Friday Fives
1. Burning Man a template for the next urban century
Nobel prize winning economist, Paul Romer, was at Black Rock City this year for the annual Burning Man festival “The world, he says, needs more “Burning Man urbanization.” This is a fascinating look into how the Nobel Laureate sees Black Rock City as a template for the future face of urbanization.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/upshot/paul-romer-burning-man-nobel-economist.html
2. VC investment in Australia
A recent study, a partnership between Innovation Bay and KPMG High Growth Ventures, offers some interesting insights into Australia’s Venture Capital sector. From deal size, valuation size and sectors of interest this initial research will set a baseline for future surveys and help identify areas where the startup ecosystem can best be supported.
https://www.startupdaily.net/2019/09/the-state-of-vc-investment-in-australia-2019/
3. Nous - blink to access a computer
NZ high tech social enterprise, Thought-Wired, have an ambitious aim of making the world accessible to everyone. Nous is a hardware and software solution which lets people control assistive software by blinking. The technology has been developed in a co-design process with therapists, people with disabilities and their support networks, and the team have just released this case-study on one of the Nous co-designers and users, Danielle, and shows how life changing this technology can be.
https://getnous.app/pages/nous-case-studies-danielle
4. US AID’s new resilience Innovation Lab
University of California, Davis is the home for a new U.S. Agency for International Development backed innovation lab building test projects to help people mitigate, adapt to, and recover from shocks such as drought, flood, or conflict. “The investment reflects growing recognition by USAID of the role that resilience must play in agricultural development, so that people who face recurring crisis can escape and stay out of poverty.”
5. The Observatory of Economic Complexity
We’ve been enjoying having a play around with the trade data visualisations on this open source platform. Created by the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab the observatory services more than 20 million interactive visualisations.
Check it out at: https://oec.world/en/