Development Lab: Development Impact Lab (DIL)
Overview
Science and technology can create major breakthroughs in international development, but social and economic barriers such as market and institutional failures sometimes prevent potentially transformative innovations from reaching the word’s poor. In partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL), the UC Berkeley Development Impact Lab (DIL) will bring together world-class science, engineering, and economics to change the way new technologies for development are designed and distributed in the developing world. The Lab’s ultimate goal is to create a new field of Development Engineering that integrates science, engineering and social sciences and formalizes the use of advanced science and technology to understand and address development problems.
Background
The Lab will build on pioneering work by UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies which, together with the Center for Effective Global Action, has strategically combined social science expertise with engineering, natural sciences and public health to generate comprehensive, demand-driven solutions to development challenges. The Lab will also incorporate the work of the new development institute, LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies (LIGTT). DIL will train a new generation of development practitioners and innovators drawn from all academic disciplines by building on the Blum Center’s undergraduate minor in Global Poverty and Practice. The Lab will also integrate and expand the BigIdeas@Berkeley competition, which provides funding, mentoring and encouragement to promising student-led initiatives at the product development, testing and scaling phases. These elements, together with the launch of a new academic field of Development Engineering, will engage a rich ecosystem of scientists, engineers, and economists working together on global development issues.
Planned Activities
| Innovation Pipeline | A series of faculty and student targeted challenges, prizes and seed grants to identify and support high-potential innovations throughout the process from great ideas to scaled interventions. |
|---|---|
| Demonstration Portfolio | Managed portfolio of development solutions drawing on new technological breakthroughs that will be shepherded through the pipeline of research, field evaluation, translation and scale-up. |
| Development Innovation Toolkit | Web-accessible "Development Innovation Toolkit" of hardware, software, information and data to enable others to generate and manage their own innovation pipelines. |
| Development Engineering | A new field of Development Engineering (DevEng) with a graduate curriculum, a designated Ph.D. emphasis, post-doctoral fellowships and a new, peer-reviewed Journal of Development Engineering. |
Goal
Bring together the best of engineering, economics and social sciences to shepherd innovative technological breakthroughs in energy, health and information and communication technology through design, evaluation and scale-up, with the ultimate aim of improving the lives of at least one million people at the base of the economic pyramid.
Last updated: February 22, 2013
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