Robert Shaw's blog

Looking for help....

I’m organizing a couple of innovation related workshops at ITU World Telecom on 27 October in Geneva, Switzerland at the Palexpo venue next to the airport – you can find out more about World Telecom at world2011.itu.int and the agenda is here.

These workshops are not presentation-based – they’re about interactive participation by delegates. We want to together tackle specific challenges in hands-on action-based workshops.

Each session lasts 90 minutes. A maximum of 30 delegates to Telecom World 2011 will come together to share experiences, lessons learned, emerging best practices and to network with peers from around the globe. Together you’ll co-create potential solutions to the outlined challenge and formulate co-created recommendations that will feed into the Telecom World 2011 Manifesto for Change.

Open Innovation Workshop 1: The Challenge: Innovation for Development – and how ICTs can help?

09:00-10:30

We can sum up the goal of innovation for development as discovering new ways of creating opportunity for those in developing countries to meet their aspirations for a better life. How can ICTs be best used to foster innovation for development? Innovation rarely comes in big leaps – it takes the form of what Steven Berlin Johnson calls ‘slow hunches’ – small tweaks and refinements to what already exists. That’s why virtually every new idea or advancement often has several originators – the time and conditions for emergence were just ripe. What are some of the big ideas in the innovation field currently being discussed that are perhaps “ripe for emergence” and how can we use ICTs to apply them to development challenges?