MIT Announces 9 African Startup Challenge Finalists, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
These 9 African Startups are Working Toward a More Inclusive World – MIT Sloan Newsroom
MIT Sloan recently announced the nine African startup finalists of The Initiative on the Digital Economy’s Inclusive Innovation Challenge, all of which use technology to “reinvent the future of work.”
Initiative Director Erik Brynjolfsson writes, “If we employ inclusive innovation globally, it could be the best thing that ever happened to humanity. We can have more wealth, better health, and widely held prosperity.”
Here are the 9 African finalists:
- Wefarm provides a “mobile network accessed through SMS, where millions of small-scale farmers can share information.”
- PrepClass connects students and tutors.
- Wesabi connects “skilled laborers to individuals and businesses.”
- Lynk is an “online platform that operates as a hiring service and also a showcase for artisans.”
- Brave Venture Labs provides “talent sourcing software for growing companies.”
- Moringa School “teaches software development and offers professional skills training.”
- Safi Organics “provides small-scale farmers with affordable fertilizer for their crops.”
- Solar Freeze “offers mobile cold-storage units for small farmers to help reduce crop spoilage.”
- AgroCenta is a “digital platform for rural, small-scale farmers to connect with buyers and access financial services.”
The finalists, who will travel to Nairobi, Kenya in late August to “pitch their ideas at a regional competition,” were selected from almost 200 entrepreneurs from 16 countries.
You can read more about the African startup contenders here.
Collaborate, But Only Intermittently, According to New Study by Harvard Business School Professor and Colleagues – Harvard Business School News
HBS has published new PNAS research, which suggests that always-on technologies like Slack, email, and social media are less effective at complex problem solving than “intermittently on.”
HBS’s Ethan Bernstein, along with BU Questrom’s Jesse Shore, and Northeastern’s David Lazer believe their research could have widespread implications on the workplace, such as “alternating independent efforts with group work over a period of time to get optimal benefits.”
Bernstein writes, “As we replace those sorts of intermittent cycles with always-on technologies, we might be diminishing our capacity to solve problems well.”
You can read more about the research here.
Sizing up Markets, Peering into the Future – Carroll School News
BC Carroll recently hosted its annual Finance Conference in which financial experts delivered a surprisingly “upbeat forecast” on global investment, tech innovations, and cryptocurrencies.
Of the conference’s goals, John and Linda Powers Family Dean Andy Boynton ’78 writes, “We want our students to become lifelong learners, people who look for ideas in many different places. We want them to think both deeply and broadly, and to become great leaders for the future.”
Despite the relative stasis of the larger economy, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Professor Nicholas Burns ’78 described this particular moment in American history “consequential” and “chaotic” from a global economy standpoint.
Burns explains that “high on his list of global challenges for the United States is the rising dominance of nations to the East, especially China and India,” particular when the U.S. has not employed “skillful diplomacy and strategic thinking” to accommodate this “coming shift in global power.”
Nicholas Burns (’78), speaking recently at BC Carroll / Photo via bc.edu
He said, “There’s no question that by the next century, we’ll be a Pacific world,”
You can read more about the conference here.
Carroll Dean Shares Advice in Forbes
Andy Boynton, dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, recently published an article for Forbes on “trusting your gut” and how to make better decisions. The article discusses how the advice to “trust your gut” could be a brilliant decision, or could just as easily become a terrible mistake. Boynton explains that “being able to distinguish one from the other is a critical skill for a leader or anyone making a decision.”
So how does Boynton explain when and how you should trust your gut when making business decisions? He gives three rules of thumb for trusting your gut. He first explains that it is helpful to trust your gut when you are in a situation such as working in an environment that is fast-changing and data is not always the best direction to follow. Balancing the data with your instincts, explains Boynton can be a step in the right direction.
