I am currently a second year MBA student at the Yale School of Management. I graduated from Indian Institute of Technology in 2006 with a major in Electrical Engineering. Thereafter, I worked with British Telecom as a consultant where I was primarily involved in strategy and planning. At BT, I held a cross functional profile that spanned around Crisis Management, Strategy, Technology, Finance and Project and Vendor Management. I am passionate about the telecom/technology sector and am extremely interested in the emerging markets. I will graduate from Yale School of Management in May, 2011.

At Yale, my interests lie in Strategy, Finance and Technology. I spent the last summer with Zephyr Management, a Private Equity fund in NYC. I also interned with IBM in Business Performance Services. I head the South Asian Business Forum at the School of Management and am also a member of the organizing team of Asia Tomorrow- Yale’s premier student run conference.

Sasha Vyash, my team mate, is a second year MBA student at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She has a master’s degree in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (India). She is actively involved in the South Asian Business Association and consulting club at Tuck. She has extensive experience in the retail and analytics industry. Before Tuck, she worked for an Analytics firm called Dunnhumby. At Tuck, she majors in Marketing and Strategy. She spent the last summer with Fidelity and would be joining McKinsey & Co. in June, 2011. She has a huge interest in economic development and emerging markets.

Having spent a major part of lives in India, we have been constantly exploring areas and opportunities for development in the emerging markets. Emerging markets, due to the dynamic, ever changing landscape presents a challenge to the entire business community. There are principally two challenges involved here- to construct innovative business models that are sustaining and more importantly, touch the base of the pyramid. In our opinion, emerging markets are revolutionary because there is a huge room for innovation and entrepreneurship in these regions. As we challenged ourselves to come up with good solutions, we heard of the Economist Innocentive challenge. This was an excellent platform for us to showcase our idea and also gather feedback and response from the rest of the innocentive community. We have a good mix in our team. I have a background in engineering. So, I have a good grasp of things from an implementation perspective. Sasha has a background in Economics thereby proving the bigger macroscopic picture. In addition, both of us being MBAs have a fair knowledge of the other factors that are crucial for a sustainable business model. Winning the challenge has been absolutely thrilling for us and we definitely look forward to solve more challenges here!

Summary of the Proposal

Our idea revolves around leveraging the telecom revolution in emerging markets and using sophisticated analytics techniques to enhance the agriculture value chain. Our tool- Agro-Engine would help identify trends and deliver unique insight to farming communities, processing plants and retails giants that would help them in investment management and portfolio optimization. The scope of this tool is huge in emerging markets.

Background: The advent of 3G services (in developed and emerging markets) has laid the foundation of a seamless information exchange platform that would connect the rural markets. The challenge lies in bridging the huge digital divide and using this to further advance the rural population. Presently, a large number of farmers allocate their resources based on their legacy and word of mouth. Processing plants and retail majors have no ways to identify or predict future supply and thus cannot optimize their investments.

We propose the conceptualization of a data driven, Portfolio Management Tool that would help the industry identify trends based on historic data and performance. The tool is apt for developed economies where there is already sufficient telecom penetration. Agro-Engine would aid farming communities and large corporate giants in the retail and agriculture sector in allocating their resources and optimizing their portfolio. For example, a typical farmer’s portfolio would consist of crops he intends to grow on his land. Our analytics tool would incorporate multiple inputs such as previous track record, financial constraints, risk appetite and time to market. The tool would leverage the 3G revolution in developing economies through rural penetration and existing rural infrastructure. With increased usage and data availability, the tool would become more and more robust and gain credibility in identifying trends and delivering useful recommendations.

Below is a summary of the winning solution from Andrew Deonarine.  To see a larger version of the image, right click and select “view image”

In locations such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, children, teens, and adults do not have access to education. Many are illiterate, and cannot make use of books and other learning material. While some technologies, such as inexpensive laptops and tablets have been proposed to address the educational needs of this population, the devices are too expensive, require some degree of literacy, and are difficult to implement in resource poor areas. However, cellular phones have significant penetration in the world’s poorest countries, since they provide a means to make a living. In essence, they comprise a global, untapped computer network.

In this solution, I have presented a cellular phone based technology called EduCell that develops and distributes educational material using a method called PhoneCasting. PhoneCasting allows someone to write their own educational program using their phone and distribute it to other devices. EduCell consists of a piece of software that that runs small multi-lingual “scripts”, easily developed by local teachers in developing countries. Scripts are then assembled with multimedia to create interactive modules that teach reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. Modules can then distributed (PhoneCasted) to millions of other phones via an Internet server, or pre-loaded, at no cost. The benefits of the PhoneCasting technology are significant: a software programmer or knowledge of English is not required to produce content, which democratizes software development. This would, for the first time, make basic literacy and educational material accessible to hundreds of millions of cellular phone users, and their children, around the world.

–Dr. Andrew Deonarine

Below is Tristram’s summary of his solution:

Imagine a school house in a Nicaraguan village. One hundred students, each with nothing but a laptop, independently engage in their lessons. A precocious twelve year-old collaborates with an Ecuadorian peer on a biology project about rural water contamination over the cyber school learning platform. To her right, an eleven year-old, who tended the family’s coffee plot for the past year, plays a computer game to practice basic addition.

