Melissa Cliver, Catherine Howard, and Rudy Yuly will be presenting their project, “Navigating Value and Vulnerability with Multiple Stakeholders: Systems thinking, design action and the ways of ethnography” at the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC) conference in Tokyo, Japan, to be held on August 29-September 1, 2010.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

photo: 21st of September Coffee Cooperative and their seedlings during a nursery building workshop
 
Project Description: A growing cadre of organizations, corporations, NGOs and philanthropic foundations seek to address difficult global problems like poverty using social innovation and technology. Such problems are multivalent, deep-rooted, ever changing and culturally specific. Amid this complicated terrain, ethnographic tools and methods are uniquely suited and key to successfully addressing these large-scale dilemmas.
 
This project uses dynamic combinations of research, strategy and creative thinking to develop scalable financial service prototypes designed to promote financial inclusion for the world’s poorest individuals. Fostering holistic solutions in this arena requires new ways of conceiving, designing and delivering innovation. Their paper will describe the process and vision for navigating these complex environments with hybrid strategies and an embrace of systems thinking, concluding with six imperatives for success in global social innovation projects.
 
 
The team will also be exhibiting a catalog of selected works: 2008–2010 research from IMTFI titled: New Organizational Models: Open-Source Financial Services Research. To read the catalog, please visit the pdf viewing site.