̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Jaideep Prabhu

Fish bellies, fava beans and food security

plc32 — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 15:20:27 +0000

Cambridge Zero and Cambridge Global Food Security gather academics and experts to share solutions for the planet’s looming food production problem.

Farm to factories

plc32 — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 16:51:02 +0000

Cambridge Zero collaborates with Cambridge Global Food Security Interdisciplinary Research Centre (IRC) and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Decarbonisation Network for two research events in March 2024 that look at industry decarbonisation and food security.

Cambridge academics elected 2023 British Academy Fellows

jek67 — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 11:30:28 +0000

Professor Jaideep Prabhu and Professor Sujit Sivasundaram join the latest cohort of Fellows which highlight the depth and breadth of the SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy) disciplines and reflects the importance of interdisciplinary research.

Founded in 1902, ̽��ֱ��British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Each year, it elects to its fellowship up to 52 outstanding UK-based scholars who have achieved distinction in any branch of the humanities and social sciences.

Professor Jaideep Prabhu is a Professor of Marketing, the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business & Enterprise at the Judge Business School and Director of the Centre for India & Global Business. He is also a Fellow and Director of Studies at Clare College.

He said: “I am delighted to be joining such a distinguished group of academics, not only in my area of Management and Business Studies, but also across the Humanities and Social Sciences. I look forward to working with the other Fellows of the Academy on issues of importance to the UK and the world where the Humanities and Social Sciences have a crucial role to play. I owe a debt of gratitude to all those I have worked with over the years, and in particular my colleagues at Cambridge. This wouldn’t have been possible without them.”

Professor Sujit Sivasundaram is a Professor of World History and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College. He is currently working on the long history of Colombo as an exemplar of the global South city and also on an environmental history of the Indian Ocean. You can read a recent interview with Professor Sivasundaram in This Cambridge Life.

He said: “World history is about reaching for unexpected places to bring light to the human present and future. Research in this field is necessarily and fittingly collaborative and builds on the insights of librarians, curators, students and intellectuals, among others, in various places in the world. I thank all my friends, spread so far and wide, for pointing me to the right path in my research. This honour belongs to all of them.”

Welcoming the new Fellows, Professor Julia Black, President of the British Academy, said:

“It is with great pleasure that we welcome yet another outstanding cohort to the Academy’s Fellowship. ̽��ֱ��scope of research and expertise on display across our newly elected UK, Corresponding and Honorary Fellows shows the breadth and depth of knowledge and insight held by the British Academy. It is our role to harness this to understand and help shape a better world.”

Two academics from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have been elected Fellows of the British Academy as part of a new group of leading international humanities and social sciences researchers.

̽��ֱ��British Academy

̽��ֱ��British Academy building

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Engineer's humanitarian mission to insulate thousands of bomb and bullet-damaged homes in Ukraine

sb726 — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 08:06:02 +0000

A window that takes 15 minutes to build – designed by a Cambridge PhD student who has paused his studies – is transforming the lives of Ukrainians living in war-damaged homes.

“Elegant” algae solution wins Cambridge Zero student Climate Challenge

plc32 — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 16:02:58 +0000

Team AlgaeSorb’s winning pitch persuaded a panel of innovation experts to award them the top prize of £1500 for an idea, which judge Dr Nicky Dee, Founder of climate-focused venture capital group Carbon13, described as “elegant”.

“ ̽��ֱ��Climate Challenge was an incredible opportunity to not only meet like-minded students, but learn invaluable skills on crafting and designing impact-driven projects,” said Team AlgaeSorb’s Anish Chaluvadi, a Gates-Cambridge Scholar and Nanoscience and Nanotechnology PhD student at King’s College.

̽��ֱ��team also includes Nanoscience and Nanotechnology PhD student Timothy Lambden (Girton College) and Tristan Spreng, a Natural Sciences Masters’ student (Trinity College) and President of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Energy Technology Society.

“ ̽��ֱ��Climate Challenge was one of the most exciting and well-organised events I got to attend during my four years at Cambridge," Spreng said. "From the breadth of speakers at the seminar sessions to exchanging ideas with other participants during the launch and final events, it was a truly amazing experience.”

