Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's visit to Cuba served to further strengthen bilateral relations between the two countries, leverage the South American giant's investments in the Caribbean island, and deepen political ties.

The traditional canoe is at the center of several projects aimed at reducing Fiji’s energy consumption, providing cheaper transport, keeping local traditions alive and giving a boost to tourism.

A bumper harvest and a surge in emergency food aid have ended a famine in Somalia that killed tens of thousands of people, the United Nations said on Friday.

Kenya struggles to spread the wealth from rapid growth

RAMALLAH 09 January 2012 (IRIN) - Izz Tawil draws a black circle on the flip-chart in his office in Ramallah, capital of the West Bank in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt).

It is often said that innovation is at the core of sustainability, but turning that abstract idea into action isn’t always easy. How do true innovators actually make the leap from status quo to full-on disruption?

First, a definition. Innovation doesn’t necessarily entail creating something new. It’s not the same as invention. Rather, innovation usually involves a fresh perspective on something that already exists--taking an idea, a technology, or a material (or aggregating several) and then considering how their use can create a positive impact in a new and better way. The process of making this leap is often scary, and requires a certain amount of gumption, as well as copious amounts of leadership, entrepreneurialism, and good design.

Innovation doesn’t necessarily entail creating something new. It’s not the same as invention.

Autodesk’s interest in discovering how history’s greatest innovators worked their magic is obvious (the company develops design, engineering, and entertainment software), and the application of innovation to sustainability is even more critical for us. That’s why my colleague Bill O’Connor began researching the 1,000 greatest innovations of all time last spring. O’Connor called the investigation the Innovation Genome Project. The goal was to discover and codify patterns and practices that people could apply to their day-to-day work to be truly innovative.

As O’Connor worked with a team of MBAs from Hult International Business School to review the first 100 innovations, they quickly identified six questions that famous innovators have consistently asked and answered to generate ideas that can lead to new innovations.

These six innovation questions are:

• What could I look at in a new way? (Steve Jobs looked at the computer in a new way, leading to the Mac and the personal computer revolution.)
• What could I use in a new way? (Paleolithic humans turned fire from a scourge into a means of cooking, heat, light, and protection.)
• What could I recontextualize in space or time? (The Sumerians moved language from spoken to written form, expanding its power and reach.)
• What could I connect in a new way? (Thomas Edison connected the light bulb to the electrical grid, leading to electrified cities.)
• What could I change, in terms of design or performance? (Nearly 3 million years ago, the world’s first “innovator” transformed a simple rock into a stone hand-axe.)
• What could I create that is truly new? (In 1776, American colonists created the first “intentional” nation, based on specific abstract principles.)

So my team and I tried it. We used these six questions to come up with software that would solve a problem we had heard over and over again--that of customers telling us that they’d like to design using sustainable materials, but they couldn’t justify the extra expense. Because the materials were more “sustainable,” they assumed that they were more expensive.

The third question was our catalyst. What could we recontextualize in space or time? That question led us to two more that put us on the right track: Why do all the existing design tools look at environmental impact but not cost? Whom can we bring in to create a tool that understands both?

The perfect partner to help us solve this problem was Granta Design, a materials information and technology company. They helped us develop the Eco Materials Advisor feature which we released last spring. With Granta’s materials expertise and their access to the best raw materials cost and availability data, we created a tool that illuminates both the environmental and financial costs of various materials, which can have surprising results. A silicone grip, for example, might actually make more environmental sense than a natural latex grip that requires almost 100 gallons of water to form and manufacture.

Sustainability problem-solving doesn’t need to be about paying for more responsible products; it just takes a few innovative questions to make it work.

Meet Douglas Merrill, Google's former Chief Information Officer, whose loan-giving startup ZestCash makes FICO scores seem straight outta the Stone Age. "All data is credit data," he says--and the insight is helping America's "underbanked" legions.

A few years ago, Douglas Merrill became convinced that good people were being denied credit, just because loaners weren’t sifting through enough data. So Merrill, once Google’s Chief Information Officer (and one of our Fast 50 in 2008), joined forces with Shawn Budde, formerly of Capital One, to create their data/banking mash-up ZestCash. The company wants to do nothing less than transform underwriting. Fast Company talked with Merrill about vampires, the Oedipal complex, and FICO scores.

You’ve written about how we have “an alternative financial system” in this country, that’s not particularly pretty. What is that financial system, for those who might not be familiar with it?

There’s a large percentage of the U.S. population--estimates vary widely, somewhere between 60-100 million people--who have no healthy relationship with a bank. They may have a credit card, but either it’s not useful to them, or they can’t use it. These are referred to as the underbanked, or unbanked. Everyone needs credit, for when things go wrong. A lot of people don’t have any savings at all. As a result, this group of high-cost lenders has appeared, called payday loan companies. Forty million Americans took out a payday loan last year, and for those payday loans, they paid about a total of 10 billion dollars in fees--just fees, not the principal.

