invention

This post first appeared on the Global Health Ideas blog. It has been cross-posted with their permission.

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This is a guest post by Preethi Sundararaman, summer associate working with the FEC Healthcare for All team at Ashoka.

It is a known fact that childhood obesity is on the rise, affecting one third of American children today. Alarmingly, researchers are predicting that for the first time in U.S. history, children may have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

On July 13th, I attended the “Innovation, Information and Technology for Better Health Outcomes” conversation event held at World Bank. Todd Park, the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and co-founder of Athenahealth Inc., was one of three panelists at the event.

A key theme Park brought up was the impact technology and social media could have on healthcare for younger generations. “What if FarmVille were HealthVille?” Park asked. FarmVille, a real-time farm simulation game, has acquired 75 million Facebook users just within a year of being available. If games with the potential to reach this many were designed around health data, generations to come could grow up being more health conscious.

And how can we recognize it when it happens instead of just throwing it away?

That's the subject of a recent article in Wired Magazine—"Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up"—which explores how usual behaviors and even our own brains tend to stand in the way of recognizing good things in unexpected results.  Writer Jonah Lehrer introduces us to Kevin Dunbar, a researcher who studies, of all things, scientists—"how they fail and how they succeed."  Though Dunbar's research focuses on scientists, the lessons are remarkably appropriate for inventors and social entrepreneurs.

Kevin Dunbar: "The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored."  Image source: Wired

Here are a few lessons from the article—How to Learn From Failure:

Lesson # 15: Capturing the Knowledge

Last week our fearless Tech4Society event team leader put together a day devoted solely to distilling all of the knowledge we have or think we have about the invention and technology space within social entrepreneurship.

It’s a brilliant idea and a rare opportunity here at Ashoka to turn off email for the day and reflect on how far we’ve come in our understanding of a space we just stepped into three years ago with the support of The Lemelson Foundation.

As is tradition here, everyone participates.  Interns, volunteers, senior leadership, junior staff—it’s an equal opportunity chance to share in some serious mind work.

We started out with a few presentations by the Ashoka Tech blog crew, the Youth Venture team, and a review of a recent flash dance in Chicago, just to keep things even more interesting.

The afternoon was devoted to free-wheeling brainstorming—first as a large group and then in small groups of 3 or 4. Ideas bounced round the room as people wielded smelly markers and Post-it notes like seasoned pros in the noble quest for Knowledge.

Thomson Reuters recently came out with the Global Research Report – India. I was happy to read the 12 pages describing the country’s in-house scientific capacity and output. It’s clear that the technical know-how of a country, and ultimately its ability to innovate, is necessary in order for indigenous solutions to be discovered and brought to bear. We’ve seen this in the US -- scientific and technical innovation has triggered many of the greatest entrepreneurial activities in history. 

The key points of the paper, which can be downloaded for free here, are that the growth in India’s scientific output over the last decade has shot up tremendously, an 80% increase from 2000-2007. Compared with many other countries reviewed in the study, such as Japan, France, Germany and the UK, India is on the sharp rise. The paper estimates that if this trend continues India’s research productivity will be on par with the G8 nations in about 7 or 8 years, and surpass them between the years 2015-2020.

Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Augustin Woelz, founder of Sociedade Do Sol (Brazil),  uses an“open source” approach and systemic outreach to students, teachers, universities, citizen sector organizations, and businesses to make his low-cost inventions easily accessible to communities.  He empowers families to build their own energy production systems in a process led by youth, which not only economically benefits families, but also helps develop new leadership roles for young people in society.

For instance, Agustin designed the Low Cost Solar Heating System (Aqueceder Solar de Baixo Custo – ASBC) as an affordable, open-source, build-it-yourself system to pre-heat water for domestic bathing,tailored to Brazil’s climate and consumption patterns.

Photo By: Flickr/Project H Design www.projecthdesign.org

The other day I was fortunate enough to catch Dan Grossman on his lunch hour, somewhere between his full-time job as an industrial designer and his second full-time job spreading education tools around the world.

Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Paul Basil, through his organization Rural Innovations Network (RIN), helps innovators improve upon innovations with a larger rural market in mind. With suitable exposure, modifications, technical assistance, and incentives, these homegrown innovations can replace expensive, ineffective tools and can solve some of the region's most pressing social and agricultural problems.

This week Paul Basil will be joining us on our online group. Make sure to check it out.

The life of Marc Koska changed the day he read that HIV would spread via unsafe injections like wildfire and he decided to do something about it. That was back in '84. It seemed to him that if injections were the cause, then the spread was preventable.  Today his invention, a low-cost non-reusable syringe, is being widely used. And, more importantly, his campaign to raise public awareness about the dangers of reusing syringes have even led India to change national policy.

"The quest was to develop a syringe that could be made of the same materials... tooling and assembly equipment and used in exactly the same way as a conventional syringe – but with one minor, negligible cost modification that would make re-use impossible. The K1 was the result. And today, 17 years later, literally millions are used every week. Once only, so that every injection with a K1 syringe is sterile and safe". 

If you want to see the syringe, watch this video.