The Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship hosted an international forum at Stanford University on Innovation Beyond Boundaries: Partnerships for Advancing Smart, Green Living from June 29 to 30. The forum gathered leading thinkers and practitioners to advance understanding and practice on the important topic of public-private partnerships for innovation. Dr. Kristina Johnson, former Under Secretary of Energy, and Dr. Curtis Carlson, President and CEO of SRI International provided the opening and closing keynotes respectively.

Around the world, innovation at the intersection of information technologies and clean energy is a major activity. The challenges for smart, green living require innovation across organizations, industries, disciplines, and countries. Some of the most important efforts are not those of government or industry alone but from public-private partnerships. These kinds of partnerships were actively discussed at the forum. Throughout the two-day event, experts from academia, government, and industry addressed lessons from the United States, Asia, and Europe.

Key questions probed by the speakers and the participants included roles of public-private partnerships and other forms of collaboration playing to advance innovations in smart, green industries, such as in the built environment and intelligent transportation; innovations in processes, models, and platforms that are leading the way; the results from living labs, leading cities, and other outstanding examples of public-private partnerships around the world; and the implications for business strategies and the impact of government policies to nurture advancement in these partnerships.

This forum was an invitation-only exchange in which approximately 70 participants shared experiences about multi-company collaborations, public-private partnerships, non-profit partnerships, and government-funded consortia.

The Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted two events in May, which brought together the technology and activist communities in support of a common cause-Egypt. The Program benefitted tremendously from the presence of two Egyptian activists, Ahmed Saleh and Sabah Hamamou, who traveled from Cairo to share their experiences and contribute ideas to help build a community between Tahrir Square and Silicon Valley. These events were coordinated by Stanford and Silicon Valley technology firms interested in leveraging their expertise in technology innovation to provide practical benefits for pro-democracy activists in Egypt and beyond.

On May 14, the Program on Liberation Technology in partnership with the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, Code the Change (a Stanford student group), CloudtoStreet, and Platform d, organized a Hack-a-Thon for Egypt at Stanford's design school. This event attracted more than 80 computer engineers, programmers, technologists, academics, activists, and members of the public. All expressed a firm commitment to volunteer their skills and time towards the development of technology applications to aid activists.

Volunteers connected in real time with Egyptian activists through videoconference and live presentations where they described the type of applications that would be beneficial to their work. Programmers and designers in the room listened intently as ideas for the following technologies were proposed; mobile phone applications for political mobilization, web-based training for election monitors, a crowdsourcing platform for constitutional negotiations, and a tool to monitor the Egyptian parliament.

Ahmed Saleh, a political activist and founder of the Kifaya movement (the Egyptian Movement for Change), provided a personal account of the revolution, captivating the audience's attention with his details of the 18 days leading up to President Mubarak's fall. Sabah Hamamou, a journalist and blogger, emphasized social media's impact on the public's capacity to organize and connect.

Hackers quickly got to work dividing into groups to begin designing the prototypes for some of the suggested applications. Sketching out designs on whiteboards and developing basic code, programmers worked late into the evening on four tangible projects: a web platform to crowdsource constitutional negotiations, a content management system for an Egyptian watchdog group to increase citizens’ ability to hold politicians to account, an election monitoring training and certification interface, and new visualizations of Twitter usage data emerging from the 18 days of protests.

Going forward, the teams will work with their Egyptian counterparts to scale-up their projects into applications with practical and broad application. The CloudtoStreet project led by CDDRL visiting scholar Ben Rowswell will work to incubate several of the projects and maintain connections with their Egyptian partners to aid in the implementation phase on the ground. A follow-on event to the Hack-a-Thon is planned for the summer quarter of 2011 to encourage the teams to continue the development of applications.

The second event hosted by the Program on Liberation Technology on May 20, brought executives from Google and Facebook to Stanford to explore social media's impact on democratic transition. More than 40 gathered to hear from Egyptian activists Saleh and Hamamou who spoke at length about their direct experience using social media and its impact on the uprisings.

