Masters in Social Entrepreneurship

From the GMU Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Clearly I think this is a great step forward for the field:

It's Official! A Master's Degree in Social Entrepreneurship

Mason is proud to announce officially the launch of our Masters in Social Entrepreneurship. Enrollment begins immediately for the Fall 2012 semester. If you've always dreamed of traveling with sensei-like faculty on an interdisciplinary path to becoming a social enterprise black belt, your dream has come true. We welcome applicants from around the globe and from all undergraduate majors for this two-year program. Only a handful of universities in the world offer a graduate degree in Social Entrepreneurship. Interested? Complete this form and we'll keep the details flowing to you.

Prizes as Incentives

We've covered the use of prizes as an incentive mechanism several times before, but NPR has an interesting piece on this today. I like this example of competition based procurement policy (NPR):

Napoleon offered 12,000 francs to improve upon the prevailing food preservation methods of the time. Not surprisingly, the purpose was to better feed his army "when an invaded country was not able or inclined to sell or provide food". Fifteen years later, confectioner Nicolas François Appert claimed the prize. He devised a method involving heating, boiling and sealing food in airtight glass jars — the same basic technology still used to can foods.

Let that sink in for a minute. "Fifteen years later, confectioner Nicolas François Appert claimed the prize." 15 years! The X-prize, arguably a more complicated challenge, was initiated in 1996 and claimed in 2004 (< 10 years.) There is a persuasive argument that we are in a period of great stagnation and that it is increasing difficult to create new inventions and to bring them to market, as we have already picked the "low-hanging fruit" as Tyler Cowen says. These dark projections of the future are one possible path, but stagnation, as I'll discuss in an upcoming series of posts, is not the only trend currently shaping our economy.

The NPR piece is based on a recent NYT article, which itself is based in part on a report by Knowledge Ecology International that catalogs historical examples of prizes. The report is here.

The Coming Prosperity

New book by Philip Auerswald, and the subtitle is: How Entrepreneurs are Transforming the Global Economy. You can preorder at Amazon. Doing so affects the publishers decision to print more or fewer copies of the book, so if you think it's interesting, order now.

Phil has started blogging the book. Here's one discussion on fear (Ch. 13), from his section on what's ahead for America.

Here's a talk he gave on the Hill, summarizing some of the main points behind his approach.

Publication of NoVa Clean Energy Economy Report

Produced by GMU's David Hart and a small team. Some details:

The Clean Energy Report represents an effort by a small group at the George Mason University School of Public Policy to estimate the size and sketch the contours of the “clean energy economy” of northern Virginia. It is, by any definition, a rough draft. We relied on publicly available data in order to identify firms, government agencies, and other organizations that contribute to improving the region’s energy efficiency and expanding its renewable energy use. We have sought to make our methods and findings as transparent as possible.

The report and additional info are here. The authors are currently seeking feedback so if you want to help out take a look and see what, if anything, they're missing.

xkcd on standards proliferation

Schumpeter in Africa??

Few people will contest the assertion that most of the entrepreneurial growth in this century will take place in BRIC countries (actually mostly India and China).

But Africa?? Africa, we hear, has too many little nondescript inchoate domains with a big-man at the top calling themselves nation states, while still struggling to curve a synthetic national identity out of the vestiges of a colonial past.

I argue that all that is changing; has changed.

Africa is democratizing, Africa is integrating. Africa is growing up.
The so-called “Arab Spring” is in fact the tail end of a long African Summer.



The newest of the regional integration programs is COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite Summit. The Tripartite is an umbrella organization consisting of three of Africa’s Regional Economic Communities (REC’s), namely: the East Africa Community (EAC), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).



COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite Summit will focus on expanding and integrating trade and include the establishment of Free Trade Areas (FTA’s), Custom Unions, Monetary Unions and Common Markets, as well as infrastructure development projects in transport, information and communications technology and energy.

