DIL State of the Lab Winter 2016/2017 | Page 3

WINTER 2016-2017

Dear DIL Colleagues,

In 2012, the Development Impact Lab( DIL) at UC Berkeley was established with an aim of developing scalable technologies that reduce poverty and accelerate equitable economic growth. The Lab took a unique approach, by integrating innovations in the social sciences-- such as behavioral economics, A / B testing, and willingness-to-pay experiments-- into the iterative design of new technologies. This approach, which we call Development Engineering( Dev Eng), builds scalability and sustainability into the innovation process, yielding new products and services that positively impact development outcomes. Since its start, DIL has invested in over 135 projects across 35 countries, through research awards, travel and exploratory grants, and student prizes such as the Big Ideas Contest.

This year, DIL has focused on institutionalizing the Dev Eng approach. We supported faculty-led research, launched an open access journal called Development Engineering, and established a Dev Eng PhD concentration at UC Berkeley. We invested in a number of development solutions, not only by funding research, but also by supporting“ top-up” grants, data visualizations, and animations to accelerate the translation of projects in our pipeline. These efforts are creating scientific breakthroughs, generating actionable evidence for development practitioners, and catalyzing changes in policy globally.

One major milestone in 2015-16 was Facebook’ s aquisition of the“ Community Cellular Network” technology, a suite of hardware and software that can provide low-cost, solar-powered mobile connectivity for remote, rural communities. DIL seed-funded the project, led by Berkeley professor Eric Brewer. It was initially prototyped in Papua, Indonesia and is now being scaled in the Philippines, through partnership with a local telephone company. Some of the researchers on the team have joined Facebook to help commercialize the technology; others have stayed in academia and continue to innovate in the space of rural connectivity.

In May 2016, DIL reached another milestone with the launch of Development Engineering: The Journal of Engineering in Economic Development. The first volume of this open access publication was released at the 2016 Technologies for Development Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. It features rigorous studies of promising development technologies-- from clean cookstoves and rural electricity grids, to sensors that monitor household water filters and pumps. Importantly, it includes a failure analysis explaining why an RFID inventory tracking technology( commonly used by retailers in the U. S.) fails to work for small enterprises in Sri Lanka. The journal is committed to learning from success and failure alike.

In 2016, DIL also graduated the first cohort of Berkeley doctoral students enrolled in the Dev Eng concentration, including graduates from engineering, economics, and environmental science departments. Spearheaded by Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Blum Center Education Director, Alice Agogino, the National Science Foundation also recognized Dev Eng through its award of a $ 3M grant to focus on the intersection of food, energy, and water systems. The new discipline is now spreading to other university campuses, including Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland and Duke University, which are both offering certificates in development engineering. Additionally, the Dev Eng ecosystem was recognized through a shared award from the UC Office of the President to nurture entrepreneurship( with new funds made available through California Assembly Bill 2664). The Principal Investigator, Professor Ikhlaq Sidhu, will be collaborating with Phillip Denny, Program Director of the Big Ideas Contest, on this initiative. The continued expansion of Dev Eng will help train a next generation of innovators to harness technology for sustained, scalable development impact.

Toward the end of this year, we were fortunate to engage the broader development community through our 2016“ State of the Science” conference, which focused on the Science of Scaling: Building Evidence to Advance Anti-Poverty Innovations. The event brought together over 100 researchers, policymakers, industry leaders, and academics to share ideas about scaling anti-poverty interventions around the world. As reported by DevEx, the meeting offered durable lessons and rigorous evidence about the scaling process, including new ideas on how to generalize the learnings from specific technology deployments.

As DIL enters our fifth year of programming, we will continue accelerating research projects in our pipeline, and we will work with partners to spread the reach of” development engineering”. We hope that you will continue to follow our work, and we encourage you to reach out and get involved. You can sign up for our biweekly e-newsletter at bit. ly / DILNewsletter and visit us online at dil. berkeley. edu.