According to Saleh, "Facebook had a humble start in 2008 (in Egypt) but quickly became viral when activists coordinated a national strike on April 6. This shocked the security services but they quickly learned from their mistakes.” The We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page communicated the message of the revolution, Saleh explained, but it still took a great deal of social mobilization to convince people to join the protests in Cairo. Once the power was cut, Saleh told the audience, the "keyboard activists" were then inspired to go to the streets.

If it wasn't for the world watching (the revolution) I am not sure we could have done it.
-Sabah Hamamou

Hamamou showed a variety of YouTube videos featuring cartoons poking fun at the deposed regime, which were produced by small Egyptian media companies. In doing so, she highlighted the fact that social media is becoming increasingly more popular in Egypt as politicians and civil society groups use this tool for civic education and outreach. Sabah explained this by noting that "people want alternative ways of being entertained outside of traditional media." She continued by pointing out that, "if it wasn't for the world watching (the revolution) I am not sure we could have done it."

Both activists outlined practical steps that the technologists in the room could take to help aid their efforts. Saleh underscored the importance of secure communication, which is an enormous challenge for activists who are confronted with sophisticated technologies used by regimes to survey their communication. With limited funds, activists are unable to afford expensive circumvention systems and require software and secure tools that provide user-friendly and cheap solutions. Saleh ended by emphasizing that these secure communication technologies can save lives and are urgently needed.

Hamamou suggested that Silicon Valley-based technology companies should expand their grant-making and philanthropic programs to include Egypt where they can engage directly with NGOs on the ground. She specifically highlighted YouTube's Partnership program and Google's digital journalism grant, which currently have no formal presence in Egypt. A representative from Google explained that engagement in Egypt requires them to comply with local laws to use the Egypt domain, requiring them to censor materials that are not permitted by the authorities. These laws and limitations make it challenging to maximize freedom of expression in this kind of environment.

Both events allowed the Program on Liberation Technology and its partners to match the technological ingenuity of Silicon Valley with the needs of activists in Egypt. Looking forward, the Program will be building on the applications created and the community established around this cause to make a more profound impact on the efforts of pro-democracy activists in Egypt and beyond.

Note: News of the Hack-a-Thon spread quickly through both the traditional and social media sectors, eliciting a great deal of interest and coverage of this event. The initiative was featured on the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page, home to over 100,000 international members generating an upwards of 350 "likes" and 80 comments. In addition, Fast Company.com published an article on the event and the Financial Post of Canada mentioned the CloudtoStreet project in their business section. See the links below to read more:

• http://business.financialpost.com/2011/05/26/the-myth-of-the-social-media-revolution/
• http://www.fastcompany.com/1755509/hacking-the-egyptian-revolution
• http://dschool.stanford.edu/2011/05/24/prototype-tools-for-change-in-egypt/

The Europe Center at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and The Stanford Center for Innovation in Learning announce the Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom Memorial Fund in memory of Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom to be used to support fellowships and activities designed to support Stanford-Sweden international exchange.

The Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom Memorial Fund is dedicated to build upon and grow the relationship originally fostered by Stig Hagstrom between Stanford University and Sweden in academic and cultural aspects by funding official speakers, students, and events to the benefit of the University and Swedish society.

Gifts in support of this fund will be used for the provision of cross-cultural opportunities for collaboration, both academic and social (for example, coffee afternoons, film nights, speaker events).

Contact and donor information: Those wishing to donate to the Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom Memorial Fund may use the contact below.

Checks, made payable to Stanford University--in Memory of Stig and Brita-Stina Hagstrom, may be sent to:

Neil Penick
Hagstrom Memorial Fund
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

Email: npenick@stanford.edu
Tel: (650) 723-8681

Details on the programming in the Stanford-Sweden relationship may be found below.

During a talk on May 13, Dr. Robert Kneller, a visiting professor at the Stanford Medical School, examined how national systems of industry-university cooperation impact innovation by comparing the Japanese system with that of the United States. Dr. Kneller has spent 13 years as a professor with the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, a major science and engineering research center at the University of Tokyo.