Eight teams gathered in the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership’s (CISL) newly retro-fitted Entopia building to pitch ideas ranging from using machine learning to create algorithms for flood risk to crunching satellite data for locating wall-mounted solar panels.

̽��ֱ��judging panel also included serial entrepreneur Simon Hombersley, Professor Jaideep Prabhu, the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise at the Cambridge Judge Business School, Lindsay Hooper, Executive Director of CISL and Chris Gibbs from the ̽��ֱ��’s technology transfer unit Cambridge Enterprise.

Dr Dee said AlgaeSorb was a brilliant entry by a mixed team, which drew on different country experiences and expertise across chemistry, physics and materials sciences.

“As a result they developed an elegant solution to tackle methane in the Global South where other landfill solutions are not available and in a way that supports the local communities,” she said.

In between pitches, experts such as Professor Prabhu and Cambridge Zero Director Professor Emily Shuckburgh offered insights on sustainable innovation and its importance in the race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Dr Amy Munro-Faure, Cambridge Zero’s Head of Education and Student Engagement led a quick game that mixed teams for spontaneous pitches, which resulted in a wild melange of ideas that included saving dolphins and travelling through time.

̽��ֱ��eight-week Climate Challenge programme is run in partnership with CISL Canopy, Carbon13, Energy IRC, Cambridge Enterprise, the Maxwell Centre and sponsored by Moda Living. Competing teams undertake training and develop early-stage proposals for solutions to tackle climate challenges in innovative ways.

Each year there is a new theme. This year’s theme, “A Just Transition”, asked teams to consider the social impacts of their climate solutions.

Two runner-up teams were awarded a prize of £750. FireSight, formed of Jovana Knezevic and Onkar Gulati, pitched a risk assessment and consulting service to address global wildfires using remote sensing and machine learning. Carolina Pulignani and Shannon A. Bonke of Wastevalor fascinated the judges with their technology that converts waste into methanol.

Team Reckon, made up of Aparna Holenarasipura Sreedhara and Akanksha Sahay, won the Audience Choice Award for their software as a service platform entry. ̽��ֱ��software gives organisations the ability to measure the social impact of their climate transition plans.

Judges said the Climate Challenge was a powerful demonstration of how innovation and the determination to tackle climate change permeate every level of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� community.

“Helping build the entrepreneurial mindset in the ̽��ֱ�� ecosystem is critical to the innovation agenda and particularly crucial for a true net zero where over half the innovations needed for 2050 are still in the lab,” Gibbs said.

A team of student entrepreneurs who see algae as a potential business solution for reducing methane emissions from landfill and waste-water sites won the 2023 Cambridge Zero Climate Challenge after a nail-biting competition.

̽��ֱ��climate challenge was one of the most exciting and well-organised events I got to attend during my four years at Cambridge

Tristan Spreng

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Opinion: How ‘frugal innovation’ can fight off inequality

cjb250 — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 13:59:25 +0000

Inequality is the defining social, political and economic phenomenon of our time. Just 1% of the world’s population now holds over 35% of all private wealth, more than the bottom 95% combined. Bad as this may seem, trends suggest that the situation will only get worse. Addressing it will involve multiple strategies working together, but one which is less well understood is how simple, affordable solutions to people’s problems can make a genuine difference from the bottom up.

One way of measuring inequality is known as the Gini coefficient. It gives us a useful and straightforward number between zero and one, where zero represents perfect equality where everyone has the same income, and one expresses the maximum of inequality. In the countries which make up the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the Gini was at 0.28 in the mid-1980s, but increased by 10% to 0.31 by the late 2000s.

Inequality is a global problem. In the form of absolute poverty, it exists across countries. About 4 billion people – more than half the world’s population – live on less than US$9 a day. But inequality is also a problem within countries. By the late 2000s, income inequality measured by Gini had risen in 17 out of the 22 OECD countries – in Finland, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Sweden and the US, it increased by more than 4%.

̽��ֱ��cold, hard truth of inequality. ̽��ֱ��Hamster Factor/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Making demands

Inequality is also a problem that exists on both the demand and supply sides of the economy. On the demand side: large numbers of people are excluded from the fruits of the economic process as they lack access to basic healthcare, education, nutritious food, and clean energy. This is largely an emerging world problem, but it is also increasingly a problem in the developed world.

