Last week, Bill Clinton spoke at the Inc 500 conference about entrepreneurship and challenged small business owners of the fastest growing small companies to tackle large systemic problems by using their creativity: the health care crisis and poverty.
In my large scale systems planning workshop class on Tuesdays and Fridays, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re using structured design methods to figure out what services each stakeholder (providers, suppliers of medical equipment and pharma companies, health plans, government, and employers) could provide to help improve the system.
And, in the strategic design research class that meets early Wednesday morning, a group is trying to use WRI’s next 4 billion work to create a framework for success for enterprise in the BOP market.
So, so far we’ve hit poverty and healthcare. What else ya got?
Oh, right. We’re also working on creating an electronic learning record (analogous to the electronic medical record), which intends to be a longitudinal record for students. It will take schools away from using tests solely to assess academic performance and achievement, and focus on the student’s personal interests and passions as a whole. I, along with another team member, am working on the business model and potentially finding project partners.
So, okay, you’re reading this and it might sound like a shameless plug for the Institute of Design, but the point is, a design school is a great place to be to think of game-changing, disruptive innovations that benefit people’s lives.
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