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The Problem with ‘Forced Entrepreneurship’: How Universities — and Venture Capitalists — are Failing Climate Tech Innovators
Universities are increasingly positioning themselves as hubs of business innovation, and as Emre Eren Korkmaz at the University of Oxford explains, their support has become an important driver of climate tech innovation. But he argues that universities’ "one size fits all" approach to supporting these innovators is fundamentally flawed, prioritizing the pathway to entrepreneurship — and the demands of venture capitalists — rather than empowering true innovation. He explores the problem and highlights some alternative approaches.
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- Education, Environment, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology
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The Global Impact of South-South Cooperation: The Case for Teaching Developing Countries’ Solutions to Business Students Worldwide
South-South Cooperation empowers developing countries to create home-grown solutions to development problems, and to share them with other countries in the Global South. According to Mette Morsing at Principles for Responsible Management Education, the business sector has a key role to play in scaling these solutions in both the Global South and North. But for that to happen, she argues that business schools must focus on increasing knowledge exchange between emerging market innovators and their peers in the developed and developing worlds.
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- Education, Technology
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Five Ways the Private Sector Can Align with the Sustainable Development Goals
How can the private sector advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and what’s the best way to measure the success of these efforts? Those questions were among the topics explored at the recent Sustainability and Development Conference at the University of Michigan. Yaquta Kanchwala Fatehi and Dana Gorodetsky at the William Davidson Institute attended the event, and they share some essential insights on the private sector’s role in supporting the SDGs.
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- Agriculture, Environment, Impact Assessment
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Universities Must Teach Their Budding Scientists Entrepreneurship
As Africa continues to develop, there will be growing demand for experts who can address its social and economic needs. According to professors Karl Kunert and Christopher Cullis, the region's budding scientists can help meet that demand by acquiring business-oriented skills - but these skills aren’t usually part of their training. They explore the benefits of teaching students to turn scientific innovations into business opportunities, and the key role universities can play.
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- Education
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Three Reasons for the African Research Gap – And How to Close It
Sub-Saharan Africa’s population share will more than double in the next 50 years—from 13 percent to 25 percent of the world's population. Despite this growth, its research outputs lag far behind other regions, with just 2 percent of peer-reviewed publications coming from authors there. Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) program manager Maya Ranganath explores reasons for the gap, and ways CEGA is working to increase the volume of high-quality academic research produced by scholars in the region.
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- Agriculture, Education, Health Care
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To Fix the Gender Gap, Fix the Digital Divide
Most job growth will come from STEM fields, yet women make up only 12 percent of engineering students. That’s why MIT’s new Solve initiative launched a Women and Technology Challenge asking for technology-fueled solutions that enable women and girls’ full participation in the economy. Selected solutions will receive support from cross-sector leaders interested in investing in innovative social impact projects – the Solve challenge deadline is Aug. 1.
- Categories
- Education, Finance, Impact Assessment, Technology
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‘Ready, Steady, Scale!’: A Practical Tool to Assess Your Social Business
To scale in base-of-the-pyramid markets, social ventures need to learn to operate and grow in complex, uncertain and resource-limited markets, and become highly adaptive to market and social context. That's why the MIT Practical Impact Alliance developed "Ready, Steady, Scale!" It's a guide to help inclusive business practitioners better understand their organization’s readiness for scale and to clearly identify opportunities for improvement.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise