Impact Curious?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Excerpt of book by Priya Parrish: “My journey to impact investing began when I was an undergraduate studying economics and entrepreneurship and couldn’t find any examples of people harnessing the power of business to improve the world. That was 20 years ago, before impact investing was a recognized strategy. Back then, just about everyone in the field was an entrepreneur experimenting with investment tools, trying to figure out how to do well financially while also making positive change. I joined right in.

The term “impact investing” has been around since 2007 but hasn’t taken hold the way I thought (and hoped) it might. There are still a lot of myths about what impact investing truly is and does, the most prevalent of which is that doing good won’t generate returns. This couldn’t be more false, yet it persists. This book is my attempt to debunk this myth and others like it, as well as make sense of the confusion, as it’s difficult for a newcomer to understand the jargon, sort through the many false or exaggerated claims, and follow the heated debates about this topic. This book is for the “impact curious,” or anyone who wants more than just financial returns from their investments. It is for anyone interested in finding out what their investments can do when aligned with purpose. It is for anyone who wishes to live in alignment with their values—in every aspect of their lives.

This particular excerpt from my book, The Little Book of Impact Investing, provides a history of the term and activity in the space. It addresses why now is a particularly good time to make business do more and do better—so that the world can and will too…(More)”.

Strategic Foresight Toolkit for Resilient Public Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Toolkit: “By exploring 25 evidence-based potential disruptions across environmental, technological, economic, social, and geopolitical domains, the Strategic Foresight Toolkit for Resilient Public Policy helps anticipate challenges and opportunities that could reshape the policy landscape between 2030 and 2050. These disruptions are not predictions, but hypothetical future developments identified through extensive research, expert consultations, and workshops. The Strategic Foresight Toolkit features a five-step foresight process, guiding users to challenge assumptions, create scenarios, stress-test strategies, and develop actionable plans. It includes facilitation guides and case studies to support effective implementation. Each disruption is accompanied by insights on emerging trends, potential future impacts, and both immediate and long-term policy options to ensure resilience and preparedness. Designed for policymakers, public administrators, and foresight practitioners, this publication is designed to promote holistic, strategic and evidence-informed decision-making. It aims to support countries and organisations in using strategic foresight to design and prepare robust and adaptable public policies for a range of possible futures. With its practical methodology and forward-looking approach, the Strategic Foresight Toolkit is a vital resource for building sustainable, resilient, and effective public policies…(More)”

The disparities and development trajectories of nations in achieving the sustainable development goals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Fengmei Ma, et al: “The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a comprehensive framework for societal progress and planetary health. However, it remains unclear whether universal patterns exist in how nations pursue these goals and whether key development areas are being overlooked. Here, we apply the product space methodology, widely used in development economics, to construct an ‘SDG space of nations’. The SDG space models the relative performance and specialization patterns of 166 countries across 96 SDG indicators from 2000 to 2022. Our SDG space reveals a polarized global landscape, characterized by distinct groups of nations, each specializing in specific development indicators. Furthermore, we find that as countries improve their overall SDG scores, they tend to modify their sustainable development trajectories, pursuing different development objectives. Additionally, we identify orphaned SDG indicators — areas where certain country groups remain under-specialized. These patterns, and the SDG space more broadly, provide a high-resolution tool to understand and evaluate the progress and disparities of countries towards achieving the SDGs…(More)”

Suspense and surprise in the book of technology: Understanding innovation dynamics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Oh-Hyun Kwon, Jisung Yoon, Lav R. Varshney, Woo-Sung Jung, Hyejin Youn: “We envision future technologies through science fiction, strategic planning, or academic research. Yet, our expectations do not always match with what actually unfolds, much like navigating a story where some events align with expectations while others surprise us. This gap indicates the inherent uncertainty of innovation-how technologies emerge and evolve in unpredictable ways. Here, we elaborate on this inherent uncertainty of innovation in the way technologies emerge and evolve. We define suspense captures accumulated uncertainty and describing events anticipated before their realization, while surprise represents a dramatic shift in understanding when an event occurs unexpectedly. We identify those connections in U.S. patents and show that suspenseful innovations tend to integrate more smoothly into society, achieving higher citations and market value. In contrast, surprising innovations, though often disruptive and groundbreaking, face challenges in adoption due to their extreme novelty. We further show that these categories allow us to identify distinct stages of technology life cycles, suggesting a way to identify the systematic trajectory of technologies and anticipate their future paths…(More)”.

Un-Plateauing Corruption Research?Perhaps less necessary, but more exciting than one might think

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dieter Zinnbauer: “There is a sense in the anti-corruption research community that we may have reached some plateau (or less politely, hit a wall). This article argues – at least partly – against this claim.

We may have reached a plateau with regard to some recurring (staid?) scholarly and policy debates that resurface with eerie regularity, tend to suck all oxygen out of the room, yet remain essentially unsettled and irresolvable. Questions aimed at arriving closure on what constitutes corruption, passing authoritative judgements  on what works and what does not and rather grand pronouncements on whether progress has or has not been all fall into this category.

