
This theme has really blossomed in the past few years at MIT and beyond, with not only DE-themed companies winning the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition overall, but ever-more connections and links with the MIT International Development Initiatives, including the IDEAS Competition, the D-Labs family of class offerings, and other exciting efforts, including IDDS. A few recent developments especially stand out at MIT:
- Martin Fisher, founder of KickStart, won the 2008 Lemelson-MIT Sustainability Prize;
- DiagnosticsForAll won the 2008 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition overall and ClickDiagnostics won the Development Track;
- AssuredLabor and Ghonsla (and others) won prizes in the 2008 IDEAS Competition;
- Half the MIT in the World columns are about student teams my colleagues Sandy Pentland, Randy Zadra, and I supported via the DE-IDRC Seed Grants program we ran this past IAP 2008;
- The MIT International Development Initiative is embracing ever-more themes, including Health, Mobility, Energy, and more;
- Jhonatan Rotberg launched the NextBillionNetwork at the Institute to "deploy innovative mobile technologies that help people reduce friction in their local markets from the bottom up;"
- Rick Locke, Anjali Sastry, and colleagues are expanding the G-Lab family of classes to include Greater Asia, Latin America, and an Africa section focused on Health Delivery;
- Key DE-related guest speakers have come to MIT, including Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, founder of GrameenBank, GrameenPhone, and other Bangladeshi micro-ventures and Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises and Design Revolution, author of Out of Poverty, among others!
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