On the supply side, large numbers of people are excluded from the economic process because they are shut out of employment in high-value-adding industries which rely heavily on skills and technology. This is largely a problem in the developed world where globalisation and tech have hollowed out manufacturing, but it is a problem in some developing countries too.

My work over the last decade leads me to believe that an important part of the battle against inequality lies in what could be termed frugal innovation. Simply put, it is about applying human ingenuity to create faster, better and cheaper solutions for more people in core areas such as financial services, health, education and energy. We can call it “frugal” because this is not about massive state-level or corporate investment, but it is about developing and delivering affordable technologies and ideas to meet basic needs at scale. This has the potential to address both supply and demand side aspects of inequality.

On the demand side, developing these frugal solutions across sectors promises to include large numbers of people currently without access to affordable financial services, education, and healthcare. Indeed, such a frugal revolution is already taking place in emerging markets in South Asia, Africa and Latin America. In India, such solutions in healthcare are bringing free or highly affordable services to large numbers of people in areas as diverse as cataract and heart surgery and prosthetics. Across the country, Devi Shetty has applied medical and management principles to reduce the cost of heart surgery to US$1,200 while maintaining global quality standards. He wants to get the price down to US$800.

Mobile payments in Kenya. WorldRemit Comms/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

In Africa, an earlier telecoms revolution is now driving a second generation of frugal solutions in key sectors such as financial services. M-Pesa, an SMS-enabled service that enables unbanked people to send and receive money though their mobile phones, has empowered over 25m Kenyans (many of whom have small businesses) to improve productivity and gain access to revenue-generating opportunities. Such mobile based payments are in turn driving affordable market solutions in areas such as solar lighting for those living beyond the reach of the electricity grid.

Similar frugal solutions in clean cookstoves, medical devices, transport, pharmaceuticals, sanitation, and consumer electronics are positioned to drive growth in Asia and Africa over the next few decades, helping to raise millions out of absolute poverty in the process.

Job makers

On the supply side, frugal innovation offers the possibility of generating more high value adding employment for more people, particularly in Western economies. Big corporations are increasingly lean and no longer hire the large numbers of people they did in the past. And so entrepreneurship is more than ever a key driver of growth, both in terms of output as well as in generating employment. Young people entering the workforce can no longer expect to be job takers; increasingly, they are expected to be job makers.

Luckily, they are now more empowered to do so: small teams of people can set up new companies and achieve scale in ways that weren’t possible before.

New tech for old problems. Keith Kissel/Flickr, CC BY

Technologies such as cheap computers, sensors, smartphones, and 3D printers are enabling such teams to invent and prototype in ways that were only available to large corporations or government labs in the past. This in turn has given rise to the maker movement where budding inventors can tinker in Make Spaces and Fab Labs with other like-minded people and develop solutions to problems they face in their communities. Ideas that have come out of Tech Shops and Make Spaces include the Embrace Baby Warmer and Simprints, a biometric device to manage medical records in the field in developing countries.

If these “makers” wish to commercialise their solutions, they can crowdfund the capital needed, outsource the manufacturing, list their products on amazon.com to help with distribution and use social media to spread the word. Indeed, such “maker spaces” could well morph into the high tech, local, sustainable factories of the future, delivering high value adding, creative manufacturing opportunities to cities where 20th-century polluting manufacturing has been systematically weakened over the last few decades, and where lost jobs in those sectors have sharpened inequality.

While most politicians and policy makers fulminate and flounder in their attempt to deal with rising inequality worldwide, a quiet frugal revolution is already addressing the problem right before their eyes. ̽��ֱ��state need not be a bystander. Now is the time for governments to sit up, take notice and spur this revolution on. Doing so could help save their societies and economies before it is too late.

This article has been co-published with the World Economic Forum.

Jaideep Prabhu, Director, Centre for India & Global Business, Cambridge Judge Business School

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

With inequalities set to get worse, it’s time to take radical action, says Jaideep Prabhu, Director of Centre for India & Global Business, Cambridge Judge Business School, writing for ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Could the answer lie in the ‘frugal revolution’ that is already under way?

