Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The American system of higher education has long been the envy of foreign onlookers — that’s why the governments of many countries are inviting U.S. universities to open satellite campuses in their centers for higher learning, in hopes of adopting some of the U.S.’s best home-grown practices.

But it’s not just the foreign countries who benefit from the deal. In what the New York Times called an “educational gold rush,” U.S. universities are rushing to claim their turf in cities across the Middle East, East Asia and India.

Where these two aligning interests come together is at education hubs, such as Doha, Qatar’s Education City. When most people think of the Persian Gulf states, things like oil tycoons, casinos and over-the-top hotels come to mind. However, the government of Qatar has taken enormous strides to present the capital city as a regional center for education and research, as the home of the 14-acre hub of universities located on the city’s outskirts.

At Doha’s Education City, students from all around the Arab world can receive medical degrees from Cornell, computer science degrees from Carnegie Mellon, or journalism degrees from Northwestern, without the culture shock of moving, or the post-9/11 fight for a visa facing many Arabs who hope to study or work in the U.S.

Education City, an initiative of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, is home to some nine institutions of higher education, as well as primary and secondary schools. The campus is the brainchild of Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, who had the idea to bring branches of several leading universities to a unified campus in Qatar, the first of which opened in 1998.

With regional advancement in mind, Education City was developed to teach students the skills considered critically important by the Gulf Cooperation Council, as well as a place where university researchers can build relationships with public and private sector colleagues.

The campus includes schools from six U.S. universities — Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar School of the Arts, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, and Northwestern University in Qatar — École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC), the University College of London Qatar and Qatar’s Faculty of Islamic Studies.

But what’s in it for the U.S. universities? The opportunity to get ahead on the burgeoning trend of campus internationalization.

“Sometimes people ask: Why is Northwestern University in Qatar and not in China or India, for example,” Northwestern University in Qatar Dean Everette E. Dennis said in an interview upon the graduation of the school’s first class in May of this year. “Part of the answer is: Because Qatar’s leaders asked us to come. There was an invitation extended, and a determination was made that this had value for the University.”

The rise in opening overseas branches reflects a shift from sending students to semesters abroad or swapping faculty on research exchanges. Just as Dennis described Northwestern’s decision to open in Qatar because of the government’s invitation, so was New York University lured into opening its satellite campus in Abu Dhabi by a $50 million gift from investor Omar Saif Ghobash, according to the Times.

Collaborative urban research hubs are not unique to the Middle East. New York City approved plans in December 2011 to build a graduate campus for technology on Roosevelt Island, Cornell NYC Tech. The campus will be a partnership between Cornell University, which has its main campus in Ithaca, N.Y., and Haifa, Israel’s Technion Institute.

“We believe this new land grant can help dreamers and entrepreneurs from around the world come to New York and help us become the world’s leading city for technological innovation,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when the campus was announced.

The city gave the university $100 million and a grant of city-owned land to help spur the $2 billion project, which will eventually facilitate 2,500 students. Beginning in Spring 2013, graduate engineering classes will be taught in a temporary location until the Roosevelt Island campus is complete.

How do you think cities can best facilitate education? Let us know what cities have to gain when they become education hubs in the comments.

Images courtesy of Flickr, Clint Tseng

Crowdtilt is a platform anyone can use to raise money for anything.

Sound familiar? Kickstarter shares the same crowdfunding focus. But what sets Crowdtilt apart from its better-known competitor is something that one of its cofounders, James Beshara, picked up as a microloans collection officer in South Africa: peer pressure.

Instead of advertising a fundraising objective to the world, Crowdtilt encourages users to share them within their social networks. The objectives can be more diverse than Kickstarter would allow: renting a vacation house with a group of friends, buying a birthday present for a coworker or collecting money for a self-financed production. Crowdtilt makes public who chips in and, implicitly, who doesn’t. Want to avoid being known as that guy who went on vacation with the group but never paid for the hotel? Pay up.

