InnovationAfrica

Researchers look to relatives for clues in quest to develop sources of bioenergy

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:32:14 +0000

ST. LOUIS, MO, May 14, 2012—Arranging DNA fragments into a genome sequence that scientists can interpret is a challenge often compared to assembling a puzzle except you don’t have the box and have no idea what the picture is supposed to be. Sometimes clues from other publicly-available DNA sequences of related organisms can be used to guide the assembly process, but its usefulness depends on how closely related any two sequences are to one another. For example, a reference genome might be so distantly related from the one being assembled, it would be akin to comparing a Model-T to a contemporary hybrid car.

For researchers interested in switchgrass, a perennial grass that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is investigating as a prospective biofuels feedstock, assembling the plant genome poses an even more complicated puzzle than usual because it has multiple copies of its chromosomes. The genome of a close switchgrass relative, foxtail millet (Setaria italica), is described in the May 13, 2012 edition of Nature Biotechnology “Reference genome sequence of the model plant Setaria”.

For Dr. Tom Brutnell, a co-author on the study and director of the Enterprise Institute for Renewable Fuels at the Donald Danforth Plant Center, the Setaria genome is the starting point for his own research interests. “Now that we have the genome sequence, we can kick start the development of genetic tools for Setaria.” His proposal under the DOE JGI’s 2012 Community Sequencing Program builds off the availability of two Setaria genomes, that of foxtail millet and its wild ancestor green foxtail (S. viridis), which is also described in the paper. “What we really want is an Arabidopsis for the Panicoid grasses,” he said, referring to the ubiquitous model plant used by many researchers. “Green foxtail is smaller than foxtail millet—we can get it to flower when it’s just six inches tall and you go from seed to seed in six to eight weeks. In contrast, foxtail millet is a proper crop so it’s taller, has a longer generation time of four months and no one has really developed efficient transformation methods for it. Our project with the DOE JGI allows us to tap the Setaria genomes to fast track S. viridis as a model genetic system.”

One of the challenges in studying grasses for bioenergy applications is that they typically have long lifecycles and complex genomes. Jeremy Schmutz, head of the DOE JGI Plant Program at the HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology, pointed out that foxtail millet (Setaria italica) has several advantages as a model. It’s a compact genome and large quantities of it can be grown in small spaces in just a few months.

“We’re not thinking of Setaria as a biofuel crop per se but as a very informative model since its genome is so structurally close to switchgrass,” said Jeff Bennetzen, a BESC researcher, the study’s co-first author and a professor at the University of Georgia. He originally proposed that the DOE JGI sequence the foxtail millet genome under the 2008 Community Sequencing Program. Schmutz said that roughly 80 percent of the foxtail millet genome has been assembled using the tried-and-true Sanger sequencing platform, along with more than 95 percent of the gene space—the functional regions of the genome. “TheSetaria genome is a high quality reference genome,” he said. “If you want to conduct functional studies that require knowing all the genes and how they are localized relative to one another, then use this genome.”

One such area of study is adaptation. Since it is found all over the world, Setaria is considered a good model for learning how grasses can adapt and thrive under various environmental conditions. Additionally it appears to have independently evolved a pathway for photosynthesis that is separate from that used by maize and sorghum. “With the sequencing of the Setaria genome,” the team noted in their paper, “evolutionary geneticists now have an annual, temperate, C4, drought- and cold-tolerant grass that they can comprehensively compare to other plants that have or have not yet evolved these adaptions.” C4 plants are distinguished by their ability to conduct photosynthesis faster than C3 plants under high light intensity and high temperatures.

The DOE JGI Plant Program focuses on genomes that have been selected for their relevance to DOE missions in energy and environment, and leads the world in sequencing plants in this area. Aside from foxtail millet and switchgrass, other DOE Plant Flagship genomes sequenced include, among others, poplar and soybean. Several of these Flagship genomes are also part of the Gene Atlas project, currently in its pilot phase. Designed to be a reference by which researchers can look up the gene information gathered under several standard experimental conditions, the Gene Atlas is projected to offer researchers a method of interpreting their data by comparing them against “normal” results for these plants. New public releases of these Flagship genomes and of other plant projects occur periodically, and the sequence and analysis is made public at www.phytozome.net.

