Handbook of Innovation & Appropriate Technologies for International Development

Innovation and Appropriate Technologies for International Development series

Edited by Philippe Régnier, Professor and Dean (Research), School of Management Fribourg, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO), Daniel Frey, Professor, currently Head of the Design and Manufacturing Area within Mechanical Engineering, and formerly Research Faculty Director, D-Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Samuel Pierre, Professor, Director of the Mobile Computing and Networking Research Laboratory (LARIM), Department of Computer and Software Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal, Montreal, Canada, Koshy Varghese, Professor, Department of Civil Engineering and currently Dean (Administration), Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, Chennai, India and Pascal Wild, Professor, School of Management Fribourg, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO)

This timely Handbook provides a conceptual discussion and an empirical review of new disruptive forms of innovation producing appropriate technologies, which address both the needs of low-income populations worldwide, and provides alternative solutions for sustainable development.

的创新和适当的技术手册for International Development is an outstanding contribution to bring out the progress of such innovations and appropriate technologies helpful for the development of people across the world. This book serves as a value pack for researchers, scholars and, in particular, practitioners working in the area of technology development and entrepreneurship for local community sustainable development impacts, and how they can be commercialised through various public–private inroads.’
– Raunak Gupta, The Journal of Entrepreneurship

‘The chapter authors take a comprehensive and eclectic approach to “global engineering” in all its aspects, from academic research and learning, to practical approaches by international organizations and NGOs, to the experience of practitioners and communities who experimented with appropriate technologies — or were experimented on with them. This compendium explains the origin stories of the pathbreaking practitioners and organizations, and provides both the traditional socio-economic and political frameworks for appropriate technologies as well as the new, somewhat controversial, decolonization narrative, with a range of LMIC examples. The human aspect gets attention, including the need for protection of subjects and participants, and the ethical dimensions, with the limitations university’s institutional review processes may face about collection and analysis of data, use of AI and machine learning techniques to tease out insights and learning, to making these analyses available to the non-specialist as well as to the participants and other stakeholders. The scholar, the practitioner, the student, and the innovators will all find things to like and reflect on as we move from appropriate technologies to the broader intellectual and political context for applying what we learn to engage with the poor to improve their lives.’
– Paul M Cadario, University of Toronto, Canada