 At the same time, there is exciting work often in unexpected places outside the inner ward of the anti-corruption castle,  contributing new approaches and fresh-ish insights and there are promising leads for exciting research on the horizon. Such areas include the underappreciated idiosyncrasies of corruption in the form of inaction rather than action, the use of satellites and remote sensing techniques to better understand and measure corruption, the overlooked role of short-sellers in tackling complex forms of corporate corruption and the growing phenomena of integrity capture, the anti-corruption apparatus co-opted for sinister, corrupt purposes.

These are just four examples of the colourful opportunity tapestry for (anti)corruption research moving forward, not in form of a great unified project and overarching new idea  but as little stabs of potentiality here and  there and somewhere else surprisingly unbeknownst…(More)”

Wikenigma – an Encyclopedia of Unknowns

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Wikenigma is a unique wiki-based resource specifically dedicated to documenting fundamental gaps in human knowledge.

Listing scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer. [ 1141 so far ]

That’s to say, a compendium of so-called ‘Known Unknowns’.

The idea is to inspire and promote interest in scientific and academic research by highlighting opportunities to investigate problems which no-one has yet been able to solve.

You can start browsing the content via the main menu on the left (or in the ‘Main Menu’ section if you’re using a small-screen device) Alternatively, the search box (above right) will find any articles with details that match your search terms…(More)”.

State of Digital Local Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Local Government Association (UK): “This report is themed around four inter-related areas on the state of local government digital: market concentration, service delivery, technology, and delivery capabilities.  It is particularly challenging to assess the current state of digital transformation in local government, given the diversity of experience, resources and lack of consistent data collection on digital transformation and technology estates. 

This report is informed through our regular and extensive engagement with local government, primary research carried out by the LGA, and the research of stakeholders. It is worth noting that research on market concentration is challenging as it is a highly sensitive area.

Key messages:

  1. Local Government is a vital part of the public sector innovation ecosystem. Local government needs their priorities and context to be understood within cross public sector digital transformation ambitions through representation on public sector strategic boards and subsequently integrated into the design of public sector guidance and cross-government products at the earliest point. This will reduce the likelihood of duplication at public expense. Local government must also have equivalent access to training as civil servants…(More)”.

Boosting: Empowering Citizens with Behavioral Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig: “…Behavioral public policy came to the fore with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice. Responding to critiques of nudging (e.g., that it does not promote agency and relies on benevolent choice architects), other behavioral policy approaches focus on empowering citizens. Here we review boosting, a behavioral policy approach that aims to foster people’s agency, self-control, and ability to make informed decisions. It is grounded in evidence from behavioral science showing that human decision making is not as notoriously flawed as the nudging approach assumes. We argue that addressing the challenges of our time—such as climate change, pandemics, and the threats to liberal democracies and human autonomy posed by digital technologies and choice architectures—calls for fostering capable and engaged citizens as a first line of response to complement slower, systemic approaches…(More)”.

The Tyranny of Now

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Nicholas Carr: “…Communication systems are also transportation systems. Each medium carries information from here to there, whether in the form of thoughts and opinions, commands and decrees, or artworks and entertainments.

What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time. Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time-biased media tend to be heavy and durable. They last a long time, but they are not easy to move around. Think of a gravestone carved out of granite or marble. Its message can remain legible for centuries, but only those who visit the cemetery are able to read it. Space-biased media tend to be lightweight and portable. They’re easy to carry, but they decay or degrade quickly. Think of a newspaper printed on cheap, thin stock. It can be distributed in the morning to a large, widely dispersed readership, but by evening it’s in the trash.

Time-biased: The Tripiṭaka Koreana, a collection of Buddhist scriptures carved onto 81,258 wooden blocks in the thirteenth century, in a photo from 2022
Bernard Gagnon / Wikimedia

Because every society organizes and sustains itself through acts of communication, the material biases of media do more than determine how long messages last or how far they reach. They play an important role in shaping a society’s size, form, and character — and ultimately its fate. As the sociologist Andrew Wernick explained in a 1999 essay on Innis, “The portability of media influences the extent, and the durability of media the longevity, of empires, institutions, and cultures.”

In societies where time-biased media are dominant, the emphasis is on tradition and ritual, on maintaining continuity with the past. People are held together by shared beliefs, often religious or mythologic, passed down through generations. Elders are venerated, and power typically resides in a theocracy or monarchy. Because the society lacks the means to transfer knowledge and exert influence across a broad territory, it tends to remain small and insular. If it grows, it does so in a decentralized fashion, through the establishment of self-contained settlements that hold the same traditions and beliefs…(More)”

Information Ecosystems and Troubled Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Observatory on Information and Democracy: “This inaugural meta-analysis provides a critical assessment of the role of information ecosystems in the Global North and Global Majority World, focusing on their relationship with information integrity (the quality of public discourse), the fairness of political processes, the protection of media freedoms, and the resilience of public institutions.

The report addresses three thematic areas with a cross-cutting theme of mis- and disinformation:

  • Media, Politics and Trust;
  • Artificial Intelligence, Information Ecosystems and Democracy;
  • and Data Governance and Democracy.

The analysis is based mainly on academic publications supplemented by reports and other materials from different disciplines and regions (1,664 citations selected among a total corpus of over +2700 resources aggregated). The report showcases what we can learn from landmark research on often intractable challenges posed by rapid changes in information and communication spaces…(More)”.