What you see above is the creation of our colleague Robin Thomas from the search team: a cool new product that can be very useful. A noteboard that you can fold and carry with you and unfold and expand to take notes and scribbles of all the brilliant ideas of your numerous exciting meetings. Just through posting it in his own website, he got somehow noticed by someone at Techcrunch and he...
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Innovation, Empathy, and the Future of... →
Just spoke with Cori Lathan, a robotics engineer and the founder of AnthroTronix, a biomedical firm “specializing in the development of advanced interface technology; product development for wearable computing and robotic control systems; and design, development, and testing of simulation tools for training applications.” In other words, she designs robots to meet human challenges,...
empathy + imagination = combustible creativity +... →
So says Arianna Huffington, in an excerpt from Rippling, posted yesterday on SocialEdge.
I am increasingly convinced that the solutions to our problems are not going to come from the political, media, and financial institutions that continue to fail us. The solutions are going to come from each of us doing our part—making a personal commitment and taking action. And to summon our better angels,...
WatchOur friends and partners at Red Associates are looking to grow their team and they created this nice video to promote a simple idea: they are looking for remarkable people. Pass it along -and enjoy.
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Lunch time - the next frontier in education?
I know it’s a bit late for lunch time, but I think we can all agree that it’s still the lunch hour, broadly speaking. So I wanted to share my musings on lunch…specifically, as that daily meal to education.
I’m excited about new initiatives cropping up that recognize lunch time as an opportunity to do some informal teaching around some of the lessons that haven’t yet...
WatchShuttle Madness now also (almost) live for everyone who is not based in Washington DC, including moments of suspense!
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Equal Pay Day - By the Numbers
Today is “Equal Pay Day” – which means that women would have had to work an extra 4 month and 17 days to earn what men did in just 12 months.
There are many ways to explain this - women tend to take more time out of the labor force, they tend to choose professions that may not pay as well, and one study found that they were less likely than a man to want a job that based compensation on...
A list of the best books on creativity
Top advertising minds share their go-to books on creative inspiration.
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What if all students had to solve a social...
In a post about her new book on the how-to’s of creativity, Tina Seeling describes an introductory assignment she gives her students at Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), in the Stanford School of Engineering.
On the first day of class, we start with a very simple challenge: redesigning a name tag. I tell the students that I don’t like name tags at all. The text is too small to read....
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Thinking outside the box - literally.
Heard of Caine Monroy? He’s a 9 year-old entrepreneur who built an arcade out of cardboard boxes in his dad’s garage, and is now making the rounds on the media circuit, because he, as Steve Case puts it “is inspiring countless others to think outside box”.
The documentarist Nivan Mullick had heard of the kids efforts and decided to do a fun flash-mob at the kid’s...
Peter Kellner at the ASN Global Summit →
We are thrilled to announce Peter Kellner’s registration to the ASN Global Summit. Peter Kellner, who co-founded Endeavor in 1997, is Founder and Managing Partner of Richmond Global, an investment firm specializing in venture capital in technology and communications in the U.S., China and India.
We are sure that his experience and inspiring life achievements will nurture the conversation on...
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“Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.” — Gloria Steinem”
– (She also said, “Men should think twice before making widowhood women’s only path to power.”)
WatchAshoka Fellow Mitch Hedlund came by the office yesterday. She insisted that we all watch this video and share it. The main point? The real champions of change (or changemakers) are the first followers.
- Hanae
“If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be...”
– Heraclito
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Overheard at Ashoka....
“Just got back from the Executive Team Meeting. It was about as long as Hunger Games. And just as thrilling.”
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On The Up: Stories of Changemaking in Africa
In 2011 Co-worker and entrepreneur-in-residence, Rob Wilson, went from South Africa to Cairo together with his wife to find and capture the stories of exceptional social entrepreneurs who are transforming Africa.
Their efforts are now online and in print and twenty percent of the profits from the book are being donated back to the projects profiled in its pages. Great way of giving back!
The...
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“If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will...”
– Kurt Vonnegut’s advice no.7 in his “8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story” on The Atlantic.
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