Capitalizing on innovation for philanthropy

Zia Daniell Wigder | May 22, 2007, 09:28 AM

There’s almost always a significant lag between the time when a new technology is developed and when it’s leveraged for philanthropic endeavors; funding is scarce for R&D initiatives with no commercial or government applications. Non-profit organizations must therefore rely on commercial ventures for the development and dissemination of these technologies before they can ultimately be used for altruistic purposes.

The video dialogue program is based on this premise: videoconferencing technology has been developed and widely deployed, but it’s still used relatively infrequently to help bridge the cultural divide between the US and other parts of the world. Likewise, an organization I’ve been involved with called Children of Abraham is using wiki technology to create a dialogue between Jewish and Muslim youth around the globe. Programmers in Cairo have created a platform whereby youth from countries such as Syria, Iran, Indonesia, Russia and the US are interacting and working on collaborative online projects. The most recent program had far more applicants than they were able to include.

Philanthropies are in most cases not going to be the ones driving technology advancement, yet it’s critical they stay abreast of developments in this area. As new technologies multiply and become more widely deployed, so should their uses beyond just the initial commercial ones. There’s an enormous opportunity to leverage recent innovations in the online space to tackle global issues – it’s a matter of being creative and applying the technology in non-traditional ways.