Remittance Flows ~ FT Infographic on Pathways

The FT writes about Remittances: the hidden engine of globalisation...

"The number of people in the world who live outside the country of their birth has risen from 153m in 1990 to 270m last year according to the World Bank, swelling global remittance payments from a trickle to a flood. As migration has increased, these financial snail-trails have become one of the defining trends of the past quarter-century of globalisation -- the private, informal, personal face of global capital flows. For many developing economies, it is a lifeline. [...] Some governments have sought to channel remittances into development efforts; Indonesia is the latest country to consider a “diaspora bond” in a bid to tap the savings of its wealthier overseas residents."

Development Ventures ~ Exponential Prosperity!

My MIT colleague Alex (Sandy) Pentland and I are offering our Development Ventures action lab class this Fall 2015 at the Media Lab starting Thursday September 10th from 10a-12noon, with special focus on frugal, DIY, and ultraffordable technologies as well as exponential innovations including mobiles, big data, and analytics. This will be our 15th year!

Every year, we look forward to the latest new venture concepts our students propose -- in domains ranging from Health & Wellness, Energy & Sustainability, Education & Creativity, Commerce & Financial Services, Civic Engagement and beyond -- and we try to help the most motivated teams and promising ideas actually start and thrive! Alumcos since 2001 include FirstMileSolutions/United Villages, blueEnergy, WAY Systems, Dimagi, Howtoons, CellBazaar, Global Cycle Solutions/GCS, Assured Labor/EmpleoListo, ClickDiagnostics/mPower/ClickMedix, Dinube, Sanergy, WoundPump/WiiCare, ESSMART, Wecyclers, Ghonsla, Logistimo, Apportunidades, CrowdSOS/WiseSystems, MoringaConnect, TrueAfrica, MDaaS, MAX, and more. What will blossom this year?

Unicorn Hunters ~ Investors in Ventureland...

In her Bloomberg piece Goldman in Ventureland, Katrina Brooker writes of newly emergent players in later stage financings in so-called unicorns and more...

"Wall Street used to wait for startups to go public before investing in them. These days, however, entrepreneurs don’t need the public markets like they used to; private capital is plentiful. Uber has raised some $6 billion in equity and debt, and it hasn’t announced any plans to go public. “By the time you IPO as a company with a $60 billion market cap, you are really in the stratosphere,” [...] “The opportunity to invest has passed; the explosive growth is often behind them.” This market moves fast: When Airbnb raised money in April 2014, the company was valued at $10 billion; a year later, that valuation had more than doubled to $25 billion, when it raised another $1.5 billion. Included in the latest round were East Coast investors, most of whom would never have invested at such an early stage in the last tech boom..."

Root Capital ~ Growing Agri-Impact Finance...

Check out Root Capital, a financing and connections-making social venture which helps small and growing rural agri-businesses thrive long-term, socially, economically, and sustainably. See especially their Timeline and here's founder Willy Foote sharing how it all started... And a summary of their approach... And a Skoll World Forum Uncommon Heroes mini-docu on Root...

Development Ventures ~ Solving Global Problems

My MIT colleague Alex (Sandy) Pentland and I are again hosting our Development Ventures action lab class this Fall 2014 at the Media Lab starting this Thursday September 4th from 10a-12noon, with special focus on frugal, DIY, and ultraffordable technologies as well as exponential innovations including mobiles, big data, and analytics. As always, we look forward to the latest new venture concepts our students propose -- in domains ranging from Health & Wellness, Energy & Sustainability, Education & Creativity, Commerce & Financial Services, Civic Engagement and beyond -- and we try to help the most motivated teams and promising ideas actually start and thrive!

Dutch Pensions ~ PBS on Pooled Risk+Benefits

PBS Newshour investigates Dutch pensions...

MIT Development Ventures ~ Action Lab 2013

My MIT colleague Alex (Sandy) Pentland and I are again hosting our Development Ventures action lab class this Fall 2013 at the Media Lab starting this Thursday, 5 September, with special focus on frugal, DIY, and ultraffordable technologies as well as exponential innovations including mobiles, big data, and analytics.

As always, we look forward to the latest new venture concepts our students propose -- in domains ranging from Health & Wellness, Energy & Sustainability, Education & Creativity, Commerce & Financial Services, Civic Engagement and beyond -- and we try to help the most motivated teams and promising ideas actually start and thrive!

R&D Megafunds ~ Novel Securitization Financing

Fascinating piece just published in Nature Biotechnology by our MIT colleagues Jose-Maria Fernandez, Roger Stein and Andrew Lo on Commercializing biomedical research through securitization techniques. They propose RIBOs -- Research & Innovation Backed Obligations -- or R&D megafunds...

"...a financial structure in which a large number of biomedical programs at various stages of development are funded by a single entity to substantially reduce the portfolio’s risk. The portfolio entity can finance its activities by issuing debt, a critical advantage because a much larger pool of capital is available for investment in debt versus equity. By employing financial engineering techniques such as securitization, it can raise even greater amounts of more-patient capital."

To exemplify this, they propose a cancer megafund. Read the paper for more details, but these illustrate flows...

MIT Development Ventures ~ D-Lab Action 2012

My MIT colleague Alex (Sandy) Pentland and I are again hosting our D-Lab Development Ventures class this Fall 2012 at the Media Lab, this time with special focus on frugal, DIY, and ultraffordable technologies as well as exponential innovations including mobiles, big data, and analytics.

As always, we look forward to the latest new venture concepts our students propose -- in domains ranging from Health & Wellness, Energy & Sustainability, Education & Creativity, Commerce & Financial Services, Civic Engagement and beyond -- and we try to help the most motivated teams and promising ideas actually start and thrive!

