From February 11-13, Ashoka and The Lemelson Foundation, with support from Microsoft, brought together pioneers and thought leaders in the field of technology and invention for systemic social change.

Last month, I was lucky enough to attend Ashoka's Tech4Society conference in Hyderabad, India, as a writer for the AshokaTech blog. Since then, I've continued to write at AshokaTech about technological innovations in the nonprofit and social enterprise sectors. This post originally appeared there.

Ashoka hosts a monthly, Twitter-based chat called SocEntChat, in which anyone can participate and discuss issues surrounding social enterprise. It's a great place to share ideas. This month's chat was all about technological innovations, hosted by Ashoka's Tom Dawkins. Along with the usual crowd, Tech4Society organizer (and Twitter newcomer) Rosa Wang was there to share reflections from the conference. You can read the full transcript here.

Tom's first question was, "What breakthrough invention do you think will reshape the lives of the poor?" There were a lot of good answers - mobile phones, solar power, clean water - but I wondered if perhaps the question was too broad for there to be any one good answer. In a Tech4Society panel on mobile phones, for example, Ashoka-Lemelson fellow Madan Mohan Rao said that the increase in mobile phone use in rural India has the unintended consequence of limiting women's ability to communicate, as over 90% of family mobiles are carried by men. According to Rao, social equity still requires landline phones. In this way, what's more important than a specific technological solution is a willingness to pay attention to the needs you're meeting. The high-tech solution isn't always the better one, even if the low-tech one is more difficult.

Originally published on AshokaTech.

One of the many sessions in Hyderabad that I'm really excited about is a discussion on intellectual property with Richard Jefferson of Cambia, John Wilbanks of Science Commons, Phil Weilerstein of the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, and Ashoka fellow Bright Simons of mPedigree.

Here's a great interview with Richard Jefferson that ABC TV Australia ran a few months ago. Jefferson explains how Cambia is enabling biotech innovation by rethinking how scientists deal with IP issues. He makes the alluring point that open source - something we often think of as a recent development - has actually existed for millennia, much longer than proprietary technologies.