Scaling Development Ventures ~ MIT Conf 2014!

Our D-Lab, PSC, Media Lab and other MIT colleagues are delighted to host today's Scaling Development Ventures conference! This event weaves together academics, practitioners, and financiers all exploring innovative, collaborative, market-driven strategies for poverty alleviation at scale.  Speakers include Paul Polak, author of The Business Solution to Poverty and Nancy Wimmer, author of Green Energy for a Billion Poor -- How Grameen Shakti Created a Winning Model for Social Business. Panels include explorations of Appropriate Solutions for Real Needs, Partnering for Scale, and MIT Alumni Scaling up Innovation.

Scale of the Universe ~ Huang's Epic Infographic!

NASA APOD spotlights Cary & Michael Huang's epic Scale of the Universe interactive infographic!

Urban Vision ~ Cities, Scaling and Sustainability

The complexity science-oriented Santa Fe Institute spotlights their urban vision of Cities, Scaling and Sustainability...

Spillover Cities ~ Economist on Scale Dynamics

The Economist notes that America’s big cities are larger than Europe’s. That has important economic consequences...

"Differences in metropolitan populations may help explain gaps in productivity and incomes. Western Europe’s per-person GDP is 72% of America’s, on a purchasing-power-parity basis. A recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy’s research arm, reckons that some three-quarters of this gap can be chalked up to Europe’s relatively diminutive cities. [...] Cities today have a productivity advantage for different reasons, to do with ideas rather than costs. When one firm in a city comes up with a new technique, product or design, nearby firms may quickly build on it or hire its creator. One firm’s innovation boosts its own productivity but also spills over to other businesses. Companies that prefer seclusion cut themselves off from these "knowledge spillovers."

Global Health ~ Models for Sustainable Scaling

Very exciting to see MIT Sloan colleague Anjali Sastry's new Fall 2011 offering, 15.S02 Global Health Delivery and Management: Business models for scale and sustainability in low-resource settings exploring...

"...what differentiates successful enterprises from those that fall short in delivering healthcare in the most challenging settings. A survey of bottlenecks, constraints, and opportunities sets the context for our investigation of the business model and social enterprise innovations that hold the most promise. We draw on an engaging mix of content, case studies, and class guests to develop our own insights."

Replication and reach, accessibility and affordability, effectiveness and endurance -- all key needs for effective global health solutions.

Powers of Ten ~ Zoom Visualization of Cosmos

Thanks to NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day for reminding me of Powers of Ten, a classic educational visualization!

Pearl City ~ China's 42M+ Metropolitan Merger

Thanks to Aftermath News for spotting Malcolm Moore and Peter Foster's piece in the Telegraph that China to create largest mega city in the world with 42 million people...

"City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta. The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales. The new mega-city will cover a large part of China's manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy. Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong."

Yes, yet one more amazing thing here is that neither Hong Kong nor Macao are (yet) formally part of the plan! And to give you a sense of the scale here, this Pearl supercity is the same size in surface area as the entire Netherlands!

Urban Scaling ~ Outstanding, Superlinear Cities...

Thanks to Jonah Lehrer for writing A Physicist Solves the City in the NYTimes about Geoffrey West and colleagues who wanted...

"...to study cities as if they had never been studied before. [West] was tired of urban theory -- he wanted to invent urban science. For West, this first meant trying to gather as much urban data as possible. Along with Luis Bettencourt, another theoretical physicist who had abandoned conventional physics, and a team of disparate researchers, West began scouring libraries and government Web sites for relevant statistics. [...] After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same."

Their paper, Urban Scaling and Its Deviations: Revealing the Structure of Wealth, Innovation and Crime across Cities by Bettencourt et al, spotlights...

"... the fundamental role of nonlinear agglomeration integral to the life history of cities. [...] As a result larger cities are disproportionally the centers of innovation, wealth and crime, all to approximately the same degree. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. New rankings of cities and a novel and simpler perspective on urban systems emerge."

Beyond Fossil Fuels ~ Kristianstad's Conversion

Using Waste, Swedish City Cuts Its Fossil Fuel Use writes Elisabeth Rosenthal in the NYTimes about Kristianstad which...

"...has already crossed a crucial threshold: the city and surrounding county, with a population of 80,000, essentially use no oil, natural gas or coal to heat homes and businesses, even during the long frigid winters. It is a complete reversal from 20 years ago, when all of their heat came from fossil fuels. [...] as befits a region that is an epicenter of farming and food processing, it generates energy from a motley assortment of ingredients like potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines. A hulking 10-year-old plant on the outskirts of Kristianstad uses a biological process to transform the detritus into biogas, a form of methane. That gas is burned to create heat and electricity, or is refined as a fuel for cars. Once the city fathers got into the habit of harnessing power locally, they saw fuel everywhere: Kristianstad also burns gas emanating from an old landfill and sewage ponds, as well as wood waste from flooring factories and tree prunings."

Interesting how generalizable this can be. See also slideshow.

Challenges of Life ~ Start of BBC Nature Series!

Here's the starting sequence -- Challenges of Life -- of the lavish and gloriously photographed new BBC Life Series!

Scaling Education ~ Sramana Mitra on Strategy...

Forbes columnist (and MIT alumna) Sramana Mitra writes in The Education Solution...

"...there is still a stigma attached to online education. Elite institutions do not want to dilute their brands by expanding the reach of their methodology using online channels. This is a mistake, a humongous lost opportunity, and one that needs to be revisited because an astoundingly large number of people in America need retraining and career makeovers right now. In India, China, Brazil and Indonesia, the sheer size of the populations suggests that nothing other than online education can meet the needs of billions of people hungry for an opportunity to learn and secure a passport out of poverty. The adoption of online education has happened largely in the for-profit education world..."

Yes, indeed, and Mitra goes on to spotlight University of Phoenix, Grand Canyon University, LA College, and others. And in our Development Ventures class (and sister offerings) we've been actively exploring mobile offerings and other ways of dialing-up scalable educational experiences for everyone, everywhere. This is a very compelling domain!