whose innovation is it anyway?

So I was talking to a dude at one of Australia's major banks. And he was enthusing about P2P lending (Kiva, Zopa, Prosper). And I said something along the lines of "You know that Grameen bank has been doing microfinance in Bangladesh for over 30 years?" He hadn't. Whilst P2P lending and microfinance are not identical, there are significant similarities.

I had a brief Skype conversation this evening with Sriram Reddy from Infoxchange and Engineers Without Borders. Some of the issues he is working on with farmers in India sound very similar to initiatives I have heard about in rural Australia.

For decades we have assumed that technology transfer in international development basically flows from the Developed World to the Developing World. That assumption is increasingly untenable.