Microfinance is built on the same type of social collateral. Here, Beshara explains how leveraging social pressure door-to-door helped him build Crowdtilt, which powered $1 million in transactions within its first six weeks of business and was recently named Reddit’s official fundraising platform.

FAST COMPANY: What was working as a microloans collection officer in South Africa like?

JAMES BESHARA: I didn’t have any guidebook or guidelines. My orientation for being a loans collector was literally, they told me, “you’re big, you’re pale, you’ll be somewhat intimidating … so you’ll make a good loans collector.”

To give some color to what that means, it’s where you go regularly house-to-house or shanty-to-shanty in the townships right outside of Cape Town, and you are telling delinquent borrowers that they owe “X” amount back to the organization. I went to South Africa for “on the ground” experience, and that’s about as on the ground as it can get.

What did you learn there that factored into Crowdtilt?

Instead of putting up collateral, in microfinance you put up your social collateral. You put up your reputation among your family and friends. That guarantees higher repayment rates. I was fascinated by social reputational collateral surrounding groups and money. That’s where the fascination started.

How is social collateral built into Crowdtilt?

The whole model hinges on that you and your friends can see who has, and implicitly, who hasn’t paid. It creates some pure motivation to pay up quickly, and that has been pretty remarkable to see.

Kickstarter you hope that as many people as possible sees your project, and their success rate is about 40%. Our success rate is 91%. I think the biggest reason for that is that with Crowdtilt, you generally know the network that you’re funding your objective with. And since everyone knows each other, there is an amount of peer pressure to pay your amount and make something happen.

I understand the idea of social pressure helping you get a trip to Tahoe paid for, but what made you feel that was what made microfinancing successful?

My academic background has been economic development with a focus on microfinance and microinsurance. And that element of reputational collateral has been widely studied.

Have you seen it, though?

As a loans collector, in all my bag of artillery, that was my biggest motivation in getting them to pay their loans back. I would say, “the rest of your group has paid their part of the loans,” and I would list off the names: “Tibe, Simon, they’ve all paid back their part of the loan.” If one person in a group that takes out a microloan does not pay his or her portion, the whole group is banned from taking out further loans.

The groups are completely voluntary, so it’s similar to a Crowdtilt campaign and the social dynamic that it’s not random strangers that are lumped together as a group. That group comes as a unit to the bank for a loan. They organize themselves and the bank just provides the financial side of it.

With Crowdtilt, you already know the group. You bring the group to crowdtilt, and our site just facilitates financial aggregation.

I’ve heard that when you started Crowdtilt, you intended it to be a platform for charities to raise money. What happened to that?

Studying economic development, I knew the non-profit world really well. But the realization was that in the most consequential and impactful events in the last few years, socially, have taken place on Twitter and Facebook. In the Arab spring, people didn’t use social networks built for social change. They didn’t use social networks built around revolutions or social activism. They used the too their friends were already comfortable using.

If you can build a platform that they’re used to using with their network and their group for trivial things, then you can basically onboard people, get them used to this system on a bigger scale and they’ll know it exists for them to use it for socially conscious objectives as well.

We’ve already started to see it actually. Our biggest use case in terms of number of campaigns are the fun thins like a party buses, like birthdays, tailgates, fantasy football, but he largest campaigns to date have been things like raising $100,000 in five days for a private school in Florida that was going to lose their charter.

So do you feel as good about helping people raise money for the party bus as you do helping people raising money for the school?

Well, I can say that we as a company, we believe the heights of our existence are the things we do as groups. So I would say in that respect, yea, it actually is as important for us to be able to go out and have the best birthday of all time because your friends all pitch in for a party bus for your birthday. I do think actually that it’s just as important.

I know most of the world might not think that’s as important, but we kind of see all of our campaigns as collective demand for something to happen. It’s hard to say which is more important than another.

You also own a fly-fishing store?

I own a fly-fishing company with one of my best friends from high-school. We started it in college.

Every product we sell provides fresh, clean drinking water to someone in the developing world for a full year. There’s a social bent to everything I’ve done so far. The one that’s been most successful to date, Crowdtilt, doesn’t have an explicit social bent to it. It’s kind of ironic.

