Deadline: October 18, 2020
Innovate4Health aims to inspire innovators for the future to tackle the urgent challenges and health inequities of emerging infections, including Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) and COVID-19.
Innovate4Health is a design sprint that focuses on empowering students from health and other disciplines at university and graduate school levels to take initiative in solving these problems in health care settings and communities. Innovate4Health differs from traditional design sprints through its focus on co-constructing innovations. We are not searching for a “magic bullet” to solve emerging infections. Instead, we want to identify real-life local projects that would have the potential to make a positive and scalable impact on communities, develop implementable solution, and advocacy approaches. Ultimately, we want to be the bridge connecting these projects to the global health community and work with students to build more impactful and sustainable solutions for these health inequities in low-resource settings.
In the competitive application process, we are looking for student teams providing a vision for what they might want to innovate, including the specific problem and context, as well as sharing how they might be positioned to help implement such a project. At the application stage, however, we do not expect fully-developed projects. The design sprint process is intended to help teams develop further their ideas from the application stage. Student teams selected to join the cohort of this year’s Innovate4Health design sprint will have the opportunity to work with global health leaders to design innovations within one of three innovation pillars: reducing zoonotic disease transmission in food systems, ensuring effective prevention and treatment of emerging infectious diseases in the hospital setting, or making community health systems more resilient to emerging infections.
Taking a systems approach, Innovate4Health emphasizes social innovations that consider the needs of resource-limited settings. We are looking for student teams (2-4 students per team) to join us in designing innovative solutions. Through the design sprint, teams will work through ideation, implementation, and advocacy strategies to support the adoption of these approaches. Selected teams will work with a team of experts to co-construct their solutions through asynchronous and synchronous learning.
We invite applications from teams that would be excited to collaborate with other highly talented students teams. The design sprint will extend over three to four months. We will explore the local context of resource-limited settings through guided tours through virtual healthscapes, from a wet market to a secondary hospital.
