Orchestrated Development ~ Futility of Point Fixes

We just had a great D-Lab Projects Showcase at the MIT Museum with some two dozen teams showing off their projects, most with demos of working prototypes. Fantastic stuff, including solutions for a range of medical ailments and disabilities, as well as several power, water, and other value-added processing services, and finally a variety of modes of income generation for historically underserved peoples. But as Anjali Sastry, Luc Aalmans, and I were discussing at the event, too many of these inventions will fail if they remain isolated as "point fixes" applied alone and without more systemic sensibility. Indeed, we need to Orchestrate Development, to simultaneously build up sectors like power, water, health, logistics, and the like via viable ventures, market-making, cooperative organization, co-investments, and many other mechanisms of the applied arts, business, and civic sectors. Not easy, but urgently necessary.