Image: Flickr user Bolandrotor

Ambulance chasing only gets you so far. Hitching a ride, metaphorically speaking, on rockets funded by private corporations seeking fortunes beyond Earth’s atmosphere is where it’s at for eager legal pioneers.

There are stellar opportunities for lawyers specializing in space exploration. Space law is quickly becoming an integral part of the evolving aerospace industry. These lawyers exist in a tightly knit industry that deals with all kinds of practical issues and some that seem cribbed from science fiction. Depending on whether the space lawyer is in private practice or academia, he or she could handle anything from liability laws pertaining to litigious space tourists to the legal framework surrounding human encounters with E.T.

“Space tourists are usually high-income earners whose survivors can use high powered lawyers–insurability for private space travel flights is a big issue at this time,” says space lawyer Doug Griffith, a former Marine Helicopter pilot now working within the commercial space industry. Like him, lots of space lawyers are veterans. And nearly all of them are space and science geeks who found a way to combine their passion for outer space with legal practice.

Space lawyers even have their own legal journal and university programs. The marvelously titled Journal of Space Law is published by the University of Mississippi Law School’s National Center for Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law. Articles in the current issue deal with, among other things, death liability in commercial space flight accidents, international law relating to suborbital flights, and mineral rights for lunar mining. Students interested in space law also have the option of studying in the Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; other law schools also offer space law courses within larger programs.

Surprisingly, it’s not the legal profession’s equivalent of a degree in fine arts. Far from it. Short of bumping into Alf, the final frontier for space law is extraterrestrial mining. Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining venture backed by filmmaker James Cameron and Googlers Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, is entering a legal gray area. “Outer space mining, in legal terms, is the Wild West,” Griffith tells Fast Company. Lawyer Michael Listner wrote an article on the topic that notes no one has truly figured out sovereignty laws for outer space and private, non-governmental exploration—the United States or China cannot claim sovereignty over an asteroid, but private corporations might. Planetary Resources, for their part, claims that asteroids do not count as “celestial bodies” regulated by the 1967 treaty because meteorites, which are asteroids that fell to earth, are not covered under it. If Planetary Resources really does succeed in starting up extraterrestrial mining operations, the value of the minerals it finds might pale in comparison to space lawyers’ billable hours.

Satellite issues, however, are the bread and butter of space law. Satellites handle television transmissions, GPS signals, and a host of other projects for commercial, military and government clients alike. Several binding international treaties such as the 1972 Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused By Space Objects, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty address liability and risk concerns over satellites–red meat for these interstellar legal eagles. (Specifics regarding fault for either non-functioning satellites or people or property on the ground hurt by falling satellites depends on the locality.)

Even NASA and the United Nations have put space lawyers on retainer, asking them more recently to update old legal guidelines or create new ones for the occasion that humanity reaches other planets. The NASA policy for quarantining humans who met extraterrestrials while visiting these other planets was created by Apollo-era space lawyers. It was repealed in 1991. The extraterrestrial regulations were part of a larger law primarily aimed at quarantining astronauts who, in those Cuban Missile Crisis days, were feared might bring pathogens home from the Moon. (Sorry, conspiracy theorists!). The Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) is an international organization based in France dedicated to space research with experts drawn from academia and the private sphere worldwide. Although the bulk of COSPAR’s work these days deals with GPS issues and satellite law, the organization published a planetary protection policy several years ago that issued non-binding guidelines for astronauts visiting other planets.

Other space law experts have since written papers on topics like international law and permanent lunar bases. Eventually, many more regulations written in the age of Apollo and Soyuz will need to be updated for the era of the International Space Station and SpaceX.

The sky’s no longer the limit for ambitious lawyers.

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Find Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, on Twitter and Google+.