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Kopo Kopo grows out of incubation at m:lab East Africa

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:14:46 +0000

For Kopo Kopo Inc, a Nairobi based mobile payment services startup, growth could not have been more rapid over the last 12 months. In August 2010, the company was formed, setting up base at the iHub co-working space in Nairobi beginning in early 2011. The company started with a skeleton workforce of two, with Dylan Higgins and Ben Lyon who are its co-founders. A couple of months later the company would succeed to become one of the twenty five mobile startups pitching at the inaugural regional mobile app and developer conference Pivot 25 (now called Pivot East). By the time of pitching at Pivot 25, the company had grown to a team of four by adding Dennis Ondeng and Kibet Yegon to lead the product development team.

The Kopo Kopo team discussing human-centered design

July 2012 was a moment of change for the young company when it won a chance to be one of seven companies incubated at m:lab East Africa’s newly launched facilities. The new incubation space offered a more quiet and dedicated space conducive for team building and “heads down” focus. Incubation at m:lab East Africa also meant improved access to resources, whether investors, mentors, or potential partners.

Apart from raising a Series A financing while at m:lab East Africa, the company also grew its team to twelve by March 2012. Kopo Kopo also completed several iterations of its mobile money-based business intelligence platform and developed an Android version of the service. Other milestones achieved while the company was at m:lab East Africa include establishment of strategic partnerships with mobile operators and business leaders.

Kopo Kopo team at their new premises on 1st floor of Bishop Magua Centre

With the above milestones met and having acquired several hundred enterprise customers, Kopo Kopo officially outgrew incubation at m:lab East Africa on 30th April 2012. The company has since moved location from m:lab East Africa on 3rd floor Bishop Magua Centre to its newly acquired premises on the 1st floor of the same building. The decision to secure space in the same building as m:lab East Africa and iHub was strategic. The company intends to continue tapping into opportunities and access networks associated with being in the technology hub that Bishop Magua Centre has become over the last two years.

Opportunity for Pivot East Finalists

The graduation of Kopo Kopo from m:lab East Africa creates room for other mobile tech startups to join the list of companies benefiting from the Lab’s business growth services. The now vacant incubation slot left behind by Kopokopo is now reserved for the deserving company winning either category of this year’s Pivot East pitching conference on 5th and 6th June 2012

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The First African Internet Standards Forum

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:13:29 +0000

Editor’s Note: This is a Guest Post by Paul Muchene of the iHub Networks Team

The phenomenal success of the Internet as today’s chief communication medium and platform for collaborative sharing and interaction has not been an accident.

There exists core values that have underpinned the Internet’s rise and exponential growth. One of these values is openness. The Internet was and still is designed with an open architecture in mind, this architecture in buttressed by open standards.

Since it’s inception in 1986, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has fostered the development of Internet protocol specifications and has produced a number of high quality drafts and documentation. Internet drafts that have gained traction are codified into a document known as a Request For Comments (RFCs). In IETF lingo, RFCs are the de-facto technical laws by which the Internet requires to function and to function well. Services like E-mail, DNS, IPv4, IPv6… have been extensively defined in numerous RFCs.

Membership to the IETF is open to all. Corporates, academics, government and individual Internet enthusiasts are free to participate in the IETF through joining a working group mailing list. Each working group focuses on eight key specific problem areas such as routing with the intended aim of crafting standards and recommendations.

On 12th May 2012, The first African Internet Standards forum was streamed live from Serekunda in Gambia with remote participation from the iHub. Participants tackled the issue of low African participation in the IETF and what mechanisms can be placed to encourage graduate students, engineers and tech devotees to engage. A panoply of presenters included Michuki Mwangi of the Internet Society( ISOC), Joe Abley of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Joe Jaeggli of game maker Zynga. They addressed numerous questions from local and remote participants especially questions regarding involvement in the IETF. The forum lasted for over four hours and thirty minutes and was both lively and illuminating.

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Startup Business Models within the African Context

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:11:08 +0000

This evening, Afrinnovator will be hosting a Startup-focused event titled “What’s your Business Model?“. Last month we held an event that brought together several seed funds and VCs…

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Egyptian wins US$100,000 African Innovation Prize

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:02:51 +0000

An Egyptian scientist’ has been awarded a prestigious prize for designing an antenna that could facilitate mobile network upgrades.
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The Biggest Obstacle to Innovation? You.

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:21:12 +0000

From HBR

We aren’t being critical with that headline.

But the problem really is you. More specifically, it’s the way you were taught to think. However, don’t feel bad. First, of all you are not alone. All of us have the same problem. Second, and much more important, there is a solution.

But first let’s explain how the problem was created in the first place.

