Igniting Innovation

After midnight on February 10, 1953, my mother leaned over the bed and whispered orders to get up. You could tell by her tone this was no time to dally. The wind that had piled up snowdrifts against the north side of our house was now blowing embers from the burning barn toward us. In the next few hours, I learned that we had lost not just the barn but all our cattle and four sheep. My father's hands were badly burned from trying to open the barn doors. He could not because the animals stampeded against them. The great Chicago fire allegedly began when Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern; in our case, the culprit was a ewe with new lambs.

I was reminded of these fires when reading the story on page 14 about the new Social Entrepreneurship Startup course in which students are developing rechargeable lights for communities without electricity. This may be the age of high-tech, but for more than 1 billion people, Bill Snyder reports, "turning on the light, if it's possible at all, still means lighting a smoky, dangerous kerosene lamp."

After World War II the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration spread light rapidly across this country. As a child in the fifties, I took electrical power for granted and expected no corner of earth to be too remote for electrical wires. If you read Fred Rose's story on page 8 about Professor Jerry Meier's half-century career teaching economic development, I think you will find it was not only the children of that era who made optimistic assumptions. By 1965, however, Meier was beginning to chronicle problems with implementing large-scale industrial development plans in the many places with mostly agricultural economies. While rural electrification clearly aided the transition of the American postwar economy and places like Taiwan successfully followed suit, the models did not work across the board.

The implementation of many ideas does not progress as smoothly as we hope, which is why the trial-and-error design of the Social Entrepreneurship course seems brilliant to me. The business and engineering students involved are learning to design LED lights not in a vacuum. They are collaborating with each other, manufacturers, and, most important, with people living in the communities they hope to help. As a result, they have learned already that a product design and business model suited to one area of India is likely to fail in one area of Mexico.

I neglected to tell you that the 1953 fire was caused not by a dangerous kerosene lantern but by an electrically powered heating lamp. Not long after the fire, my family joined other plains farmers in planting shelterbelts of trees, a new university-initiated plan. With this protection from gale winds, cattle and sheep no longer needed to be herded into a barn during a blizzard. That's the meandering way the world changes some of the time.

From the Editor

Dean's Column

Kathleen O'Toole Editor