East Africa is one of the epicenters of a vibrant, highly competitive, and quickly-growing industry that sells (on a commercial and for-profit basis) low-power solar energy products to consumers that traditionally cannot access electricity. Although this appears to be good news for the hundreds of millions of people that rely on kerosene and other traditional energy options, surprisingly little is known about east African solar energy customers and the development impacts of the solar products they use. This new study tracks a group of solar customers and products to uncover the needs and habits of consumers, the performance/reliability of products, and the impacts of business model innovations. We are in the early stages of data collection and will present early findings and next steps for the project, so feedback and ideas from the audience are especially welcome.  We seek to identify the most promising niches for solar in East Africa from the perspectives of both solar businesses and their customers.

Neo-liberalism, which became a dominant ideology in policy-making in many countries from the early 1980's, is now blamed for worsening inequality and the 2008 world financial crisis. As the recovery process is moving very slowly due to lingering uncertainties from the Euro crisis, going back to the European model of a welfare state is not a feasible policy direction for most countries. Thus, now is the time to seek a new paradigm for a sustainable capitalism and welfare state, Dr. Sang-Mok Suh argues. He proposes 'welfarenomics,' implying a better balance between economics and welfare.

Welfarenomics means promoting a sustainable calitalism through modifying the neo-classical market economy model in three ways: (1) strengthening the role of government in the areas of formulating & implementing national strategy; (2) increasing social values of business activities through developing new CSV (Creating Shared Value) activities; and (3) creating a habitat for co-development through activating civil society. Welfarenomics also implies promoting a sustainable welfare state through modifying the European welfare state model in three ways: (1) building a foundation for 'workfare' through developing customized job programs for welfare beneficiaries; (2) utilizing various welfare programs as means for social innovation; and (3) improving the effectiveness of welfare programs through applying various management concepts to the field of social welfare.

The presentation will cite some of the recent experiences in Korea, but the concept of welfarenomics can be applied to any country in need of achieving both economic growth and social equity.

For the past four decades, Dr. Sang-Mok Suh has been a policy-making expert in both economics and social welfare. After receiving his PhD in economics from Stanford University in 1973, Professor Suh worked at the World Bank for five years and at the Korea Development Institute (KDI), a top South Korean think tank, for ten years as a researcher. His doctoral dissertation was on the relationship between economic growth and income distribution. In 1986, he led the research team at KDI for formulating the National Pension Scheme for Korea. He was vice president of KDI, 1984–1988. As a Korea National Assembly member, 1988–2000, Dr. Suh played the key role of coordinating economic and welfare policies between the ruling party, on the one hand, and the government and opposition parties, on the other. While he was Minister of Social Welfare, 1993–1995, Dr. Suh formulated a comprehensive welfare strategy for Korea for the first time and initiated the Osong Bio Industrial Complex.

Abstract
We know poor governance when we see it, and we also have models of effective, responsive, and accountable governments across the globe. But the truth is that we know much less about how change happens. The limits of legal reforms and institutional forms imported from the outside are apparent, and additional resources are rarely a solution on their own.  Scholars increasingly agree on the need to develop reforms with greater consideration of local context and capacity.  New technologies create opportunities for institutional design, yet many widely touted interventions fail to attract government and citizen users.

Against this backdrop, Associate Professor of Political Science Jeremy Weinstein and I partnered over the 2012-2013 academic year to design the Governance Collaboratory. Our goal is to use the methods of human centered design to help civil society actors and government reformers develop innovations with the potential to disrupt the status quo. We conceived and tested five prototypes for our program, which involved applying the process of design thinking to various governance challenges around the world. I will discuss the key insights we uncovered relating to the substantive problems we addressed, as well as our findings on the utility of design thinking to support governance innovation.

Jenny Stefanotti is currently a fellow at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, where she applies design thinking to her work at the intersection of technology and international development. She is co-founder of the Governance Collaboratory, a Stanford-based program which supports civil society activists and government reformers to develop innovations that make government more efficient, empower people to have a say in how they are governed, and hold those in power accountable for what they deliver.

Prior to her post at the d.school, Jenny spent over ten years addressing strategic challenges across private, public, and non-profit sectors. She holds a Master’s in Public Administration and International Development from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Professor Yu Keping will systematically survey the dominant processes and key issues of China’s governance changes over the last 30 years since reform. His talk will summarize the major achievements and the ongoing problems of this 30 year long process. It will offer a brief analysis of the underlying reasons for these reforms and the main characteristics of China’s governance model. After enumerating an array of factual evidence, Yu will show that the drive behind China’s governance reforms stems from unitary governance to pluralist governance, centralization to decentralization, rule of man to rule of law, regulatory government to service oriented government, and from internal party democracy to the people’s democracy.

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Dr. YU Keping is the Deputy President of the Central Compilation & Translation Bureau (CCTB), and the founding Director of the China Center for Global Governance and Development (CCGGD). He also serves as Prof. and Director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovations at Peking University, and Prof. and Director of the Institute of Political Development at Tsinghua University. He was a visiting professor or senior fellow at many top universities, including Harvard University, Duke University in the US and Free University in Berlin. His fields of expertise include political philosophy, comparative politics, globalization, civil society, governance and politics in China. Among his many books are Governance and Rule of Law in China (ed., Brill, 2012) and Democracy Is A Good Thing (Brookings, 2010).  As a leading intellectual in China, Professor Yu was selected as one of the “30 most influential figures in the past 30 years since the reform in China” in 2008 and ranked 19 in “2011 Global Top 100 Thinkers” by Foreign Policy in the US.

Abstract
This talk reports on a study about the impact of crowdsourcing on a law-making process in Finland. In the studied process, the reform of off-road traffic law was opened for public participation in Finland. The citizens were first asked to share their experiences and problems with off-road traffic and the regulating law on an online platform. Then the participants were asked to share solutions for those problems. Crowdsourcing resulted into 500 ideas, over 4,000 comments and 24,000 votes, which were analyzed and evaluated both with citizens and experts and using an algorithmic consensus tool. The talk discusses deliberative aspects in crowdsourcing and the usefulness of blended expertise, i.e. the mixture of the crowd's and experts' knowledge, in law-making.

Tanja Aitamurto is a visiting researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. In her PhD project she examines how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation, impacts incumbent processes in journalism, public policy making and design process. Her work has been published in several academic publications, such as the New Media and Society. Related to her studies, she advises the Government and the Parliament of Finland about Open Government principles, for example about how open data and crowdsourcing can serve democratic processes.

Aitamurto has previously studied at the Center for Design Research and at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford. She is a PhD Student at the Center for Journalism, Media and Communication Research at Tampere University in Finland, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in Humanities. Prior to returning to academia, she made a career in journalism in Finland specializing in foreign affairs, doing reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Uganda. She has also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, in Lusaka, and worked at the Namibia Press Agency, Windhoek. More about Tanja’s work at www.tanjaaitamurto.com and on Twitter @tanjaaita.