International Development Design Summit (IDDS) Aims to Help Developing Countries

Recently there was an interesting event held at MIT: International Development Design Summit. The goal of the event is to design technologies that can improve people’s lives in the developing country:

Using a bicycle wheel to thresh millet, making LEGO-like bricks from dirt, or hooking up an electric generator to an irrigation pump may not save the world, but such simple projects could go a long way toward improving the lives of millions of people living in the world’s developing countries. That’s the guiding principle behind a month-long summer workshop at MIT that wrapped up today. Its goal was to develop simple, inexpensive devices that can make a real difference for people and communities.

The goal of this initiative reminds me of Mohammad Yunus’s microloan initiative. The microloan idea seems simple but it has big impact. This initiative - hopefully - will have similar impact.

MIT Commencement Talk by Muhammad Yunus

The speech at MIT’s commencement this June was delivered by Muhammad Yunus, an economist who won Nobel Prize in 2006. From the original article:

Citing his own in experiences in going against all conventional wisdom in the pioneering creation of Grameen Bank in his native Bangladesh–the forerunner of what is now a multibillion-dollar worldwide trend in microlending–Yunus said such businesses have a fundamentally different philosophy than conventional companies that see their prime obligation as the maximization of profit.

What’s needed, Yunus said, is to “reformulate the concept of a businessman”–not to replace the present model, but to offer another alternative that people can choose to follow. Such new-style businesspeople, he said, would have as their goal not maximum profit but “achieving some predefined social objective.”

Interesting points. If only more people go against conventional wisdom, the progress we see will be much faster.

Video of the speech is available here.