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NexThought Monday: Fending Off ‘Pilotitis’ in Global Tech
In 2008, as many as 80 NGOs were testing consumer-facing mobile health (mHealth) programs in Uganda - all at once. But none of the pilots were scalable, interoperable, or meaningfully coordinated. Uganda is far from alone. A World Bank study in 2013 found nearly 500 disparate mHealth programs being implemented around the world – particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia – without evidence of scaling or integration. A preventive treatment of sorts has arrived to help organizations address these "technology for development" problems: The Principles for Digital Development.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
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NexThought Monday – Seeking Scale: The Unexplored Power of Standardized Tools and Customized Implementation
Ted London has been working in the base of the pyramid domain since 1989. During that time, he's engaged with many hundreds of entrepreneurs and business leaders seeking to develop and launch enterprises in BoP markets. He's seen several success and many failures. It lead him to develop the Partnership Ecosystem Framework, a tool that helps prepare the enterprise for building the cross-organizational collaborations needed for sustainability at scale.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
- Tags
- Base of the Pyramid, scale
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Lessons Learned Building Locally-Sourced Wheelchairs
JJD Innovations is empowering local tradesmen like welders to build wheelchairs that are customized to the end-user, while also creating a sustainable supply. The firm had to reiterate the engineering multiple times based on the availability of local materials, and reiterate again when the material was available but the building skills were hard to find.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Tags
- product design, scale
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Want to Succeed in Health Care? Find the Right Price, Place and Partners
Innovations in Healthcare's search for its newest cohort of innovators included more than 180 private-sector organizations and uncovered several trends in technology, investment and strategies to address chronic disease. The top organizations illustrated three broad ideas in market-based health care: the right price, partners and partners.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Sloppy Numbers About Poor Households
Affordability – the ratio between price and household income – matters and gets insufficient attention. While there has been a huge effort to sell quality goods and services at a low price point, there's been relatively little effort to understand incomes and spending patterns in poor households.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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The State of Assessment: Why the ‘assess or not’ debate continues and how we can move beyond it (Part 1 of 2)
Recent debate has focused on whether businesses should assess social, economic and/or environmental impact. How did we get stuck here? In this two-part series, Heather Esper and Yaquta Kanchwala Fatehi of the William Davidson Institute explore the evolution of assessment and how to move beyond the paralysis.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- impact measurement, scale
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The State of Assessment: Moving the conversation forward to accelerate value creation (Part 2 of 2)
Heather Esper and Yaquta Kanchwala Fatehi of the William Davidson Institute say it's time to stop debating whether businesses should assess social, economic and/or environmental impact, and move on to a conversation about how to extract the most value. They even offer five core activities to accelerate that value.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- impact measurement, scale
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Health innovations need much more than research
The Global Forum for Research and Innovation for Health recognised that health care innovations take more than research, but the challenges of "scaling up" and efficient collaboration were largely missed. We need to focus more on the development process following academic studies.
- Categories
- Education, Environment, Health Care