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Watch the Replay of our Google Hangout with Paul Polak: Join us for a discussion of the new book “The Business Solution to Poverty”
Paul Polak will join NextBillion for our next Google Hangout at 2 p.m. Eastern, Wednesday, November 6. Polak and Mal Warwick, authored the new book: “The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers.” But we want/NEED your questions too. Find out how.
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- NextBillion Originals
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User Participation: The Secret to Successful Prototyping
This is the final post in a three-part series from Grameen Foundation that has discussed designing products and services for poor people. In this post, Tanya Rabourn reviews how to involve the user in the prototyping process to ensure a financial product that will truly serve their needs.
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- Education, Technology
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A Social Entrepreneur’s Inspiration For Solar-Powered Lighting
Solar-powered light bulbs for the poor: A growing number of social enterprises are selling such technology to bottom of the pyramid households in Africa, India and other countries. One of the first to do so, Denver-based Nokero (for No Kerosene) just introduced its next generation of products, as it works to make the company’s management more professional–and able to grow the enterprise even more.A little more background on the issue: Around 1.3 billion of world’s population lacks access to reliable electricity. Most of them use kerosene lamps, which are very very very expensive compared to incandescent lamps, (people spend as much as 30% of their income on kerosene-based fuels, according to Nokero), cause deadly fires (If you live without electricity, you’re seven times more likely to die by fire than someone with electricity, according to Katsaros), and contribute to air pollution. They don’t produce a whole heck of a lot of light, either
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- Energy, Entrepreneurship
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BDC Venture Capital allocates $135 million more to healthcare innovation, broadens investment strategy
As part of its mandate to support Canadian entrepreneurs, BDC Venture Capital announced today it has allocated $135 million in new capital to direct venture investments in innovative healthcare companies. That brings its total direct commitment to the sector to $270 million. Recognizing a massive and growing market opportunity, the BDC Venture Capital Healthcare Fund will broaden its investment strategy and invest in technology, products and services that aim to dramatically improve global healthcare productivity, efficiency and patient outcomes.
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- Entrepreneurship, Health Care, Investing
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Backpack-equipped Health Care Workers Make a Difference in Rio: Added mobility helps monitor patients, manage diseases in favela
New Cities Foundation project is the first major study looking at the impact of integrating e-health technology in low-resource, densely populated, urban settings - and the early returns are promising.
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- Health Care
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Five Skills Designers Have That Global Development Needs
“Development is being disrupted,” says Raj Kumar, president of DevEx, a site devoted to helping the international development community deliver foreign aid more efficiently and effectively. Beyond the buzz generated by the “social entrepreneurship” and “impact investing” communities, I’ve seen a significant shift coming from traditional aid agencies in the past two years.
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- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Targeting product design for the developing world
The key, MIT study finds, is designing products that make money for the microentrepreneur.
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- Entrepreneurship
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Enter India’s amazing world of frugal innovation
In 2001 a huge earthquake shook the state of Gujarat in India.2,000 people were killed, 400,000 lost their homes, and countless more lost their businesses in the devastation.One young entrepreneur, Mansukhbhai Prajapati, lost everything, but found an innovative way to get back on his feet.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
- Region
- South Asia
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