Position: Research Assistant

Location: Washington, DC -- USA

Organization: The Emerging Markets Private Equity Association (EMPEA) is an independent, member-based global industry association based in Washington, D.C., that promotes greater understanding of and a more favorable climate for private equity investing in emerging markets. EMPEA's 185 members represent more than $400 billion in assets under management. EMPEA convenes private equity practitioners to discuss pan-emerging issues, researches key industry trends, and collaborates with national and regional venture capital associations.

EMPEA produces research and industry statistics relevant for private equity practitioners and service providers, asset managers and local and regional venture capital associations. EMPEA research is widely used as industry reference data and disseminated in the market via publications, press articles, conference or workshop content, custom research for EMPEA members and the EMPEA website.

Job Description: EMPEA seeks a Research Assistant to support an expanding in-house research program. This is a newly-created role that reports to EMPEA's Research Director. Core responsibilities will include:

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I am sure that few of you are strangers to Amy Smith’s work at MIT’s D-Lab. After all, the D-Lab has been profiled several times here at NextBillion, most recently in an article featured in the news room via GOOD magazine. The article aptly describes D-Lab’s current crop of appropriate technologies, developed with the needs and constraints of the end user in mind.

"Designs are more likely to be successful if they’re not complicated and requiring all sorts of support and infrastructure," says Smith. "But simple doesn’t mean easy. It’s a challenge to get to those ‘simple’ solutions."

(Read the full article)

The five innovations profiled: a water chlorination controller (to reliably regulate the addition of chlorine to a stored water supply), a screen-less hammermill (to churn grain into flour), low-cost water test (to test drinking water safety), phase change incubator (low-cost incubator), are definitely simple, rugged, cheap, and replicable. But are they scalable? The answer is "they could be."

"We’re not as well-equipped to do dissemination as we would like," says Smith, who notes that D-Lab only has about 30 students at any one time. "We’re interested in finding the right partners to move the technologies forward." Scale and dissemination determine where "the rubber meets the road" in a university-based system of innovation.

One has to wonder what the best mechanism for sharing these innovations is. Should development projects be built around them? Can they support small businesses like the ones conceived by the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group? Or might they spawn full scale enterprises, like d.light design, which grew out of the class project at Stanford? Regardless, I truly appreciate the notion of starting a "design revolution" that will encourage engineers to create strictly for challenging environments, and expand the field of appropriate technology design.

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