This year marks the third anniversary of the Rotman Design Challenge. It started out as a commendable experiment by the school’s Business Design Club to expose MBAs at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management to the value of design methods in business problem solving. This year, the competition drew teams from a few other MBA schools and some of the best design schools in North America. As a final-round judge, I had a front-row seat to the five best solutions to the competition’s challenge: To help TD Bank foster lifelong customer relationships with students and recent graduates while encouraging healthy financial behaviors.

Designers fared significantly better than MBAs because they shared real user insights.

Both this year and last–the two years that Rotman invited other schools to participate–business school students were slaughtered by the design school students. Of the 12 Rotman teams this year, not one of them made the final round. And while only seven of the 23 competing teams were from design schools (including California College of Arts, Ontario College of Art and Design, and the University of Cincinnati), design teams scooped the top three places in the competition, doing significantly better than their MBA counterparts. So what does this tell us?

It might tell us that MBAs significantly underestimate the skill and expertise a designer brings to the table. After all, about 80 MBA students volunteered their evenings and weekends, believing they had a chance of winning a design competition with minimal, if any, design training. Would you go toe-to-toe with even a purple belt in jiu jitsu having never taken a lesson? While the typical design-school competitor has (at the least) studied the design process in depth for several semesters and practiced it in co-ops and internships, for many MBA students, this was their very first exposure to the discipline. So while we should applaud the organizers’ efforts to open MBA eyes to the importance and value of design in solving business problems, it seems that even its most forward-thinking students may not have fully digested that design is a serious pursuit that requires serious training.

The competition outcome might also tell us that designers have reason to be encouraged. With only 15 minutes to convince a skeptical panel of experienced professionals about a new idea that doesn’t exist in the world today, they fared significantly better than their MBA counterparts. Why? Because they shared real user insights to engage us emotionally, used narrative and stories to compel us, drew sketches and visualizations to inspire us, and simplified the complex to focus us. It’s proof positive that numbers and bullet points, while important, aren’t necessarily what drive executive decision making.

Design should not be tacked on to business education but infused throughout it.

Finally, it tells us that we still have a long way to go to develop business professionals who both appreciate and can engage the tools of design effectively. Rotman gets kudos for taking a step in the right direction. But a few workshops and an extracurricular competition won’t produce business leaders with real design-thinking skills. Business education must be completely redefined to include the best, most appropriate principles of design in every curriculum. Marketing classes should teach a deep reverence for the user in context and the power of observational research methods. Finance classes should teach the art of storytelling and information design. Strategy classes should teach systems thinking and synthesis. If the goal is to create great “hybrid thinkers” who will have real impact, design should not be tacked on to existing business education but infused throughout it.

I’m not letting design schools off the hook either. While design students fared much better than their MBA counterparts that Saturday afternoon, I should point out that only the winning team from the Institute of Design at IIT actually charged a fee for the service they developed (a fact that was not overlooked by my final-round co-judge Ray Chun, the senior vice president of retail banking at TD). Some competitors were able to offer a vague notion that their ideas would generally create economic value, but crisp articulations of a profit model and underlying assumptions were hard to come by.

Design education needs as much of an overhaul as business education.

And I was less than impressed with the business-thinking skills of designers the following Monday morning, when I interviewed 10 of them at the Institute of Design in Chicago for jobs at Doblin. To most candidates, I asked of the ideas they presented in their portfolios, “But how does it make money? Who will pay for that? How much would you need to sell to be profitable?” and was met with far too many blank expressions when I did so. Design schools have a long way to go to integrate good business thinking into their programs. In order to make their value known to the world, designers need to speak the language of business–that’s where great ideas get funded and developed. Design education needs as much of an overhaul as business education if we are to benefit from the talents of design thinkers in the business world.

I hope that we see meaningful reinvention of both design and business education so that the business world can realize the true value of design thinking. Until that happens, Rotman’s Business Design Club would be wise to require challenge teams to comprise both designers and MBAs. At least it would level the playing field, and it may improve the educational experience for both–assuming each can decipher what the other is saying.