Mobile Money ~ Africans Living the Future!

The Economist Daily Chart features The bank of SMS: Banking on the move in Africa...

"Africa is the continent where “mobile money” -- monetary transactions on mobile phones -- is by far the most advanced. "

Money Game ~ Kedrosky @ Kauffman on Funding

Thanks to Brad Feld for spotting this Kauffman Sketchbook featuring Paul Kedrosky on the sources of start capital for newcos...

"...Most [...] are funded by the entrepreneur’s savings, cash flow, credit cards, friends, and family."

Planetary Scale Intelligence ~ Wissner-Gross++

MIT's Alex Wissner-Gross at The Singularity Summit on the emergence of superhuman AI's or Planetary Scale Intelligence...

Meltdown ~ Al Jaz on Crashing the World...

Al Jazeera casts forth Meltdown, a continuing multi-part investigation of the 2008 global financial collapse and consequences, asking...

"...how did it all go so wrong? Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place. Also, London was competing with New York as the banking capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time, introduced 'light touch regulation' -- giving bankers a free hand in the marketplace. All this, and with key players making the wrong financial decisions, saw the world's biggest financial collapse."

Part One, the men who crashed the world... Part Two, a global financial tsunami... Still to come are Paying the Price and After the Fall.

Congestion Pricing ~ Streetfilms on Urban Econ

Bringing market economics to urban streets via Congestion Pricing... Check out other Streetfilms too!

US VC ~ Interactive Map of Investments...

The WSJ serves up this interactive map of VC distributions...

Deficit 101 ~ Khan on Govt Financial Condition

Salman Khan on Government's Financial Condition... Frightening and disgusting.

Fair Shares ~ African Participation in Bonanza!

The Guardian spotlights one of the truly biggest ideas in development finance and innovation in this analysis piece by World Bankers Shantayanan Devarajan and Marcelo Giugale -- How Africa can extract big benefits for everyone from natural resources -- something I've been calling Percapitization or Per Capita Participation...

"Transferring a portion -- or all -- of the income from Africa's natural resources directly to citizens could help to reduce poverty and fight corruption. [...] Is there a shortcut to better accountability in the management of natural resources? Yes, there is: direct transfers of resource dividends to citizens. Around 35 African countries already transfer cash directly to their poor -- through smartcards, debit cards, mobile phones, or in person. This is getting cheaper and safer. The coverage of banking and mobile phone services is expanding rapidly. So is biometric identification with mobile devices. Logistically, there is nothing that prevents governments from transferring a portion -- or even all -- of the income from natural resources directly to every citizen, not just the poor. This kind of direct dividend payment is not new -- Alaska has been doing it since the early 1980s. Why would giving people a share of commodity revenues help avoid, let alone reduce, corruption? Because if you know you are getting a portion of the oil revenues, you will surely be interested in the total amount -- not to mention in what the government does with its share. [...] Dividend transfers and fiscal integrity can go together [...] giving people a direct stake in their country's riches can buy time, and goodwill, for the slow-but-necessary construction of better governance institutions."

This is an epic and transformative prosperity policy! Distributing so-called "national" assets to the people is a far better pathway than having it be pocketed by corrupt politicians (e.g. Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, etc) or squandered by an inefficient state (e.g. PEMEX, PdVSA, etc) or privatized to the rich (e.g. TELMEX, etc) or to outside MNCs. Percapitization is really the only moral and democratic pathway.

Ngozi's Back! ~ Again Nigeria's Finance Minister

Rumors confirmed! MIT alumna and stateswoman Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala returns to Nigeria as Minister of Finance in President Goodluck Jonathan's cabinet! Be sure to watch this Reuters clip where she recollects facing up to the Generals during her last stint as MoF! And here she is speaking about the World Bank's New Africa Strategy...

Financial Inclusion ~ Branchless Banking in Brazil

CGAP's Kabir Kumar & Yanina Seltzer ask Meanwhile in Brazil... are we there yet?

"...financial inclusion in Brazil still has a long way to go. CGAP has studied the branchless banking market in Brazil over the past few months and has written a country note. [The top points include]:

1. "Brazil’s agent business is changing and it is unclear how it will evolve."
2. "Cell phone-based financial services are still new to Brazil but we can expect major developments in the next couple of years that could benefit Brazil’s poor."
3. "Brazil’s urban poor still do not have access to adequate financial services and branchless banking and mobile banking could help"

"Because Brazil is further along in financial inclusion via branchless banking than some of the other countries we work in, its challenges are a significant source of learning for those countries."

Emmanuel Magani ~ Africa 2.0 Co-Leader...

Excellent to have MIT Sloan MBA student Emmanuel Magani join me on MaximizingProgress.tv! We talked mostly about the first-ever MIT African business conference --

Africa 2.0: Achieving Growth Through Innovation

-- happening this Friday, April 1st, 2011 at the MIT Media Lab. Organized by Emmanuel and his colleagues from the MIT Sloan Africa Business Club (ABC), the Conference features great speakers on panels ranging from Mobiles, Energy, Finance, Entrepreneurship, and Technology thru Media. I'm especially excited to hear the venture pitches from the five top Africa Innovate! business plan competition finalists happening as part of the Conference. Emmanuel and I also talked about why the billion-strong Africans represent a trillion US dollar opportunity, the growth of the MIT ABC club events and activities, and why the time is now for business leaders to have an Africa Strategy much like they have India or China Strategies. If you're interested in these opportunities, see you this Friday at the Conference!