Innovation Institute: Sustainable China

Mr. Aramburu favored starting a for-profit business over a nonprofit organization because, as he puts it, “I believe in the notion of doing good and doing well at the same time.”

He had also noticed that generations of entrepreneurs before him were more focused on making money than on solving global problems. But among younger entrepreneurs, that tension appears to be lessening. “I don’t think we can continue the business as usual of just trying to maximize profits,” he says.

Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources. Good curators are valued members of knowledge networks. Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing. Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues. The multiple pieces of information that we capture and share can increase the frequency of serendipitous connections, especially across organizations and disciplines where real innovation happens. As Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From says; “chance favors the connected mind”.

So what do we do? This cascade of self-perpetuating, pernicious, negative effects could seem like something that's spun out of control, and there's nothing we can do about it, certainly nothing we as individuals could do. But in fact, we've been finding in our own laboratory research that small psychological interventions, small changes to people's values, small nudges in certain directions, can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy. For instance, reminding people of the benefits of cooperation, or the advantages of community, cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian as poor people.

We’ve seen them now in the squares of Tunis, Cairo, Istanbul, New Delhi, Damascus, Tripoli, Beirut, Sana, Tehran, Moscow, Rio, Tel Aviv and Kiev, as well as in the virtual squares of Saudi Arabia, China and Vietnam.The latter three countries all have unusually large numbers of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube users, or their Chinese equivalents, which together constitute a virtual square where they connect, promote change and challenge authority. The most popular Vietnamese blogger, Nguyen Quang Lap, has more followers than any government newspaper here. In Saudi Arabia, one of the most popular Twitter hash tags is #If I met the King I would tell him.”

Square People one way or another “are demanding a new social contract” with the old guards who’ve dominated politics. “The people want their voice to be heard in every major debate,” not to mention better schools, roads and rule of law.

Yes, there’s a certain satisfaction in being critical of our authors, but isn’t it more interesting to put ourselves in a frame of mind to find inspiration in them?

The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not totally without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers — or, to use a currently fashionable word on campus, people who like to “trouble” ideas. In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the chance to learn as much as possible from what they study.

two traditions: of critical inquiry in pursuit of truth and exuberant performance in pursuit of excellence. In the last half-century, though, emphasis on inquiry has become dominant, and it has often been reduced to the ability to expose error and undermine belief. The inquirer has taken the guise of the sophisticated (often ironic) spectator, rather than the messy participant in continuing experiments or even the reverent beholder of great cultural achievements.

to understand what’s really going on, the climate jigsaw puzzle needs to be complete. That, says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, is where climate modeling comes in. The discipline synthesizes data from multiple sources, including satellites, weather stations, even from people camping in the Arctic and submitting measurements of the ice they see around them. Climate modeling, Schmidt says, gives us our best chance of understanding the bigger picture of the world around us. “We take all of the things we can see are going on, put them together with our best estimates of how processes work, and then see if we can understand and explain the emergent properties of climate systems,” he says. These four silent animations show what he means.

given skepticism about China from Africa’s own increasingly vibrant civil society, which is demanding to know what China’s billions of dollars in infrastructure building, mineral extraction and land acquisition mean for the daily lives and political rights of ordinary Africans.

at the start of a four-country African trip, Prime Minister Li Keqiang acknowledged “growing pains” in the relationship, and the need to “assure our African friends in all seriousness that China will never pursue a colonialist path like some countries did, or allow colonialism, which belongs to the past, to reappear in Africa.”

China takes our primary goods and sells us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of colonialism.”

We are encouraged by the recent announcement of MIT accepting maker portfolios as part of their college application process. Portfolios are often described as a more authentic means of assessment than the traditional classroom test.

At this point, coal mining accounts for only one-sixteenth of 1 percent of overall U.S. employment; shutting down the whole industry would eliminate fewer jobs than America lost in an average week during the Great Recession of 2007-9.

Every morning as a child, I'd watch thousands of men walk down that hill to work in the shipyard. I'd watch those same men walking back home every night. It has to be said, the shipyard was not the most pleasant place to live next door to, or indeed work in. The shipyard was noisy, dangerous, highly toxic, with an appalling health and safety record. 2:34 Despite that, the men and women who worked on those ships were extraordinarily proud of the work they did, and justifiably so. Some of the largest vessels ever constructed on planet Earth were built right at the end of my street.

He said, "What the hell are you gonna do?" ♪ 11:23 ♪ I said, "Anything but this!" ♪ 11:26 ♪ These dead man's boots know their way down the hill ♪ 11:29 ♪ They can walk there themselves and they probably will ♪ 11:32 ♪ But they won't walk with me ‘cause I'm off the other way ♪ 11:35 ♪ I've had it up to here, I'm gonna have my say ♪ 11:37 ♪ When all you've got left is that cross on the wall ♪ 11:40 ♪ I want nothing from you, I want nothing at all ♪ 11:43 ♪ Not a pension, nor a pittance, when your whole life is through ♪ 11:46 ♪ Get this through your head, I'm nothing like you ♪ 11:49 ♪ I'm done with all the arguments, there'll be no more disputes ♪ 11:54 ♪ And you'll die before you see me in your dead man's boots ♪

So the procession is moving at a stately pace down my street, and as it approaches my house, I start to wave my flag vigorously, and there is the Queen Mother. I see her, and she seems to see me. She acknowledges me. She waves, and she smiles. And I wave my flag even more vigorously. We're having a moment, me and the Queen Mother. She's acknowledged me. And then she's gone. 13:50 Well, I wasn't cured of anything. It was the opposite, actually. I was infected. I was infected with an idea. I don't belong in this street. I don't want to live in that house. I don't want to end up in that shipyard. I want to be in that car.

Allowing Cubans to sign cellphone contracts helped swell the state coffers but gave citizens a tool for information and communication. Every little move toward flexibility has provided some economic relief to the administration and, simultaneously, a relative loss of control.

“Raúlist reforms.” The octogenarian leader appears to know that if he speeds up change, the entire sociopolitical model could dismantle before his eyes. While he keeps delivering the same message and proclaiming that changes are “for more socialism,” the reality makes it clear that Cuba is transitioning to a sort of capitalism exempt of labor rights and civic freedom.

A growing number of Cubans build their own receivers to enjoy television programming from Florida. Copies of those shows, popularly known as “the package,” are distributed on USB sticks or external hard drives by clandestine networks.

we sometimes forget that cultural differences represent profound psychological differences. The critical question for all nations is, “How can we engage globalization without losing our traditions?” For traditions are our links with the past. How do our traditions become integrated into some new worldview?At its core, globalization is not about communications technology; it’s about personal identity. It goes to the psychological foundations of a people. It is the process of realizing that wherever we come from, from now on, we are “one people” with one destiny.

WILLIAM V. WISHARD Lake Ridge, Va., May 27, 2014 The writer is a former trends analyst and author of “Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning.”