From even before kindergarten, we all were taught to reason in a way that works fantastically well in a predictable world: you establish a goal; you construct a number of plans to achieve that goal; you do tons of research to determine which is the best one; you gather the necessary resources to attain it; and you go out and execute on that superior plan.

We think of this as prediction reasoning, a way of thinking based on the assumption that the future is going to be pretty much like the past. And it is wonderful — in certain situations where we have tons of data and/or experience. Are you a supplier to restaurants and want to know how much your revenues are likely to fall if we go into a double dip recession? There are fairly easy way to find out. Want to know how a 1% increase in housing starts will affect refrigerator sales? That’s predictable, too.

But when you are leading innovation, the world is anything but predictable. You are creating something that has never existed before and so you simply don’t know how the world is going to react. By definition, innovation deals with the unknown.

And that’s why you are the biggest problem when it comes to innovation. If you keep using prediction reasoning in situations that are simply not predictable, you’re bound to be disappointed and frustrated.

You need a different way of thinking.

Our suggestion is to begin thinking like the people who are best at innovating and dealing with the unknown — serial entrepreneurs. After all, there is nothing more uncertain than starting a new business from scratch. In the face of the unknown, serial entrepreneurs act. More specifically they:

1. Take a small (smart) step forward. In starting a new business, it might be asking potential customers what they think about the idea.

2. Pause to see what they learned by doing so. “Gee, the ground seems awfully squishy over there, I better step back and try a different direction.” Or, “in talking to people about X they didn’t seem all that interested, but they kept telling us over and over again if we tweaked it a bit and…”

3. Build that learning into what they do next. It might be presenting a sketch of the modified idea or showing a prototype.

This process is a far cry from the “plan, optimize, execute” of prediction reasoning. But it is precisely the kind of thinking that will let you get out of your own way when you’re leading innovation.

Now, we aren’t suggesting that you eliminate prediction reasoning. There are two reasons we’re not. First, as we have seen, prediction works really well when the future can realistically be expected to be similar to the past and you never want to discard something that works well in a specific situation. The way of thinking we are advocating complements the way you were taught to reason; it doesn’t replace it. Second, entrepreneurs continue to use prediction reasoning effectively in the situations where it works well, i.e., in the places where it is logical to assume that the future will be a lot like what has come before. (“What can we expect in incremental sales from an add-on product;” “How should we go about creating next year’s budget, given this year’s success?”) You always want to use the right tool for the job.

But thinking differently is difficult, especially since prediction reasoning is so ingrained. Let us give you two questions you can ask when you find your way of thinking blocking innovation:

• Instead of thinking some more, is there an action I can take right away?

• Can I make whatever action I just imagined cheap enough so that it lies within my affordable loss?

You may or may not actually take the action, depending on your ultimate judgment. But asking the questions interrupts and sheds light on your thinking habits and it will open you up to different way to ways of solving whatever challenge you face. If you use prediction reasoning when it makes sense, but think like an entrepreneur when it doesn’t, you’ll find you will have eliminated the biggest problem to innovation: You.


	M

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How to Create an Innovation Mission Statement

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:15:14 +0000

Often individuals and organizations tend to get stuck in the mode of talking about innovation and/or trying to understand innovation. The only way to really know innovation is to do innovation, and learn from your mistakes along the way. In this article Harun Asad suggests preparing an Innovation Mission Statement as an initial, action-oriented way to get out of the rhetoric trap.
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How to protect the inventions of the poor

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:11:51 +0000

New models of intellectual property rights are needed to protect — and promote — local knowledge and innovations, says Anil Gupta.
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The Next Digital Revolution in Education? Grading.

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:10:17 +0000

It seems that you can’t go anywhere these days without seeing a new pretender to a digital revolution in education. Just this week, Harvard and MIT launched an online initiative, edX. It follows Stanford University’s digital education initiatives and the start-ups it has spawned, CourseRA and Udacity. Apple (with iTunes U) and now Microsoft (with its deal with Barnes & Noble) are also moving into course materials. And then there has been a longstanding set of course management tools with a dominant and expensive incumbent, Blackboard.

Each of these digital initiatives is aimed squarely at what universities already do: lecturing, providing textbook materials, and managing courses. And each aims to save universities money. Then there are ventures like Khan Academy, which are trying to change the way many students learn. But, again, they aim at a traditional constituency.

But there’s another big group interested in digital learning: employers.

