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Migration and Business
   Today, we’ll talk about migration and business. In the flat world of maps, sharp lines show where one country ends and another begins. But the real world is more fluid. First, peoples do not have borders the way that parcels of land do. They migrate. Consider the difference between China and the Chinese people. One is an enormous country in Asia. The other is a nation that spans the planet.
   Second, thanks to cheap flights and communications, people can now stay in touch with the places they come from. A century ago, a migrant might board a ship, sail to America and never see his friends or family again. Today, he texts his mother while still waiting to clear customs. He can wire her money in minutes. He can follow news from his hometown on his laptop. He can fly home regularly to visit relatives or invest his earnings in a new business.
   This is because the diaspora networks have three lucrative virtues. First, they speed the flow of information across borders. Second, they foster trust. Third, and most important, diasporas create connections that help people with good ideas collaborate with each other, both within and across ethnicities.
   Then, there’s the relationship between migration and creativity. Immigrants are only an eighth of America’s population, but a quarter of the engineering and technology firms started there between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder, according to Duke University. The work by Northwestern University suggests that to exile itself makes people creative. They compared MBA students who had lived abroad with otherwise similar students who had not, using an experiment in which each was given a candle, a box of matches and a box of drawing pins. This candle problem requires people to imagine something being used for a purpose quite different from its usual one. Some 60% of the migrants saw the solution against 42% of non-migrants.
   Diaspora ties also help businesses to collaborate. What may be the world’s cheapest fridge was conceived from a marriage of ideas generated by Indians in India and Indians overseas. Three Indian-American engineers had an idea for a cooling engine and then worked on a cheap fridge for rural Indians too poor to fork out the $200 normally required, let alone the subsequent electric bills.
   Finally, the "new type of hyperconnectivity" that enables such projects is fundamental to today’s networked diasporas. Migrants are now connected instantaneously, continuously, dynamically and intimately to their communities of origin. This is a fundamental and profound break from the past eras of migration. The break explains why diasporas, always marginalized in the flat-map world of national territories, find themselves in the thick of things as the world becomes networked.
   We’ve talked about the changes of diasporas, why diaspora networks are effective and how migrations can help business. Any questions?