Jonathan Bays is a consultant in McKinsey’s New York office; and Paul Jansen is a principal in McKinsey’s San Francisco office.
Back in the 18th century, the inability to accurately measure the longitude of a ship’s position made transoceanic voyages high-risk ventures—for investors as well as sailors. The answer? In 1714, the British government offered a cash award of £20,000 to anyone who could develop a way of precisely determining a ship’s longitude. Nearly 300 years later, prizes meant to spark solutions to complex problems are experiencing a renaissance.
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The Stanford Social Innovation Review is written for and by social change leaders in the nonprofit, business, and government sectors. Sample articles of particular interest to readers of What Matters are available below.
- Revitalizing Struggling Cities
by Ben Hecht. Living Cities is working with five US municipalities to develop an ecosystem for solving urban problems.
- Picking Green Tech's Winners and Losers
by Clayton M. Christensen, Shuman Talukdar, Richard Alton, and Michael B. Horn. Unless clean tech follows well-established rules of innovation and commercialization, the industry’s promise to provide sustainable sources of energy will fail.
- McKinsey Quarterly : Social Innovators are using prizes to spur solutions to difficult societal problems
- Center for American Progress: Can social impact accelerate social innovation?
- Bloomberg BusinessWeek: America’s most promising social entrepreneurs
- The New York Times: Venture philanthropy and the foreign aid revolution.
- Wired magazine: Massive biometric project gives millions of Indians an ID
08 Jan 2012 · 04:50:11 PM GMT
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In response to Telling the world’s stories to promote change
23 Dec 2011 · 03:48:12 AM GMT
Agree. Data Analytics has been left as only a commercial corporate concept for a long time; with Governments only relying on a 5-yearly census to get key statistics.Social data as it is generated from social media is a powerful Risk Management and So...—Mthandeni Mathabela
In response to Harnessing big data to address the world’s problems
21 Dec 2011 · 03:56:38 PM GMT
Gary and Matt, When I was a child in India in the 1950s, there was a question that was continuously being asked by those in government, universities, private industry and public-sector organizations: “How do we feed all our people, when we ...—Ajay Bhatla
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19 Dec 2011 · 01:44:09 PM GMT
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