How’d you first encounter this system?

My wife’s sister Vic is a single mother of three, a full-time student, and full-time employee: She’s Superwoman. She had a flat tire, but she didn’t have the money [to fix it]. She called me and I wrote her a check. I asked her, “Vic, if I hadn’t answered the phone, what would you have done?” She said, “I’d have gotten another payday loan.” So I looked up what payday loan was. It turns out there are 25,000 payday loan stores in this country, more than McDonald's and Starbucks combined. If you’re not paying attention you don’t see them. What interested me the most was the high cost of payday loan options. The reason for the high cost is that nobody in the payday loan space can figure out if I, as a borrower, am going to pay. That’s called underwriting. [ZestCash] figured out how to apply the best of traditional underwriting (that’s what Capital One brought) and the best of data analysis (that’s what I brought) to figure out who’s likely to pay back a loan. As a result we can offer product that’s about 50% the cost of payday loan.

You’ve said that good people are being denied credit because old processes don’t take advantage of today’s data-rich environment. What do you mean when you write, “all data is credit data”?

Credit underwriting hasn’t really changed in 40 years. It uses a particular mathematical function called a logistic regression, and about five to 10 pieces of data. FICO revolutionized this in the '70s, and it was a transformative innovation. But there haven’t been big innovations since then. We’re proposing the next big innovation: Use hundreds or thousands of data points, much like how we used data at Google to rank search results.

What’s an example of the kinds of data you use?

It turns out if you look at our site, at the educational material--if you take look and surf around the site--you are more likely to pay the loan back than if you don’t. It’s an itty bitty signal--not 50% better, just a little better. But take a lot of things that are a little better, and you get something that’s a lot better.

So essentially you’re giving Fast Company readers a tiny discount, now that they know this.

Your readers will know something about how we think about data. We don’t give a lot of examples for exactly that reason.

How’s it going so far?

It’s hard to imagine a better job than the one I have. You get to work on a cool, hard math problem and at the same time be helping people. Our customers saved half a million dollars in December alone. We’ll hit our 10,000th unique customer in the next month or so, and have loaned out several million dollars already. So there’s a huge amount of growth. But I guess everyone says that.

It seems that you have a lot of hobbies [inset]. Which is most relevant to ZestCash?

My hobbies are things like riding motorcycles and reading dumb books. At one point I gave an employee an old Kindle, and she went and counted the number of vampire books on there. It was in the double digits, which is quite embarrassing.

Maybe vampires represent your fear and hatred of predatory lenders.

I never thought of it that way. But not all vampire novels have vampires as the bad guys. You’d think I’d have Reflections on the Revolution in France instead of some random vampire novel. If you read my resume without knowing me, you might get the sense that I’m really serious. I like tattoos, I have long hair, I like telling jokes.

Know any good jokes about FICO credit scoring?

Sadly, I have no FICO jokes. I like it when ZestCash is compared to FICO, because FICO changed the world.

But do you have an Oedipal relationship with FICO? You love them, but you kind of secretly want to kill them?

I’m fairly confident that FICO isn’t my parent. I’m able to see farther because I stand on shoulders of giants. I believe ultimately our way of doing math and analysis will become the dominant way in underwriting, and we will save the underbanked billions of dollars.

This interview has been condensed and edited. For more from the Fast Talk interview series, click here.

Follow Fast Company on Twitter. Think you'd make a good Fast Talk subject? Mention it to David Zax.

[Images: Flickr user swanksalot]

Social innovation is one of those phrases that is in danger of becoming nearly meaningless due to its overuse, and use in such a wide variety of applications. Today, most businesses want to have some claim on the idea that they’re doing something good, and most nonprofits want to be able to say that they’re moving beyond old models of charity and bringing something more innovative to their work.

Every year, Microsoft holds the Imagine Cup, a competition that challenges students ages 16 and older to "imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems” by innovating in software design, game design, embedded development, digital media, and on the Windows Phone 7 platform. This year, for the first time, the technology giant went one step further and launched the Imagine Cup Grants Program.

The agriculture industry must prepare and adapt - now

Easing restrictions could help food reach the drought-affected poor in southern Africa, experts argue

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. solar industry group fighting a rival coalition's request for steep import duties on Chinese-made solar cells and modules warned in a report on Monday that more than 60,000 U.S. jobs could be lost if such duties were imposed.

Maids, parking valets, and other domestic workers push back against ill treatment in 'the world's most unequal region.'

The World Trade Organization has affirmed that China unfairly limited exports of nine raw materials to protect domestic manufacturers.

After years of hearing lectures on fiscal prudence from the West, many in Latin America are left with bewilderment, and even a little schadenfreude, at the West’s problems.

A staggering manufacturing system in China has made it possible for Apple and other companies to make devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up, but for workers, it can be dangerous.

The tourism industry remains unexploited, especially in comparison to the hordes of tourists who flock to Asia

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