Urban Studies, Entrepreneurship, and Technology

Joseph Stasio, Merrimack College

Entrepreneurship and innovation are dynamic and inherently unpredictable. The world of technology changes rapidly, and community needs often arise without significant advance warning. The marriage of entrepreneurship, innovative technologies, and community service is both tumultuous and exciting. We have undertaken this marriage between the disciplines of science and engineering, entrepreneurship,
and service learning in an effort to improve the world, on a local level, through the training and use of advanced technology to solve urgent social problems. We are creating novel interdisciplinary projects that focus on the use of GIS and GPS technologies to serve the needs of not-for-profits and NGOs in the Lawrence, MA, community, the second-poorest community in Massachusetts. Our goal is to build technological capacity within community organizations such that they become more economically sustainable over time.

>>Read the peer-reviewed paper here (PDF)