Disruptive Innovations Contest Winners

Submitted by Ana Escalante on September 28, 2007 - 10:51.
Published in: |

Here on NextBillion, we have followed the Disruptive Innovations contest from Ashoka very closely, hoping that a new ‘disruptive innovation’ will provide a good idea or innovation for the BOP. The winners were announced earlier this month and truthfully, I am very disappointed. There were three winners – none of them are international, nor is there one that caters the BOP.

The competition’s objective was to find 'disruptive innovations' – as Professor Clayton Christensen from Harvard Business School refers to innovations that dramatically reshape current trends. This specific competition aimed to find solutions for health and health care marketplace problems. The online competition, "Disruptive Innovations in Health and Health Care-Solutions People Want," was an initiative from Ashoka’s Changemakers. There were 10 finalists - I blogged about them last month - and three winners were chosen by online votes.

A disruptive innovation must be an innovative solution to a problem and it has offer a technology, process or business model that changes the way that products or services are currently available. This can be either by making it more affordable or simpler to use. The potential change caused by such innovations is so dramatic that eventually, the original model is replaced, or 'disrupted.'

The winners of the $5,000 USD grant for "Disruptive Innovations in Health and Health Care-Solutions People Want," competition are:

Project ECHO: Knowledge Networks for the Treatment of Complex Diseases in Remote, Rural, Underserved Communities (University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center). Using telemedicine and the Internet, specialists and primary care providers co-manage patient populations with chronic diseases in rural areas, as well as other underserved communities across New Mexico.

Family Coaching Clinics: A New Model of Preventive Mental Health Care (UCLA Semel Institute Global Center for Children and Families). Using the same principles as MinuteClinics and RediClinics, Family Coaching Clinics operate in accessible retail environments to make mental health services readily available to families before simple problems become more serious.

Instant Birth Control (Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette). Using Web tools and multi-media outreach, this 24/7 online program increases women's access to reliable birth control, eliminating the need for in-person doctor visits for routine contraception and sexual health care.

Health care is an important issue to address. Bad health practices need to be tackled in the United States and in the world. But I do find interesting that from a window of three, the winners only operate in the United States. I find interesting that the HIV initiative that I blogged about did not even make it to the final three winners, considering that it is a very blatant problem in many African countries.

I have one remark for the organizers of the contest: I find very peculiar that the three winners from an online voting competition all serve the country with the highest rate of internet usage, the United States. I am not sure if this is really fair. Perhaps Changemakers should consider that many people that live in the BOP do not have access to the internet, and therefore cannot participate actively in a competition like this one. Because of the digital divide, there is a discrepancy in online voting type competitions. Until the digital divide is crossed maybe online voting is not the fairest way to award grants for projects like global health.


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India
Submitted by Carla on September 29, 2007 - 15:36.
Just an observation: the majority of comments on the Project Echo submission were posted from India (leading me to suspect the same is true for the votes). That submission described plans for expansion both inside and outside the US (correctional facilities inside the US and expansion to rural India and Vietnam). Another motivation that *may* have skewed the voting: Robert Wood Johnson co-sponsored the competition and indicated that they may provide further funding of up to 5 million dollars to projects that they find promising. But RWJF is restricted by their mission statement to fund only US based projects operating within the US. Perhaps the US based projects felt more motivated to try to win the competition (since there was a possibility of winning RWJF funding)? BTW, my favorite projects were the ECHO Knowledge Networks, the oral rotavirus vaccine, and the field device for CD4 counts. Those three in combination would have a huge impact on global health!
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Disruptive Innovations Competition
Submitted by Charlie Brown on September 30, 2007 - 20:14.
Dear Ana,

Thank you for your blog post regarding the Changemakers “Disruptive Innovations in Health” competition. It is great to know you are following the competitions, and I hope you will continue to follow the Disruptive Innovations in Health discussion and the entries that come in during upcoming competitions.

In response to your questions, the Disruptive Innovations in Health competition sourced over 78 entries from countries with direct BOP markets and another dozen that were directly or indirectly targeted at the BOP. In selecting the finalists, the judges looked at how each entry reflected the three criteria: disruptive innovation, social impact, and sustainability. These were the requirements for becoming a finalist; none of them reflect a target geography or market.

Changemamakers has designed the competitions so that all entries gain value from the experience. In the online discussion you can note that one of the winner’s solutions, a project from the U.S., was noted as a prime candidate for replication in India and for Native American reservations. The opportunity to discuss an innovation provides the opportunity for a solution targeted at the U.S. to find value in a radically different market, and potentially, the collaborators to help make it happen.

In the voting stage for the finalists, those with greater Internet access would seem to enjoy greater odds of winning. Surprisingly enough, this has not been the case in the 14 Changemakers competitions to date. A prime example is last year's “How to Improve Health for All” competition where all three winners were from India, beating out U.S. entries. In this example voters were tracked to rural information kiosks and some of the least Internet-accessible areas of India. It was an exciting moment to see citizens in BOP areas utilize the Changemakers competition, thereby gaining access to a global community for the first time.

Thanks again for your post and hope you continue to follow the competitions. We'd love to have you participate in the various discussions as well, and bring your insights to bear on the process of discovery and innovation.

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HIV & HCV
Submitted by Tara Bahait on September 30, 2007 - 20:45.
"I find interesting that the HIV initiative that I blogged about did not even make it to the final three winners, considering that it is a very blatant problem in many African countries." Yes, agreed! And so is HCV (hepatitis C virus), especially in Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, and southeast Asia. In fact, more people are infected with HCV than HIV, and HCV causes more deaths per year than HIV. HCV is also a common coinfection with HIV. So the urgency of the HIV epidemic is intrinsically linked with that of hepatitis C. I bring this up both because October 1st (Monday) is World Hepatitis Awareness Day and because one of the winning proposals in the Changemakers competition is providing HCV treatment to poor and underserved populations. For more information, please see the World Health Organization website: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs164/en/
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