Future Now
The IFTF Blog
An Open Health Competition
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and Changemakers.net have launched "Designing for Better Health," a competition that calls for projects that demonstrate novel and effective approaches to enouraging behavior changes to improve people's health. In a letter to the Changemakers community, RWJF explains:
This competition is intended to offer you the opportunity to showcase your ideas and your work, and it provides RWJF a uniquely valuable and rich opportunity to learn about what solutions hold promise. As a part of the Changemakers global community, we want you to help test and refine the ideas surfacing through this competition – we call your attention to the online review option that accompanies each entry, and invite you to share your thoughts and reactions throughout the stages of the competition. This level of collaboration is what will help to surface new innovations and connect participants to new ideas, partners, and resources.
The sponsors hope that this global competition will produce "nudges," which they define as "innovative little pushes" that will help people make better choices regarding their own health and the health of others. For more on this concept, which is based on Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book, Nudge, see this explanation of "How to Nudge." The homepage for "Designing for Better Health" offers several examples of health-related nudges.
RWJF's mission is to improve the health and health care of all Americans; its Pioneer Portfolio supports innovative ideas and projects "that may have far-reaching impact on people’s health, the quality of care they receive and the systems through which that care is provided." The Changemakers.net website uses the following tag line: "Open Sourcing Social Solutions." Changemakers describes its collaborative competitions as opportunities to develop "'open source' innovative, workable solutions to the world’s most entrenched social problems." It notes that, "Competition entries are posted transparently online and available for anyone to view and collaborate with by providing new ideas, asking insightful questions, and providing connections to new resources."
"Designing for Better Health" is a great example of Open Health--the application of open innovation principles to the global health economy. (Members of the Health Horizons Program can access our Open Health Map and companion Toolkit here.) Open Health is one aspect of the future of science that IFTF is studying via Signtific, a dynamic, collaborative, web-based platform designed for engaging scientists and technologists from all areas of study in identifying disruptive trends. I encourage you to check it out and participate in the project!