Are Skyscrapers the Farmlands of the Future?

Design by Olive Foster

Massive skyscrapers are more commonly associated with exacerbating, rather than mitigating, global warming. But if Dr. Dickson Despommier--author of The Vertical Farm, and professor of environmental sciences and microbiology at Columbia University--has any say in the matter, skyscrapers could play a big role in not just helping the environment, but also alleviating hunger. 

The main idea behind vertical farming is that fruit and crops will be grown hydroponically—nutrient rich water replaces the need for soil—in high-rise buildings. Planting, monitoring growth and harvesting would all take place within the building, and the cultivation process would employ what Despommier calls “close-loop agricultural technologies”: all water and nutrients are recycled substantially reducing runoff. 

According to Despommier, the benefits of vertical farming are manifold. Transportation and energy costs would reduce dramatically, since consumers would be located near by. Large tracts of land taken over for cultivation could be returned to their natural state, reducing carbon dioxide levels. Ancillary industries would burgeon around skyscrapers that specialized in one crop. Growing crops in a controlled environment would facilitate healthier, organic produce. Hunger would reduce: a 30-storey tower could feed upto 50,000 people.

“The biggest social benefit is that everybody gets fed healthy, clean food,” says Despommier. “The world would be a much better place if we had vertical farms.”

For-Profit Uses Carbon Credits to Provide Free Water Purification Systems

Image: Saabira Chaudhuri 

A for-profit social enterprise that provides free water purification systems to the poor in developing countries, is using carbon credits to finance its business.

New York Times contributor Tina Rosenberg has written a blog post about how Vestergaard Frandsen, the producers of LifeStraw (I’ve profiled them before for this blog and for Fast Company) – a portable water purification device that filters bacteria and contaminants from water, to make it potable. The company also produces a larger, fixed version of the device, called LifeStraw Family, which they plan on distributing for free in the developing world.

Vestergaard Frandsen plans to adopt a carbon credit model, by which it earns credits for preventing the boiling of water (which can be very damaging for the environment) . Polluters will then buy these credits, providing a sustainable source of income for the company. 

“The company is on the way to getting approval from one of the carbon credit markets for the LifeStraw Family, and expects to win it in February,” writes Rosenberg. “Approval will provide a way for Vestergaard Frandsen to recoup its $24 million initial investment and to turn the product into a sustainable business ─ at no cost to users.”

Why Thomas Friedman's Protectionist Column on Innovation is Wrong

Earlier this month, the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman wrote a column about Indian startups called Do Believe the Hype. 

Friedman takes a rather extreme view of the burgeoning of India’s startups – calling this movement “scary” and “depending on your perspective…a sign of the apocalypse.”

I find this protectionist sort of viewpoint strange. Don’t social innovations, like mobile banking which enables people in rural or otherwise off-the-grid type areas access to institutionalized forms of savings and transfer of funds, benefit us all? If I can save more, transfer money more easily, become richer, and make my business more efficient, that’s good for GDP and the economy as a whole – domestic and global – as innovations can, and will, be exported.

500 Million to Use Mobile Health Apps by 2015

Mobile health applications could be the next big market for social entrepreneurs. While mhealth has been touted as a potentially billion dollar industry for some time now, a new report attempts to analyze the mhealth application market in particular.


 According to the Mobile Health Market Report 2010-2015, released in time for the DC based mhealth summit, which finished yesterday, 500 million of a total of 1.4 billion smart phone users will be using mobile health applications by 2015.


“Our findings indicate that the long-expected mobile revolution in healthcare is set to happen. Both healthcare providers and consumers are embracing smartphones as a means to improving healthcare,” said Ralf-Gordon Jahns, Head of Research at research2guidance, the company that issued the report.

Interview with Charles Fishman: Message in a Bottle

Image credit: Verne Equinox

The Writer

Charles Fishman has been a full-time reporter for Fast Company magazine since 1996. He is currently on leave, writing a new book, ‘The Big Thirst,’ which will be published next March.

An award-winning investigative journalist, Fishman is also the author of the ‘Wal-mart Effect,’ which appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, and was rated one of The Economist’s best books of 2006.

Fishman grew up in Miami, Florida, and graduated with a BA from Harvard University in 1983. 

The Story

In July 2007, Fast Company magazine published an article by Charles Fishman called ‘Message in a Bottle,’ which looked at the economics and psychology behind what Fishman describes as “an unlikely business boom.” 

The article describes how bottled water, a formerly virtually nonexistent business, has become an “indispensable prop” for America: a transformation largely fueled by marketing and branding, which drive home ideas about the convenience, taste and health benefits of bottled water.

The Relevance of the NGO for Social Entrepreneurs

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Vladimir Delagneau, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Nicaragua based clean energy company Tecnosolucion, has written a blog post on the World Economic Forum’s website about the importance of NGOs in actualizing (social) business ideas in rural areas.

Delagneau, who has been named 2010’s Regional Social Entrepreneur of the Year in Latin America, emphasizes how NGOs can essentially broker alliances with local third parties who might otherwise be reluctant to adopt a new technology, regardless of how tried and tested this may be in other regions. 

“Often, when one embarks on an entrepreneurial endeavour, one thinks about the market opportunity (meeting the needs of a certain group of people) in constructing a business model that is functional and operational, while taking into account the financing needs of the business. However, in rural business activities, the alliances (that businesses form) with third parties are vitally important,” he writes. 

To me, Delagneau’s post embodies a crucial idea: partnerships between outsider companies and indigenous communities or businesses, established with the help of a credible, local body are an effective way to scale a social enterprise, while simultaneously staying both relevant and accountable to the needs of the community one is penetrating. An NGO, that might not have the funds or know how to conceive of and incubate technological solutions on its own could be an invaluable partner in actualizing a social enterprise, particularly one that involves outsider technology and ideas.

Gates Grants: Combating Malaria through Light, Drug Resistance through Gold

Image credit: James Gathany

The Gates Foundation has announced the second round’s winners of its Gates Grand Challenges Exploration Project, which aims to incubate projects that adopt innovative approaches to solving global health problems. 

 Nine projects have been awarded $1 million. Here’s the Gates Foundation’s description of a few of these:

• Dr. Mark Davis from Stanford University is working to create a new method to quantify and profile cellular immune responses to vaccinations, specifically for the influenza and rotavirus vaccines, to improve effectiveness;
• Dr. Dan Feldheim at the University of Colorado is exploring how small molecule-coated gold nanocrystals could be tailored to circumvent many viral and bacterial evolutionary drug resistance mechanisms;