Welcome to Business Innovatoins...2009

Business Innovations students:

I look forward to meeting you all on Thursday afternoon and to kicking off what should be a great semester. We have provocative and inspiring ideas and examples to cover together in a topic that gets both more timely and more sophisticated all the time. I look forward to discussing these with you and for all of us to learn from your diverse and experiences.

As noted in the syllabus, the topic of business and development naturallly lends itself to provocative conversations about what we care most about and how we can apply our skills to achieve it. To facilitate this interaction, we have set up this blog. In addition to encouraging you to post interesting articles you see or ideas you have related to our coursework, we will also use the blog to post weekly questions on the required readings that I will use as the basis for navigating the following session. Your timely answer to these questions is both very helpful in setting up the class discussions and measured as part of your class participation grade. These questions will rarely take more than a few minutes to answer but offer an invaluable pulse of your perspective on the course material. We will post questions on the day after each session and need answers by Wednesday evening of the following week so that we have time to collate and analyze them before the Thursday afternoon session.

The first questions should be up soon. They do not require you to have completed the reading firstWe do have a few required readings for the first session. These are all relatively short but set the context for the course. In the event you are not able to get your coursebooks before Thursday, I have sent you an email to your Columbia address with the readings attached--please let Mara know if you did not receive this email. They are:
--Case study: this is a brief write-up on one business innovation to revive a domestic cashew processing industry in Mozambique. This is background to a role-play exercise we will conduct on Thursday
--UNDP report: Read Ch 1-2 (~20 pages) of this report (and more if you are particularly interested). This was a breakthrough report for one of the most important development agencies to acknowledge the potential in private sector and business-led development approaches and touches on many themes we will find later in the course
--Philanthrocapitalism--a counter-point to the "good news" you will read elsewhere about the role of the private sector in development. This attack on business-oriented charity and development work caused quite a stir when it came out last year
--Global Monitoring report: introduction--this is the World's Bank annual overview of the global economy. It provides important context for the beginning of our discussion about the relative gains and pains experienced by poor countries during the recent commodities boom and global economic crisis.

Mara De Monte, our TA, will be able to answer any any questions you have on course logistics. If you want to contact me directly, email me at antonybugglevine@gmail.com (rather than my Columbia address) though I am not always able to answer immediately.

I look forward to seeing you on Thursday,

Prof. Bugg-Levine