Social Impact

So You Want to Control Your Own Destiny, Do You?

Founder motivations and control for impact entrepreneurs Lean Startup  is great for finding scale opportunities, quickly, You make assumptions, discover your customer needs, run some tests, and you can quickly get feedback that you’re either on the right track, or need to start again. Yet one thing that tends to stop founders from even asking

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Biofabricate

Looking forward to the multiple disciplines being convened at the Biofabricate conference – and the chance to thread environment impact assessment, health impact, startup ethics, and the precautionary principle. ‘BIOFABRICATE’ is the world’s first summit dedicated to biofabrication for future industrial and consumer products. Biofabrication comprises highly disruptive technologies enabling design and manufacturing to intersect

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Bodies and Buildings Class 1: Intro to Systems Thinking

Have we reached the limits of growth:   Bodies are in trouble right now – despite reaching the peak of productivity the US now leads the world in the rampant growth of chronic diseases that lower life expectancy, and reduce life quality. “People are living longer than projected in 1990 — on average, 10.7 more

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Bodies and Buildings NYU ITP Syllabus for 2014

Bodies and Buildings Fall 2014 Syllabus NYU ITP Instructor: Jen van der Meer jd1159 at nyu dot edu Mondays 6:30 – 9:25 PM 721 Broadway at Waverly Why is it so hard to care for our planet and ourselves? We seem hungover from a century of prosperity and ingenuity, unable to invent economic models that

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Lean Customer Discovery Needs Design Research

When you are in a startup, under the gun, trying to execute – how do you find time for empathy? Lean launchpad simulates entrepreneurship by requiring founders to get out of the building…and into their customer’s world. Teams succeed when they start talking to people, and find the magic in actually validating their hypotheses with

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8 Principals for Designing for Dignity in Health Tech

Thanks all for the great discussion, in real time at StrataRx and on the Twittersphere. Is it enough to design for a great patient experience, improved health outcomes, and overall cost reductions in health care? While incentives may soon change, the idea of data-driven solutions to improve health care is not a new one. Yet

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