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Indian participants in the 2009 Global Social Benefit Incubator

India is represented strong in the list of participants from the 2009 Global Social Benefit Incubator, which is a program led by SocialEdge and Santa Clara University that “assists social benefit entrepreneurs in developing business plans that enable their organizations…

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Open Innovation in India

Close on the heels of Shivam’s post on the open innovation tool, Innocentive, I am excited to write about the Open Innovation Portal, backed the Centre of Excellence in E-governance at Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi), along with Sun Microsystems and Knowledge Commons.

One very important point…

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StartingBloc Institute for Social Innovation – Boston 09

TCI had mentioned the StartingBloc fellowship earlier, and this past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the Greater Boston institute at MIT Sloan and Tufts Fletcher School.  To provide some background on StartingBloc, the organization holds three institutes in Boston, New York and London,…

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TC-I welcomes Shivam Srivastava as Part Time Writer

The ThinkChange India team is proud to introduce Shivam as one of our new part-time bloggers. A quick introduction of Shivam:

Shivam Srivastava is currently a WiMAX systems engineer at Motorola, Inc, where he designs and deploys wireless networks for rural…

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Transfer money after the beep

Here is an interesting approach to the technological hurdles of mobile banking. Called Cashnxt, this venture in Kerala, uses high-pitched sounds via mobile phones to encrypt and decrypt the secure data needed to perform a financial transaction. An article on…

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[Guest Post]: Financial Literacy and Microfinance – New Research

Editor’s Note: Aparna Dalal works with the Financial Access Initiative, a research consortium between New York University, Harvard, Yale, and Innovations for Poverty Action. FAI is focused on finding answers to how financial services can better meet the needs of poor…

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Soundbites from Nancy Barry, former President and CEO of Women’s World Banking

Last night I had the good fortune of sitting in on a talk given by Nancy Barry, a pioneer in the field of creating private, market-based solutions to poverty alleviation for women across the globe. Her talk was very powerful…

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The Size of India’s (And Your) Water Footprint

While reading an article called “Water Footprints Make a Splash,” I was immediately intrigued by the concept of a water footprint. What exactly is a water footprint? Author Ben Block uses coffee to illustrate:

If the full water requirements of a…

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Making condoms cooler through cellphones

It’s definitely an out of box and innovative idea, and could be just what is needed to make the word ‘condom’ more socially acceptable in India. The BBC World Service Trust has launched a condom ringtone for cellphones, a 45 second…

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Making a List, Checking It Twice

The Summer Olympics takes place every four years. So does another, lesser-known event: the Copenhagen Consensus Conference (CCC). The forum involves a group of established and renowned economists discussing the world’s problems, and then prioritizing ways to address those issues. A…