Image: Morphart Creations Inc., sextoacto and ueapun via Shutterstock

My recent post, “Why Small Businesses Should Scrap Strategic Planning,” set off a barrage of conversations, mostly from entrepreneurs who agree. Big companies have to make all their strategic decisions at once during an annual strategic planning session because it is too difficult and costly to get their team together more frequently. Small companies get to take the opposite approach: They tackle strategic choices as they come.

Consider Zor Gorelov, the CEO of SpeechCycle, a company transforms how phone and cable companies like Telstra, Cablevision, and Cox deliver customer service. Last week I got a chance to sit down with Zor in the SpeechCycle headquarters. Deep in Wall Street, next to a sunny window overlooking the Statue of Liberty, I asked him to lay out the strategy that’s driven such dramatic growth (SpeechCycle was recently recognized by Deloitte as a “Technology Fast 500”). He walked through five pivotal decisions that collectively compose a disruptive strategy that, so far at least, position them as the uncontestable leader in what they do.

1. The perfect exit: Before launchined SpeechCycle, Zor, a 25-year-old Russian engineer, recognized that while Soviet-era hospitals could not afford even basic sheets, they still wanted cutting-edge IT systems to keep up with the West, so he started building them. He launched a software company and saved just enough to buy tickets and get out of the Soviet Union with his wife and young son.

2. The search for meaning: After a stint at Bell Labs and Microsoft, followed by launching and selling BuzzCompany.com, one of the first Internet messaging software companies, Zor became fascinated by how humans extract meaning from speech. This lead him to launch SpeechCycle with several cofounders to realize a simple insight: They could help large firms use software to listen to and understand their customers better. Because they focused early and intensely, they now have unparalleled expertise using proprietary “High Definition Statistical Natural Language Understanding” technology to understand certain types of conversations.

For example, they know the virtually infinite ways a customer might complain about a slow Internet connection. Do you? If you don’t, you might want to try SpeechCycle, which would enable you to have your phone system simply ask, “What is your problem?” while your competitors guide their customers through the torturous “Press 2 for an option you don’t want” process.

3. Borrowing a road: In their first days, Zor and his cofounders, who bootstrapped the company, figured their best target customers would be electronics firms like HP. They were desperate to win clients so they sat down with a list of 1,500 consumer electronics companies and started cold-calling to win their first customer, a second-tier printer manufacturer. It soon became clear they were barking up the wrong tree because most customers call their phone and cable service providers when they have a problem. You don’t call Linksys when your router is down, do you? You call your Internet service provider first. SpeechCycle now serves leading telecom service providers instead.

4. Use the cloud: On a high-stakes phone call with HP, their target client told them that HP is very unlikely to buy software from a small software company. They simply don’t do that. So years before “software as a service” or “the cloud” were known terms, SpeechCycle adopted that model.

5. Sell value: Early on it was difficult to get customers to take a leap and pay this relatively young, unknown company to do something they were not convinced yet was possible, so the SpeechCycle team pivoted their pricing plan, saying, “Only pay us when it works.” If a customer calls and cannot solve their problem through the automated SpeechCycle enabled system, if they hit “zero for an agent,” SpeechCycle does not get paid.

Now, somewhere at Harvard Business School, a professor is telling impressionable students that the way to create a strategy is to sit down, think, and then document a set of decisions like this. They might even call up SpeechCycle as an example, and argue the company’s strategy is disruptive because they focused on:

1. Getting better than others at extracting meaning from utterances

2. Serving service providers, not hardware makers

3. Moving early to the cloud

4. Adopting value-based pricing

5. Creating a pricing plan that makes it easy for potential clients to sign on

And while this is true, it overlooks how innovative disrupters like SpeechCycle arrive at their strategy. They strategize immediately, as needed, not in November every year. They strategize in 10 minutes in the hallway, not over three days in a boardroom.

The key to outthinking your competition is to make smarter decisions at every turn. So the next time you make a decision, stop what you are doing and think for 10 minutes. Break your thought process apart into five steps. My book, Outthink the Competition, provides tools to manage these steps precisely, but here is a short version:

1. Imagine: What do you want to achieve? Real-life example: I am about to get on a phone call and want the others to hang up motivated and in action.

