What does it take to be a successful real estate developer? Author John McNellis tells you how, sharing practical tips and advice from his wealth of experience over 35 years in real estate development. Like meeting with a mentor over coffee, McNellis entertains with witty anecdotes, and wisdom on how to take advantage of opportunities and avoid pitfalls. Offering humorous insights, the book covers the ins and outs of how to get financing, working...

The Open African Innovation Research and Training (Open A.I.R.) project focused on the intersection of innovation, intellectual property (IP), and development in Africa and this book offers its research findings. Its case studies cover nine African countries--Egypt, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Botswana, and South Africa--looking at IP rights in a range of sites of innovation: agricultural production, biofuel technology, traditional...

In this consideration, respected trend analyst JP Landman focuses on the South African economy, examining its history, its current state, and what he perceives as its future fate. By questioning and challenging the preconceived ideas and the media-portrayed examples of what members of the public might deem a modern and developed society, Landman goes beyond the present to give readers a solid, long-term, and informed view. As an economist, the author...

This book sets out to explain how Shanghai emerged from relative obscurity in 1842 to become one of the world's best-known finance and industry hubs. As China's largest city, Shanghai today plays a central economic role, much as it did in the 1920s. The author provides a concise diachronic survey of the economic history of modern Shanghai, setting out how the city's urban infrastructure, municipal institutions, consumer culture, and industry have...

Why are some nations rich and others poor? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of the right policies? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Based on fifteen years of original research, Acemoglu and Robinson marshall historical evidence from the...

La década de 1980 marca un punto de inflexión en el desarrollo de América Latina. Durante esa década se produjo la coincidencia de cuatro fenómenos que desde entonces han marcado el desarrollo de América Latina: el colapso del "régimen proteccionista" que venía siendo empleado por los países latinoamericanos desde la década de 1950; la crisis de la deuda externa; la generalizada aceptación de la política neoliberal, y el surgimiento de...

Help people help themselves: That's the idea behind microcredit. Small loans-sometimes no more than $50-can radically improve the life of a poor family. Where development aid and billion-dollar loans fail, microcredit is emerging as the success story in the battle against world poverty. People who were previously considered "unbankable" no longer have to look to loan sharks for funding. With microcredit, they can become owners of small businesses....

He's a fourteen-year-old boy, taken to fight in war. She's his twin sister, desperate to save him. Patish and Leeta enjoy an idyllic life in their ancient Indian village - until a battle over diminishing water supply threatens their world. While Patish trains as the warrior he'd never planned to be, duty falls on Leeta to make a perilous journey for the wisdom of the mysterious Purple Sage. When the final command is given and the armies are...

We live in the midst of one of the greatest technological revolutions in history, an era of deep-seated transformation-a macro shift in civilization, says preeminent scholar and futurist Ervin Laszlo. Its signs and manifestations are all around us, from the deadly HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping Africa and the dangerous fire-trap sweatshops routinely killing workers in Bangladesh, to the environmental havoc created by genetic engineering, power plant pollution...

Innovation requires supportive innovation ecosystems. This book is about building innovation ecosystems and improving existing ones. These have the character of complex adaptive systems. Innovation ecosystems do not just happen; they need to be engineered. Cases and examples in the book of how to engineer innovation ecosystems illustrate widely applicable fundamentals. No previous knowledge of complexity is assumed. Innovation ecosystems are systems...