GKI Ushers in the Collaboration Era: LINK Goes Live!

 

How do you cut child malnutrition in Uganda? How do you salvage Rwanda's quality coffee sector from the scourge of an insect? How do you ensure that East African farmers grow cassava resistant enough to drought to withstand a changing climate? How do you make science learning practical and relevant in countries riddled with joblessness and illiteracy?

 

After stakeholder consultations with hundreds of scientists, entrepreneurs, students, decision-makers, civil society organizations, and administrators of universities and research organizations, the Global Knowledge Initiative (GKI) unveiled its new model for collaborative problem solving. The specifications of the model were bold: Deliver a single process simple enough to be teachable, versatile enough to handle the cassava and malnutrition challenges, and affordable enough for a not-for-profit to deliver globally.

 

LINK love

 

As the result of an exhaustive global needs analysis, LINK went live in November 2010 after meeting with stakeholders from Silicon Valley to Kampala and many locations around the world. GKI used insights from each stop to formulate the program. GKI designed LINK, or the Learning and Innovation Network for Knowledge and Solutions, to address an endemic problem characterizing the world today: Far too often, progress toward development challenges is stymied because those who need critical resources — technical, human, institutional, knowledge-based, and financial — to solve problems often cannot find and collaborate with those who have them.

 

So what is LINK exactly? LINK provides a three-phase approach to forging, optimizing, and sustaining global collaborations that solve shared problems. Specifically, LINK zeroes in on problems that require science, technology, and innovation (STI) for their amelioration. In Phase I, LINK partners define a problem they are confronting in terms of amenability to collaborative problem solving. GKI does this by training partners to catalogue available STI resources and identify gaps. We then help them gauge their collaborative innovation baseline, which answers the question: "What am I getting from the resources and partners currently available to me?" More on our unique methodology is available here.

 

In Phase II, GKI helps partners identify and collaborate with people and institutions offering the resources they seek. Beyond matchmaking, LINK builds team members' collaboration skills. Too often scientists young and old learn the content skills required to master a particular discipline without learning the process skills required to translate that science into real-world solutions. The result of business as usual: more papers, but fewer solutions brought to scale. While co-authored papers are a valuable byproduct of the partnerships LINK forges, they are not the end goal.

 

The outputs of LINK, as elicited in Phase III, are real-world solutions — new drought resistant cassava seedlings, a milk-booster to fatten bull calves, an exciting hands-on curriculum for high school biology classes — with real-world uptake. Since GKI recognizes that scaling an innovation often requires inclusion of solvers from different sectors, GKI's role in Phase III is about identifying complementary initiatives and partners. Using web-enabled collaboration platforms and the heft of many science associations, academies, and networks with which GKI partners, we pluck critical players — both within and outside the STI community — from the universe of solvers.

 

 

"It was exhilarating to conceive of this as an organizational innovation. We saw it as a challenge for GKI to devise a model for collective action amenable to a range of challenges at different scales. We wanted something you could learn quickly, even if employing this model requires commitment over several months," GKI Chairman Sam Pitroda explains. "We see an appetite for LINK expressed at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, just as much as we see it at Makerere University in Uganda."

 

Classrooms without walls

 

For today's university students and faculty, demonstrating impact outside of the lab or the classroom compels decision making. MIT's D-Lab courses, which enables undergraduates to design and implement needed innovations for developing country communities, illustrate this demand (learn more about D-Lab here: http://d-lab.mit.edu/about). With over-subscribed courses of this kind across US universities, the addition of LINK to the array of options available to the next generation of American scientists and engineers is timely. Students' desire to contribute as global citizens is also impacting employment decisions. Google offers a case in point. GKI's staff discussed with the Head of University Relations for Google, Jeff Walz, the decisions students are making regarding future career options. "We know students and faculty want these opportunities. For the first time we see Stanford graduates rating Teach for America and the Peace Corps as their top employment picks, even over Google." He attests, "We're seeing a real change."

 

Yet LINK doesn't serve Americans alone. The yearning for collaborative science and innovation is as common in Mozambique as it is in Maryland. Gone are the days of strictly national innovation systems. The Collaboration Era is marked by teams that cross geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries. Joining partners in optimal configurations that match needs with available resources — wherever they may be — is LINK's raison d'être.

 

Quenching a thirst for global engagement

 

GKI is rolling out LINK in stages. East Africa hosts the first round of LINK pilots. Round two, which began in February 2011, includes Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the US.

 

Each roll-out begins by GKI harvesting LINK challenges through formal calls for engagement. A theme provides "challenge parameters" pertinent to each round. Reflecting the paramount importance of agriculture for Africa —approximately 75% of the region's population engages in agriculture — GKI listened to stakeholders' requests to address improvements in agricultural productivity and sustainability facing farmers, researchers, extensionists, innovators, and society. To that end, LINK Round I addresses the African Union's CAADP (Consolidated Africa Agriculture Development Programme) goals, namely, to increase agricultural productivity across the continent by 6% annually. The 25 member universities of the Regional University Forum for Capacity Building (RUFORUM) partnered with GKI to roll-out LINK Round 1 and facilitate a process that supports collaborative problem-solving in agriculture, which defines that consortium.

 

A Technical Committee, chaired by Nina Fedoroff, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, reviews each request for LINK engagement. They consider: Is the challenge transformable to development? Does it constitute a challenge relevant to people living on less than $2 a day? Does the proposed solution demonstrate scientific rigor, etc.? The review Committee is composed of eight distinguished international scientists, among them Dr. Cynthia Baldwin, Professor of Virology & Microbiology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Dr. Deanna Behring, Director, International Programs, College of Agricultural Sciences, Pennsylvania State University; Paul Dufour, Former Interim Executive Director at the Office of the National Science Advisor in the Canadian federal government; Dr. Molly Jahn, Former Dean, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Former Acting Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics at USDA; Dr. Rattan Lal, Professor and Director, School of Environment and Natural Resources, Ohio State University; Dr. Burton Mwamila, Vice-Chancellor, Nelson Mandela Africa Institute of Science and Technology, and; Dr. Moses Osiru, Programme Manager for Networking, Advocacy and Grants, RUFORUM.

 

And the winner is...

 

Requests for Engagement in LINK emerged from universities and university networks across East Africa. Each formal request was carefully screened by the Technical Committee. On February 15, 2011, seven challengers were selected for inclusion in LINK's network-forging activities. The grand prize winner, who will enjoy a GKI scholarship for in-kind Phase I LINK activities, is the Rwandan team, headed by the Dean of the National University of Rwanda's Department of Agriculture, Daniel Rukazambuga.

 

If LINK helps him to solve his challenge, Daniel's efforts, which will be profiled in a forthcoming feature story, could improve the lives of thousands of Rwandan coffee farmers, their children, and communities. Daniel believes GKI offers the missing link. Please stay tuned and find out why!

 

Contributor and photo credits: Sara E. Farley