Think about how employers are currently served. The university system spews out trained graduates — but some are more trained than others. How do employers currently sort out who’s who? Well, universities do help some by providing what is a called a “grade,” one for each course the student has taken, printed out on an official transcript, protected with currency-like copying security. But even after reviewing a transcript, employers have to go through a huge, personnel-intensive process of screening applications on a bunch of dimensions that the grade is not telling them. Sometimes that screening process is designed to learn things professors already know: how well a student can write, argue, debate, interact, and ultimately think and be creative. Such duplication of effort implies waste.

The problem is that the grade is an aggregate statistic. A student who wrote a wonderful assignment, but botched a test under time pressure, could still earn an “A.” So could one who rushed an assignment, but is quite good under pressure in an exam. Even worse, the conditions for earning a grade are, to a large extent, arbitrary, with different professors assessing students with different weightings for different courses. Much of that weighting is constrained by “university rules” that basically require that enough of the grade comes from things (like exams) where it is harder for students to cheat. That’s useful for the university, but it isn’t necessarily of the same value for employers.

Enter CoursePeer, one initiative designed to change that. CoursePeer was founded by two brothers, Marwan and Hadi Aladdin. One has graduated and the other is still going through the University of Toronto’s engineering program. Somehow they have managed to set up this venture in their spare time.

CoursePeer is billed as a social academic talent management network, which is, of course, too many words. But here is what it does: it is a platform for professors to interact with students while they take a course, providing an online environment so that professors, tutors, and students can interact. Now that idea is not new. Indeed, last year, I used a blog to do the same thing with my students.

Here’s the innovation: interaction gives professors (and tutors) the ability and opportunity to rate the interactions and activity along a variety of metrics. The basic mechanism is akin to “liking” or “not liking” a student’s contributions. But this is nuanced along a variety of dimensions including innovation, research, leadership, problem solving, collaboration, and curiosity. Earn enough “likes” and the professor can award badges for these qualities. CoursePeer involves a mix of subjective and objective evaluation, but the point is that it is baked into the learning activity.

Here’s where employers come in: CoursePeer has made those metrics and awards exportable so they can be communicated directly to employers. This system has the potential to remove the need for employers to engage in a separate evaluation. In other words, with multiple dimensions, especially on qualities that go beyond pure mastery of a course, employers can learn more about what type of student they are evaluating.

This is entirely new — from the type of information CoursePeer asks professors to provide to the notion of going beyond the grade in providing information to employers. The information is part of the natural activity of education, eliminating waste, not simply expense.

Yes, it’s the early days — and I could spend another post discussing potential impediments — but the value for this type of innovation is clear. Moreover, if the future of higher education is going to be in massive online classes, then we can expect to see even more standardized testing. In that world, the need to go beyond the grade will only increase.

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Out Innovate Bigger Competitors

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:07:52 +0000

Box.net CEO and Co-Founder Aaron Levie explains how his company decided on competing in the enterprise software-as-a-service market. After a competitive analysis, Box realized their product offering was more innovative than many legacy solutions currently being used by large organizations. Levie also articulates the value of using a business model where the sales team is working with customers already in love with your product.
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The Ins And Outs Of Open Innovation

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:33:31 +0000

An article on the Forbes website argues that there is some confusion regarding open innovation, or at least there is a need to cast a wider net around what open innovation is all about. To understand why open innovation has become so popular over the past few decades, it helps to remember what the typical or routine R&D and commercialization process looks like in most organizations. The caricature is one of scientists in white lab coats developing technologies (“R”) and business people developing (“D”) and commercializing (“C”) those technologies.

Click here to read the full article.

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Rewarding Creativity: 3 Lessons on When it Works

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:00:26 +0000

It is well known that intrinsic motivation–the kind that comes from working with a task because it’s interesting, involving and challenging–has the strongest relationship with individual creativity. Extrinsic motivation–especially based on monetary rewards–has a detrimental effect on creativity. But is this really true? In this article, we’ll explore how to reward creativity and realize that everything may not be as it seems.
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Technical creativity needs nurturing at the grassroots

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:59:07 +0000

Efforts to promote sustainable development must tap into technologies developed locally, driven by community needs and priorities.
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Supporting grassroots innovation: Facts and Figures

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:57:49 +0000

Adrian Smith and colleagues explore grassroots innovations, their potential for development and challenges facing practitioners.
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Development focus for Côte-d’Ivoire research fund

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:56:29 +0000

Young researchers in Côte-d’Ivoire are to benefit from new research funds targeting projects in sustainable development and poverty alleviation.
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