I encourage all of you to think outside of the box in regard to making all of these solutions a means of bringing about a sustainable change. One of my partners, Amit J. Nimunkar, and myself gave a presentation at the Steven G. Burrill Business Plan Competition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our plan was to try to put together a plan that could provide affordable healthcare for developing countries, while at the same time making the entire process sustainable.
Unfortunately we did not win the competition, but we were able to learn quite a bit through the entire process. Please take a look at the presentation and express our thoughts. I also encourage you to perform a similar thought excercise to determine how we can all bring about a sustainable social change.
Times may be changing. The new generation of entrepreneurs are not focused just on making profit, some are using these ventures as a means to being about social change. This is why social entrepreneurship is one of the main topics which this blog is built around. Social entrepreneurship refers to a process of creating a venture to use it as a vehicle for social change.
Interesting methods of going about designing for social change are currently being discussed. One of the best I have seen is from IDEO, a global design firm. They have developed a human centered design toolkit. The toolkit was developed with funding from the Gates Foundation and provides a framework for designing a social venture. They describe the process as being three fold first you ‘hear’, then you ‘create’, finally you ‘deliver’. ‘Hearing’ puts yourself in the shoes of the individuals. ’Creating’ is used to determine the viability of a design. Finally, ‘deliver’ discusses how you can determine if the entire venture will be viable or not.
Each of these aspects translates directly into the healthcare field in developing countries. Many times entrepreneurs are not familiar with how developing countries function. Thus there is a need to place the entrepreneur in the developing countries to ‘hear’ what needs to be accomplished. Also ‘creating’ is important to ensure the problem can be solved, and ‘delivering’ is needed to ensure the viability of the operation.
If anyone out there has an interesting problem or design project which they would like to be addressed please fill out this form. As I have stated previously I’m a member of the BME Projects Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We have a team of graduate and undergraduate engineers which are interested in working on different of design projects. Submissions will be evaluated and problems which have the largest potential for impact will be pursued, pending availability of resources.