This report from Monitor's Global Business Network and Cisco examines the driving forces and uncertainties that will shape the Internet's future. The scenarios suggest how a range of critical factors such as net neutrality policies, infrastructure investments and consumer response to pricing models could influence the Internet's potential to advance global prosperity, business productivity, education and social interaction.

Good quality, affordable housing is an area of great unmet need in urban India, with the potential to impact more than 20 million households. In 2006, Monitor Inclusive Markets started working to catalyze this market, believing it to be a space where a market-based solution was not only viable, but could drive significant social impact at scale. A product of this work is Monitor’s “State of the Market” study commissioned by India’s National Housing Bank.

In this report, Monitor Institute’s Katherine Fulton, Gabriel Kasper and Barbara Kibbe discuss the future of philanthropic innovation. The next decade will call on successful institutions to develop “next practices”—effective approaches that are well-suited to the emerging landscape of public problem solving—that allow them to act bigger and adapt better.

For prospective homeowners in India’s low-income bracket, the options for securing financing have traditionally been slim. But thanks to a growing number of housing finance companies that focus on low-income, informal sector customers, many people are getting a second chance at a loan, writes Monitor senior manager Nishant Lalwani in an article for the leading Indian business magazine Business Today.

Pedro Arboleda, a partner at Monitor, writes in the ABC newspaper of Madrid, that commercially-effective innovation requires a clear alignment of interests among people critical to the innovation process—scientists, entrepreneurs, financiers, managers, and even politicians—all of whom provide the necessary ingredients for the special innovation “sauce” to have a viable life in the marketplace.

The Monitor Institute, the social change division of the Monitor Group, published a case study examining how KaBOOM!, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building playgrounds in the United States, innovated its approach to scale by putting its model online for others to copy. Instead of replicating a traditional nonprofit approach to organizational growth, KaBOOM! is using the Internet to disseminate its model, empowering local communities to self-organize to build their own playgrounds using free resources and guidelines on the KaBOOM! website.

In this article, “How Innovation Really Works,” experts from Monitor produced a special research report with Business Today to explore how Monitor’s Ten Types of Innovation™ framework applies to growing, innovative companies in India.

Monitor Institute researchers Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper and Heather McLeod Grant write in Stanford Social Innovation Review that "working wikily," a leadership style characterized by greater openness, transparency, decentralized decision making, and collective action, can lead to greater social impact for nonprofits.

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) have proven, to the world’s acclaim, that it is possible to create commercially sustainable enterprises that address the critical needs of the poor — at least for financial services. By providing farmers, rural households, and village entrepreneurs with a stable, legitimate, and affordable source of credit, microfinance1 can help the poor meet their basic needs and build a better life. What began as a seemingly quixotic effort by Grameen, BRAC, ACCION and a handful of other organizations has grown into a full-fledged industry, with tens of thousands of institutions serving roughly 200 million customers worldwide. The remarkable success of microfinance in reaching the poor, and the stunningly broad scope of several of its leading exemplars in places like Bangladesh, is now raising a second hope, which is that the networks these institutions have created, and the credit they offer, may serve as a channel and a platform for the provision of many other critical goods and services to the poor. As many companies and not-for-profits have discovered, it is extremely difficult to offer products and services to low-income populations in a financially sustainable manner. Not only are the poor geographically hard to reach, and often expensive to reach using conventional models, but they often also lack the cash on hand to make purchases that would improve their lives over time. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) appear to provide a solution to both of these barriers. They help resolve the problem of insufficient cash flow by extending credit, and just as importantly, they constitute a ready-made distribution and marketing network. MFIs have built relationships and trust among the poor, which makes them a promising social as well as financial infrastructure through which customers can be reached.