In this cyber school, semi-automated teaching systems power an individualized education. Students learn basic concepts, broken into independent lesson modules, through a mix of multi-media programming, games, interactive assignments, and live teacher contact. Structured peer interactions build creative and critical thinking skills. The teacher’s primary task, then, is not to “stand and deliver” but to facilitate student movement through pre-designed lessons. On the ground level, social workers supervise the school house; encouraging students, engaging parents, and creating the socio-emotional foundation required for academic success.

Grade levels do not exist. Rather, students advance through a course sequence outlined in the primary and secondary school curricula, each of which has a distinct purpose. While primary school teaches the minimum skills and knowledge required for participation in economic and civic life, secondary school prepares students for a vocation or university.

Combined, these elements form a scalable school model. Automated teaching technologies keep costs low by enabling high student-to-teacher ratios. Centrally managed courses improve quality. Local support systems ensure widespread access. Children in the developing world enjoy a newfound opportunity to realize their potential.

Below is Daniel’s summary of his solution:

I approached the Challenge for a 21-st Century cyber school as a design challenge, and thus technology as a component of the solution, not the entire solution. I focuses first and foremost, on establishing learning as a value. Learning must be introduced to students where they are, not where others wish them to be. Learning must be made contextual. Technology cannot exist without policies and practices that offer safety and health, family reinforcement, including parenting practice, and community involvement.

When it comes to technology, we must avoid repeating the failed practices of the West that often introduce technology for the sake of technology. In my design technology introduction must match readiness, and be appropriate and contextual to individual learning objectives. Technology must augment the delivery of instruction, not replace it. I believe it is imperative that the learning environment itself be part of the solution, with open source at the core, so that learners can help improve the software as they use it for learning.

Personalized learning delivered through content services will be central to next generation learning systems, regardless of where they are deployed. This approach to content strips away artificial containers and allows instructors to mix and match content, with the aid of business intelligence-like tools that align components to learning styles. In this way, the educator can concentrate on outcomes while software helps configure individualized instruction to help learner achieve the desired outcomes. This also implies a deep historical understanding of the learner, and his or her learning style.

The future of education will be global, mobile and individualized. This solution seeks to integrate those elements into a comprehensive design—one that refrains from being too optimistic about technology’s ability to transform learning. Any workable solution must start with parents, communities and governments, least those who invest in transformation find their money spent on expensive learning baubles, while those who we seek to reach subsist in squalor and oppression. A 21st Century cyber school is but a part of a bridge to the future, and it will do little good without a complete structure to support it.

Today we’re featuring a solution we received from InnoCentive Solver, Joseph Pegna, which focused on freezing MC252 while it was still blasting oil into the cold waters at the bottom of the Gulf.

The purpose of Pegna’s solution was not to contain the leak from the ocean floor indefinitely, but rather to contain it efficiently until such time as a more permanent plug could be found.

The solution takes advantage of the relatively stable and low temperature of the sea floor to provide a temporary obstruction to the leak by freezing locally available materials: oil and water.

A back-of-the-envelope estimate of leak flow-rates indicates that a few ten’s of cubic meters of liquid Nitrogen would be sufficient to stop the oil in its track. Subsequent freezing of the surrounding water, either by additional liquid N2 or by lowering an industrial refrigeration unit to the ocean floor, would keep an ice plug over the leak.

Summary

This proposal takes advantage of the following conditions that exist at the depth of the leak:

1. Local temperature is about four degrees Celsius.
2. High salinity and pressure means that the surrounding water will freeze at around -25C below the surface freezing point.
3. At -25C, oil becomes so viscous that it will behave like tarmac.

The prevailing conditions of the water at the ocean bottom, along with the flow rate of the oil spill indicates  that the amount of “cooling” necessary to bring water to its freezing point in the well’s vicinity is relatively modest. While I have not performed an extensive analysis of the heat exchange, it appears that between 10 and 100 cubic meters of liquid nitrogen would be sufficient  to block the flow of oil long enough to maintain a local frozen cap with an industrial refrigeration unit. The refrigeration unit can be powered from the surface but will be operating on the sea floor. This refrigeration can be used to contain the leak for a long enough time that alternative, permanent plugs can be inserted, or an alternative relief well can be drilled.

An initial injection of liquid N2 is envisioned by inserting a delivery nozzle as far down into the well as possible. This initial burst of liquid N2 can turn the surrounding oil into an increasingly hardened material, resembling a tar-like foam,  that will hold off the flow. As this foam comes into contact with water, it is expected that it will create a surrounding shell of ice.

The addition of an industrial refrigeration unit  would then be sufficient to maintain the temperature locally low enough to preserve the temporary blockage.

The main risk of this proposal resides in the fact that the composite ice and solidified oil foam will have a density much lower than the surrounding liquid water. Hence, to prevent the foam’s buoyancy force from tearing off the ice cap, sand or any other high density material would have to be added as the ice forms to increase the composite density.

Alternatively, this ice cap could be easily captured at the surface to prevent oil from spreading after the cap is released.