Alan Barrell visits Innobasque

Yesterday afternoon, we had the opportunity of listening Alan Barrell's comment on what we need on nowadays society to develop further entrepreneurships educational programs,like they do there in Cambridge University.

As he said, in a changing world with a global financial crisis,we should focus our attention on what does it constitute a major characteristic to be in a major geographical area for this subject.Here in the Basque Country ,we do have Science/Tech parks, -and he was very impressed of what we are doing here, not only by the buildings but also by the companies which they work in them- so we´ve got some things quite well done in this domain.But, according to him, we could improve our networking policies.

He has a lot of presentations on his website, but the one who was showing us yesterday was that he used in Hosei (Japan) during a symposium in Japan focused on Regional Innovation, Incubators ant Universities on February 26th,2009. Following it, Alan Barrel explained how the Cambridge University as an academic and traditional institution,was a bit against technology before some initiatives that a group of people wanted to start up, but later on we could find that first Science Park in the 70's. Hence,This was the first point or the pole position of an amazing more and more large netowrk of different initiatives that have become companies related to biotechnology, info-technology and nanotechnology.

His current work on technopolicy network describes how a network can join Science Based Regions at different stages of development with researchers, strategists and incubators.

NEGROPONTE`S SPEECH

Today, Science week has started in Euskalduna and the starting point to celebrate this has been Negroponte`s speech.Science,Technology and Innovation are the main subjects of this week that will be distributed in different activities and different places in the Basque Country.In this case, One laptop per child's project has been brought as an example of a process that comes out from a very simple idea that seems an uthopy and becomes a very important non profit industry where something always remains the same:not forget the main aim of the project: childhood education.

Education, that has been and still is the main question.It is the basic and clear subject in this work,in order to help childhood worlwide, that will become the future younghood and the future society.

Negroponte has mentioned five main principles in this project:1.-Child ownership,2.-Low ages, 3.-Saturation, 4.-Connection, and 4.-Free and open source. which have allowed to bring laptops
all over the world.

On the other hand, with these things in mind,Negroponte has underlined that Design matters, because allows you to use something that otherwise could be really expensive.

In addition to his, there have been two issues that have made this project possible and have become this work in a successful long-lasting ever-growing project:

1-The non profit side of this project,having always in mind that children are the real users of the product and

2-the bilingual keyboard,(english-local language)according to the country where it goes the product.

The former launch countries where olpc-project started were six: Argentina, Brazil, Lybia, Nigeria,Pakistan and Thailand.But nowadays, it has spread out to more than 30 countries and it will follow growing with another programm called "Give a laptop.Get a laptop.Change the world".

According to Negroponte`s words the most innovative part of this project has been the non profit side cause it has allowed to get the best people from different disciplines working together and having always in mind that the poorest child of the world will use this product that can help them not only to play and start learning where toes and teachers are a rare resource for them but also to be able to follow learning, by reading books that otherwise they could not get to.

At the end of the day, as one stamp from Peru in a picture of the speaker`s presentation said: Education can be the best answer in order to avoid child labour.In order to build up Peace, I would add.