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 to reach increasing numbers of beneficiaries.”  The following individuals, and their associated organizations, will be [...]

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 to note in the list of objectives on their site An individual with [...]

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, whose goal is to bring together a cadre of 150 young leaders with a passion for social innovation. [...]

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 parts of South and Central America. Shivam hopes to combine his passions of engineering [...]

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 ReadWriteWeb, explains it as such: As a customer, if you and a vendor are a [...]

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 households. FAI aims to provide rigorous research on the impacts of financial access and [...]

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 and on many points, spot on accurate in my opinion. A veteran of the World [...]

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 morning roast are calculated – farm irrigation, bean transportation, and the serving of the [...]

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 short which repeats the word condom over and over again [via BBC World Service Trust] [...]

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 2005 video from TED Talks features Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish political scientist, who explained [...]