With more than 527 million people and a Gross domestic product (GDP) of approximately 624 Billion US Dollars, the 26 member countries of the Tripartite make up 57% of the population of the African Union (AU) and just over 58% in terms of contribution to GDP.

Africa: 53 Countries, One Union – The New Challenges conference

‘Africa: 53 Countries, One Union – The New Challenges‘ conference will take place in Washington, DC on June 15 and 16, 2011.

Download the preliminary Conference Program

The main objective is to offer to senior policy makers and experts the opportunity to discuss the relevance of regional and continental integration in the solution of major African problems, including those generated by recent developments which now challenge our concepts of freedom and democracy.

The Conference will focus on the roles of the United Nations, African Union, European Union and the United States and China governments. International organizations such as the World Bank, African Development Bank, World Trade Organization, and Economic Commission for Africa will also be involved.

Some Growth

We're pleased to introduce the newest contributor to our blog, Jeremiah Mitoko, a PhD student at George Mason's School of Public Policy. He will be writing about entrepreneurship, development, investment, and microfinance in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa more broadly. We look forward to many new and exciting posts from Jeremiah.

The Silicon Valley of the East

From a supplement to National Journal (NJ), also reposted on the Atlantic's site, with a different title (Atlantic):

Fairfax County is home to a quarter of all immigrants in metropolitan Washington and to 40 percent of the area's foreign-born Indians. It's no wonder that on a recent Thursday night at Worldgate Centre, a strip mall one block north of the Dulles Toll Road, almost 20 South Asians--mostly young families or groups of young men--streamed through the glass doors in just a matter of minutes to catch a movie.

KiranTeja Chadalawada was with friends on his way to see the Telugu-language film 100 Percent Love. A 22-year-old immigrant from southern India who is pursuing a master's degree in telecommunications at George Mason, he moved to Fairfax County in 2009 for school because a friend from India recommended it. "A senior from college was studying here and said it was a great [place] to learn and get an internship," Chadalawada said. After racking up a few years of experience in Virginia, he hopes to start a company of his own--but not in Virginia: He and his pals "are looking to go back to India," he said.

Increasingly, the members of the next generation of Indian entrepreneurs are looking to the East. They feel pulled by India's economic vigor and also pushed out by the daunting rules for U.S. visas. Advocates of immigration find it foolish to force smart, ambitious people to leave the United States simply because they were born elsewhere, especially after American taxpayers have invested so much in educating them.

"These guys create jobs," said Michael McVicker, an immigration lawyer whose Reston, Va., office is near the Dulles Toll Road. "They've created jobs for thousands of people, the vast majority of whom are Americans."

It was time for immigration reform a long time ago, but now is a fine time to get started.

Science Progress

A couple of FB friends have posted links to articles on Science Progress in the past couple of days, so I figured they're worth passing along here.

1. The first article covers elementary school teachers and the crisis in STEM education:

   Prospective teachers can typically obtain a license to teach elementary school without taking a rigorous college-level STEM class such as calculus, statistics, or chemistry, and without demonstrating a solid grasp of mathematics knowledge, scientific knowledge, or the nature of scientific inquiry. This is not a recipe for ensuring that students have successful early experiences with math and science, or for generating the curiosity and confidence in these topics that students need to pursue careers in STEM fields.

2. The second covers data driven vs hypothesis driven research:

   the change in approach is this: Instead of designing an experiment to test a defined, preconceived hypothesis, researchers first amass large banks of information and then wade through them with the aid of powerful computers to unearth biologically pertinent findings.

3. I'll add a third article, to make this a nicely numbered list. "Waves of Innovation" discusses innovation cycles:

   In As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution, a seminal work in cliometrics—the study of economic history—Chris Freeman and Francisco Louçã use historical data on technological advances, economic structure, salaries, and political unrest to derive a clear pattern linking innovation to the performance of the economy. These generational cycles of invention, expansion, and depression are called “Kondratiev waves” in honor of Nikolai Kondratiev, the Russian economist who first postulated their existence.