2. Dissect: What must be true? They have to (a) see we are making progress, (b) hear excitement in my voice, and (c) know what to do next.

3. Expand: Come up with 10 or more ways to achieve what must be true. I can list out all my achievements this week, I can put them in the right order, I can drink an espresso, etc.

4. Analyze: Choose the 1-3 ideas that will have the biggest impact and that are the easiest to do. I decide to list out my achievements and put them in an order that weaves a narrative of momentum.

5. Sell: Think about how to communicate your plan. Since the people on the phone are analytical, I will communicate my achievements with numbers (e.g., we had 2 new pitches, raised $3 million in new commitments, etc.).

Try it out–and if you have a breakthrough, tell us about it in the comments.

Image: Flickr user Michael Broxton

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Shoptiques

Quick Pitch: Shop local boutiques online.

Genius Idea: Brings an offline industry online; lets you shop by neighborhood.

It all began with Paris and a shoe.

While shopping in France’s capital four years ago, Olga Vidisheva stumbled across what she describes as a “tiny, one-location wonder boutique with the friendliest, most stylish owner.” There, she found a pair of suede sandals unlike anything she’d ever come across in a department store, which she promptly purchased and packed into her suitcase home.

Vidisheva says she has wanted to go back to that boutique ever since, but has never been able to. Since that time, she’s discovered some fantastic boutiques stateside, picked up a MBA from Harvard Business School and is now on a mission to make the experience of browsing and buying from boutiques available to everyone everywhere through her newly launched site, Shoptiques. The sites lets you buy clothing and accessories from 50 boutiques with one flat shipping and return fee.

Shoptiques isn’t the first business that’s attempted to bring the boutique industry online. London-based Farfetch.com, which raised $18 million in January, has made the inventories of some 200 boutiques available for online purchase. Backend solutions like Shopify have also made it easier for small businesses to set up storefronts on the web.

So what makes Shoptiques different? The biggest differentiator is product. Farfetch focuses on upmarket brands and products with pricetags not infrequently in the high hundreds and low thousands. Brands aren’t a focus on Shoptiques, and products are priced between $50 and $300.

Shoptiques also invites you to shop differently: that is, like a local. Shops are organized by neighborhood, so you can pull up all the inventory from Brooklyn, for instance, or West Hollywood. From there, you can filter by color, price, size and style. You also have the option to browse across cities by category, just like any other apparel retail site.

Shoptiques is a recent alum of Y Combinator’s accelerator program and has raised an initial seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, General Catalyst and SV Angel, among others. The startup takes a “healthy cut” of each sale made on the site, Vidisheva tell us. Everything sold online is brought in and photographed by Shoptiques. Once a sale is made, the boutique is responsible for shipping it to the customer and keeping track of remaining inventory.

Inventory and sales growth are top priorities for Shoptiques going forward, as are further curation and personalization features, Vidisheva says. “If your style is classic, and mine is edgy, we should experience the site in a different way,” Vidisheva says of Shoptiques’s plans for personalization. “Perhaps we’ll start shoppers with a quiz, recommend that they follow a few boutiques and go from there.”

Mobile is also on the roadmap, with an emphasis on bridging the online and offline shopping experience. “We want to become a destination for boutique living and shoping,” Vidisheva explains. “If you’re on the streets of Nolita, we want to tell you which boutiques near you have stuff. We really see our boutiques as partners, and we want to drive traffic to their offline stores as well. We benefit because they’ll be in business a long time, and we want to work with them for a long time.”

All that’s very promising, but we still feel one element is missing from the shopping experience: the interaction with that friendly, stylish boutique owner Vidisheva met in Paris. Phone numbers for each of the boutiques are provided on the site so that shoppers can ring when they have a question about styling or fit. But we’d love to be able to jump in a video or even an SMS chat with boutique workers while we were shopping, or see how a particular piece has been styled on a store mannequin.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Alija

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.