His talk showed how the Japanese system favors exclusive transfer of academic discoveries to established companies. It also examined other factors affecting science and engineering entrepreneurship in Japan. The talk referenced recent research showing that, at least in pharmaceuticals, new companies are more likely than old to pioneer the early development of novel technologies, especially those arising in universities. Japan's experience is relevant to current debates in America related to university management of intellectual property, entrepreneurship by faculty and students, appropriate ways to encourage industry-university collaboration, and the importance of peer review in allocating government university research funding.

New technologies can improve agricultural sustainability in developing countries, but only with the engagement of local farmers and the social and economic networks they depend on, say Stanford University researchers. Their findings are published in the May 23 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Most people tend to think that technology information flows to farmers through a direct pipeline from scientists, but that isn't true," said lead author Ellen McCullough, a former research fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment, now at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The study was co-authored by Pamela Matson, dean of the School of Earth Sciences and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford.

To better understand how farmers decide to adopt new technologies, the researchers interviewed growers, farm credit unions and agricultural experts in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, Mexico – the birthplace of the "green revolution" in wheat and one of Mexico's most productive breadbaskets.

Matson and other Stanford researchers have been working in the Yaqui Valley for nearly 20 years. Among their objectives is demonstrating how science can inform agricultural policy in an area grappling with the kinds of environmental challenges that plague other intensive farming regions.

While Yaqui Valley supplies most of Mexico's wheat, the environmental costs are high, according to the Stanford researchers. Valley farms pollute local drinking water, wreck coastal ecosystems and foul the air with particulates that cause a variety of diseases.

"If scientists want to offer solutions to manage these environmental impacts, they need to understand what influences farmers' decisions about technology and production strategies," McCullough said.

Growers in Mexico's Yaqui Valley are more likely to adopt sustainable farming technologies that have been endorsed by local credit unions.

Credit union clout

In Yaqui Valley, credit unions hold sway among the majority of farmers, McCullough said. In addition to providing loans, crop insurance, fertilizer and seed, credit unions have taken over the government's role in providing technical expertise and management advice.

Valley growers also have a long history of working with the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a world-renowned agricultural research center known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT.

But interviews conducted for the PNAS study revealed that most farmers take their cues from local credit unions and not from experts at CIMMYT. As an example, McCullough pointed to a collaborative effort between CIMMYT scientists and farmers to develop a nitrogen diagnostic tool that reduces fertilizer use without sacrificing crop yields.

The device, which gives real-time readings of nitrogen levels in the soil, proved early on that it could save farmers 12 to 17 percent of their profits. Yet most farmers rejected the new technology until CIMMYT researchers finally convinced credit union officials that it was a worthwhile investment.

"The most successful innovations that have been adopted by farmers in the Yaqui Valley have come from collaborations among researchers, farmers and local establishments, like the credit unions," McCullough said. Because of their considerable influence among farmers, credit unions should be included in any effort to effect environmental change in the region, she added.

"The Yaqui case negates the simplistic view of the one-way flow of scientific information from the agricultural research community to the user community," Matson said. "If researchers seek to produce relevant knowledge that ultimately influences decision making, they must recognize the dynamics of the local knowledge system and participate purposefully and strategically in it."

The research was supported with grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Over thirty-five scholars from sixteen different universities in the United States, Japan, and Europe gathered in Bechtel Hall for a two-day academic conference entitled Entrepreneurship and Japan's Transformation.

At the conference, twelve new papers exploring aspects of Japan's entrepreneurial environment were presented from academic fields such as political science, economics, strategy, and organization theory. The papers and discussion examined new developments in Japan, including potential opportunities opening up after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake. Topics ranged from new firm profitability, the politics of firm creation, management of innovation, and large firm entrepreneurial processes in Japan. The goal was to lead toward a better understanding of the nature of entrepreneurship, and how analyses of Japan might inform more theoretical discussions.

The conference also opened and closed with panel discussions featuring prominent experts on Japan's economics, social systems, business, and government, who discussed the effects of the great earthquake on Japan today as well as the possible impact on future research about Japan. The papers and discussions presented at this conference will be presented for publication in various journals and also compiled into an edited volume.