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Well it appears as if last week was “conference week” here at NextBillion, so it’s my turn to dish on my recent attendee experience. Ready? Here I go.

I was fortunate enough to attend 'Financial Inclusion, Innovation, and Investments,' a symposium organized by the Emerging Markets Program of the Department of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. In a happy bit of serendipity, a professor with whom I had corresponded informed me about the event just in time for me to change my itinerary. (I had planned to be in Ithaca the week before.)

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When I recently attended The Second Annual Conference on Public Policy and Management at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, I had not imagined that it will be difficult to summarize it in a blog post. Discussed at the conference - current thinking on the proposed National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill, papers on increasing financial inclusion and other issues on policy in practice.

I particularly liked a key note address by Usha Thorat, Deputy Governor - Reserve Bank of India. She spoke of different methods in which financial inclusion could be promoted - providing easier, affordable access to financial services. These include encouraging GCCs (generalized credit cards) for rural customers and recognizing microfinance institutions.

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Ironically enough, I found myself reading this article in the New York Times on an New Jersey Transit express train this morning.  The irony is that I was on my way to a meeting with the Acumen Fund, talking about ways WRI and Acumen might work together.  

Why ironic (cue Alanis Morrissette)?  The article, Entrepreneurs Can Earn Their Stripes in the Minor Leagues, Too, profiles a Baruch College professor who has developed a minor leagues for aspiring entrepreneurs.  For those who aren't baseball fans, the system is analogous to a player development system that Major League Baseball uses.  Young rookie players start in development leagues, and then move up through Class A, AA, and AAA on their way to the big leagues (also known as "The Show").

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Cheikh Mbengue, an expert from Abt Associates on community-based health insurance (CBHI) schemes in Africa, said something that perked my ears last Wednesday at a USAID After Hours Seminar on microinsurance. He said that he thinks CBHIs can't function effectively without subsidies. No one has really talked about subsidies in the BOP space. The message is always, "get prices down low enough, quality up high enough, distribution wide enough, and you've got a market at the BOP."

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When I’ve asked those who are active at the BoP what skills are needed in the space, the answer I receive is deceptively simple: “everything.” Perhaps this is because, as long time BoP entrepreneur Patrick Donohue explained, BoP is really about the “creation of markets.”

After spending many months trying to determine what I “should” do in the field, I realized that I had asked myself the wrong question. The right question is, “What do I want I want to do in the field?” Even better, “What am I good at?” This, as Patrick pointed out, is the difference between causation, or allowing goals to determine means, and effectuation, or enabling the means to define the goals. As a result, what is needed comes down to what you can give and what lens you will use to examine the problem. Nonetheless, we can still agree that there are a number of practical skills that are particularly useful at the BoP.

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I really like Tom Friedman - I have since high school, when a summer program I attended assigned his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. I've also seen him sitting in DC cafes, running to catch cabs, and even met him in person at WRI's 25th Anniversary Dinner. Nice guy. Smart, too.

Despite all this goodwill, I usually find at least one thing in his columns or his books that irks me. Maybe he's exaggerating, or hasn't gotten it quite right, or his sources are a little off. The point is, I usually take issue with him, just a little bit.

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This Investor Feature is based on a recent interview with Yeung Hau Man, founder of Envirovision. Hau Man is dedicating his career to creating sound, standardized sustainability reporting at a time when such reporting is frequently ambiguous, unreliable, and extremely easy to manipulate for the purposes of company "greenwashing."

"We don't find companies, says Yeung Hau Man of the environmental monitoring and due diligence firm he helped to create, "We find people." Through eighteen years of experience in the intersection between environmental issues and business concerns, Hau Man has learned that the long-term sustainability and market viability of any company is not so much about the business itself as the people behind it. He realized this as a manager of green fund LESS Limited, where he saw company after company that had poor sustainability standards due to a lack of commitment at the management level. He took this experience to heart when the LESS Limited team charged him with creating a monitoring and due diligence vehicle that would generate a deal flow of truly sustainable companies. This project came to fruition as Envirovision, a consulting firm dedicated to providing a quality portfolio of sustainable companies to ‘green' funds and angel investors.

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Jane Nelson, who wears many hats (IBLF, Kennedy School, Brookings), spoke yesterday at a meeting of the Global Poverty Roundtable at the GlobalWorks Foundation here in Washington. Jane offered a wide-ranging, yet concise summary of all of the ways business can engage in development. Jane said [and, Jane, I beg your forgiveness in advance for this shallow and truncated version of your presentation] that the activities fall in three general categories: core business activities, competence-led philanthropy, and influence on the enabling environment for business.

On Core Business: Two broad areas: First, practice responsible business (human rights, environment, labor, compliance, accountability, etc); second, increase economic opportunities -- innovate for new markets. How? By leveraging global value chains, increasing local content purchases, creating business linkages, creative financing mechanisms which draw on core businesss knowledge and skills, and perhaps most promisingly, through more and more effective collective business initiatives -- industry-wide efforts that both set standards and create healthy and friendly competition to succeed within these new standards.

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Last week, I sat in a conference room full of DC development-types over lunch, listening to a presentation sponsored by the Society for International Development.  It was standard stuff - the woman next to me was reading the New York Times as folks shuffled in, and I spotted a few people I know who work for DAI, Chemonics, and other development contractors.

As the event was gearing up, however, it became clear that it was no regular brownbag lunch.  First, the room was totally full - no offense, but these sort of events aren't usually so compelling as to attract 50 people on a Wednesday.  Secondly, I started to see people I know from outside the "development" world.  Fred Tipson, Microsoft's Senior Policy Counsel here in DC, slipped quietly into a chair towards the back of the room.  Then Eric Gundersen and Alex Barth of Development Seed, a local website development firm, sat in my row.  Not the usual lunchtime crowd for a SID event.

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I came across, by chance, what promises to be a very interesting venture.

A group of Indian youngsters are launching a social venture called The Spark Group. They have been educated at Ivy League universities such as MIT Sloan and Yale. Ayan Sarkar and Priya Naik - two of the founders - have worked with Nobel Laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus in Dhaka.

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