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Study identifies different ways to help social businesses grow

sc604 — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 01:00:00 +0000

Social businesses – those with a socially beneficial objective – can play an important role in developing countries in addressing needs such as healthcare, energy, education and sanitation, but such businesses have faced a difficult time scaling up to significant size and reach.

A new study by researchers from Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� has identified four key strategies and two methods for social businesses to scale up, which could help them reach many more of the four billion people in developing countries who could benefit from the services of such businesses.

Meeting these needs through affordable and sustainable solutions offers businesses a vast opportunity for future growth. As developing markets emerge from low-income to middle-income status, their development offers businesses the potential to make profits while also delivering significant social impact.

̽��ֱ��study, published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, identifies market penetration, market development, product development and diversification as the four key growth strategies at different stages of business maturity for social businesses. In parallel, the study found two ways of increasing income generated through these four strategies – increasing revenue per stream and diversifying revenue streams.

Previous studies in this area had focused on scaling up conventional for-profit businesses and NGOs, but there had been little research on scaling up profit-generating social businesses.

Social businesses have had difficulty scaling up in developing countries due to a lack of infrastructure such as roads and electricity, coupled with a lack of clear property rights and well-functioning courts. On a more encouraging note, new technology such as mobile phones and new business structures such as public-private partnerships now make it easier for such businesses to find ways to reach new consumers.

“Social businesses have enormous potential to provide important services to billions of people around the world – but they need to scale up in order to meet these needs,” said study co-author Professor Jaideep Pradhu from Cambridge Judge Business School. “This study is a first step to greater understanding in this area, but we need a lot more work to support the development and growth of such businesses.”

̽��ֱ��study focused on three successful social businesses – development organization BRAC, eye care company Aravind and Amul Dairy.

BRAC, one of the world’s largest NGOs, serving 135 million people in 11 countries in areas ranging from nutrition and sanitation to microfinance, uses “replication and diffusion” as a key to its successful efforts to scale up. To reach people in dispersed regions, for example, BRAC used village societies and village intermediaries to train people, testing solutions in local communities and improving them before expanding to larger communities.

Aravind Eye Care runs a number of hospitals and eye care centres in India, treating more than three million people a year to fight blindness in the country. In order to scale up, Aravind chose to increase the number of hospitals and centres in a given region – and then diversified activities by adding a manufacturing unit, staff training and a research department.

Amul Dairy, an Indian co-operative of three million milk producers, began to scale up by increasing the number of milk producers in the state of Gujurat followed by establishment of a processing plant to produce dairy products from excess milk. A partnership with the government then helped Amul to expand across India and into other countries.

All three companies used almost all the different scaling-up methods at one point in their development, suggesting that all strategies are important to achieve scale and that companies need to mix and match different strategies.

Based on the case studies, companies with a clear single purpose (Aravind and Amul) might start with ‘simpler’ strategies such as market penetration, while companies like BRAC with broader goals will need a more diverse approach.

Reference:
Nancy M.P. Bocken, Alison Fil, and Jaideep Prabhu. ‘Scaling up social businesses in developing markets.’ Journal of Cleaner Production (2016). DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.08.045

Adapted from a Cambridge Judge Business School press release.

New study identifies four strategies and two key methods for scaling up social businesses in developing countries in order to meet the unmet needs of more than four billion people.

Social businesses have enormous potential to provide important services to billions of people around the world – but they need to scale up in order to meet these needs.

Jaideep Prabhu

Aravind Eye Care System

Community Eye Health

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Opinion: How frugal innovation can kickstart the global economy in 2016

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 11:20:40 +0000

In late 2015 a Cambridge-based nonprofit released the Raspberry Pi Zero, a tiny £4 computer that was a whole £26 cheaper than the original 2012 model. ̽��ֱ��Zero is not only remarkable for its own sake – a computer so cheap it comes free with a £5.99 magazine – it is also symptomatic of a larger “frugal innovation” revolution that is taking the world by storm.

