Co-creating the value for social goods

My story is about the opportunity I get everyday by talking to good colleagues at work and getting inspired by their commitment while delivering and co-creating the value for the company and ourselves. My story is also about the privilege I have to teach and mentor hundreds of students and co-create the value while students learn how to identify and solve problems for social goods. I have no idea whether these students will choose to become change agents for society and business when they finally become part of the workforce and apply their learning to their day jobs but I am pretty sure, the thought process will help them tackle the day-to-day problem in a very logical problem solving way. This is the sole reason, I invest my time and energy in guiding them so that they can think, execute and produce amazing outcome. Here are some ideas I am proposing to them to work on this semester:

Reduction of food waste in USA

It is estimated that 70 billion pounds of food is wasted each year, in each phases including production, shipment and consumption. Here are some ideas:

1. Using mathematical models to optimize farming of fruits and vegetables to reduce food waste in production stage
2. develop monitoring and alerting application for grocery store so that they can get alerted on expiring food items well in advance and can connect to food banks to donate excess food
3. application to predict food usage in school/business cafeteria
4. predict energy usage to produce different types of menu food items so that business make better decision, reduce waste and optimize profit
5. use IoT and sensor technology to reduce waste and increase food safety in transportation, storage and delivery of food
6. create marketplace and co-op for “ugly” fruits and vegetables. Huge amount of fruits and vegetables are thrashed in the farm itself as stores buy only that fits to the spec
7. food sharing app — this is to reduce waste due to perceived quality of food approaching “sell by” or “use by” label
8. crowdsourcing food recipes so restaurants prepare items that people want to eat

IoT for social goods

1. low cost IoT enabled device that translates sign language into speech in real time (inspired by some recent innovation by college students in India)
2. eliminate pedestrian accident when car turns right (traffic safety), can be applied to other problems such as bike ride safety as well
3. Unicef wearables for good challenge: http://wearablesforgood.com/WearablesForGood-UseCaseHandbook.pdf
4. wearable device for measuring malnutrition or other vital information in kids and pregnant woman

Crowdsourcing for social goods

1. crowdsourcing ideas on how to preserve ailing infrastructure or modernize facilities inspired by http://upcycle-the-bridge.jovoto.com/
2. crowdsourcing for disaster relief
3. social network for natural medicine practitioners (inspired from www.sermo.com)
4. Unicef’s causetech.net

I will post more ideas later.