With the global economy struggling, this is the kind of innovation that could kickstart it in 2016. Empowered by cheap computers such as the Raspberry Pi and other ubiquitous tools such as smartphones, cloud computing, 3D printers, crowdfunding, and social media, small teams with limited resources are now able to innovate in ways that only large companies and governments could in the past. This frugal innovation – the ability to create faster, better and cheaper solutions using minimal resources – is poised to drive global growth in 2016 and beyond.

More than four billion people around the world, most of them in developing countries, live outside the formal economy and face significant unmet needs when it come to health, education, energy, food, and financial services. For years this large population was either the target of aid or was left to the mercy of governments.

More recently, large firms and smaller social enterprises have begun to see these four billion as an enormous opportunity to be reached through market-based solutions. These solutions must, however, be frugal – highly affordable and flexible in nature. They typically include previously excluded groups both as consumers and producers. Bringing the next four billion into the formal economy through frugal innovation has already begun to unleash growth and create unprecedented wealth in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But there’s much, much more to come.

Good news

Take the case of telecommunications. Over the last decade or so, highly affordable handsets and cheap calling rates have made mobile phones as commonplace as toothbrushes. In addition to bringing massive productivity gains to farmers and small businesses – not to mention creating new sources of employment – mobile phones also enable companies to roll out financial, healthcare and educational services affordably and at scale.

Take the case of Safaricom, Vodafone’s subsidiary in Kenya. In 2007 the company introduced M-Pesa, a service that enables anyone with a basic, SMS-enabled mobile phone to send and receive money that can be cashed in a corner shop acting as an M-Pesa agent.

This person-to-person transfer of small amounts of money between people who are often outside the banking system has increased financial inclusion in Kenya in a highly affordable and rapid way. So much so that more than 20m Kenyans now use M-Pesa and the volume of transactions on the system is more than US$25 billion, more than half the country’s GDP. M-Pesa (and services like it) have now spread to several other emerging markets in Africa and Asia.

Similar frugal innovations in medical devices, transport, solar lighting and heating, clean cookstoves, cheap pharmaceuticals, sanitation, consumer electronics and so on, have driven growth in Asia and Africa over the past decade and will continue to do so in the decades to come.

Catching on

Meanwhile the developed world is catching up. Declining real incomes and government spending, accompanied by greater concern for the environment, are making Western consumers both value and values conscious.

̽��ֱ��rise of two massive movements in recent years, the sharing economy and the maker movement, shows the potential of frugal innovation in the West. ̽��ֱ��sharing economy, exemplified by Airbnb, BlaBlaCar and Kickstarter, has empowered consumers to trade spare assets with each other and thus generate new sources of income. ̽��ֱ��maker movement, meanwhile, features proactive consumers who tinker in spaces such as FabLabs, TechShops and MakeSpaces, designing solutions to problems they encounter.

Square, a small white, square device that fits into the audio jack of a smartphone, using its computing power and connectivity to make credit card payments, is an example of a product that was developed in a TechShop. Launched in 2010, the Square is on track to make US$1 billion in revenue in 2015.

Frugal innovation not only has the power to drive more inclusive growth by tackling poverty and inequality around the world, it is also increasingly the key to growth that will not simultaneously wreck the planet. ̽��ֱ��big issue at the Paris climate summit was the increasing wedge between the developed and the developing world. On the one hand, the rich countries cannot stop the poor ones from attempting to achieve the West’s levels of prosperity. On the other, however, poor countries cannot grow in the way the West did without wrecking the planet.

̽��ֱ��only way to square this circle is to ensure that the growth is sustainable. ̽��ֱ��need for frugal innovation is therefore all the more vital in areas such as energy generation and use, manufacturing systems that are more local, and a move to a circular economy where companies (and consumers) reduce, reuse and recycle materials in a potentially endless loop.

Never before have so many been able to do so much for so little. Aiding and stimulating this frugal innovation revolution holds the key to driving global growth by employing more people to solve some of the big problems of poverty, inequality and climate change that stalk the planet.

Jaideep Prabhu, Director, Centre for India & Global Business at Cambridge Judge Business School, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Inset images: M-Pesa stand (Fiona Bradley); Square readers (Dom Sagolla).

Jaideep Prabhu (Cambridge Judge Business School) discusses the frugal innovation revolution that is taking the world by storm.

G. T. Wang

Raspberry Pi B+

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