BPN 1667: Social enterprises in healthcare

By Madanmohan Rao

Thanks to mobiles and social media, healthcare and environmental solutions are emerging in the consumer and citizen space, and not just in hospital enterprise IT and meteorological centres. Six winners of e-content in this category were recognized by the bi-annual World Summit Awards, held recently in Sri Lanka.

Here are my key takeaways from the project contributions, and recommendations from the winners of these projects who presented their findings to an audience of ICT innovators and entrepreneurs.

© Philipp Benedikt/Alexander Mattersberger
 

Mobile Technology for Community Health  from Ghana is part of service delivery for maternal health at Antenatal Care. It has two complementary applications: A Mobile-Midwife Application and a Nurse Application. Couples can both access MoTeCH messages via SMS (text) or voice in the local dialect or English. The service enables easy identification of both mothers and infants and saves time collating information to generate monthly reports, alerts and reminders.

Uepaa Swiss Alpine Technology from Switzerland is a mesh-networking app for alpine safety standards. The Uepaa app turns the smartphone of more than 25 million outdoor users into an alpine tracking, alerting and rescue device by using a wireless mesh communication technology developed by ETH Zürich.

Beatona is the Kuwait Official Environmental Portal, a “one-stop shop” for sharing authentic environmental information related to Kuwait in both Arabic and English. People of various ages can enrich their knowledge about the environment, and allows them to be part of the system by allowing them to contribute in improving the knowledge base through various online tools.

I-MOVE to Learn from China is a training game designed by physiotherapist. It has 5 mini-games to help children of ages 4-12 with motor delay and coordination problems. It uses Kinect for Windows sensor to detect body movements. Players have to use their body as a controller to challenge each level. Thus, students can have fun while they are doing training. The application is being developed on the iOS platforms for Apple devices and other platforms as well.

True-Kare from Portugal is an online service to simplify the life of people above the age of 65. It enables one person or institution to provide remote care to another person via mobiles and a Web portal, sharing information on medication and health indicators. In Portugal the service is being promoted by the main telecom operator and the main TV channel.

Here are the tips which these presenters offered to the audience of developers and entrepreneurs:

1. Include experts on your advisory teams and boards. Inter-disciplinary projects require a good mix of insights and knowledge from a range of domains.

2. Don’t use the Web and mobiles only to ‘push’ information to target audiences, but involve them also in contributing, ranking, rating and voting on information.

3. Pay attention to impacts: collect a range of quantitative and anecdotal outcomes.

4. Don’t ignore humble voice and SMS. In an era of hype and excitement about rich-media apps, there is still a lot of shelf-life for text and IVR as service channels.

5. Rope in operators as partners. Though mobile operators are not the mighty kings they once were as compared to app stores, they can still help deliver scale for a project.

6. Don’t look just at overall numbers of audience impacted, but also the depth of impact for each user. This is especially true in the case of healthcare projects, eg those which save or improve lives of the elderly.

7. Examine a range of business models for sustainability. A mix of subscription and hospital service bundling works well for e-healthcare.

 

Presentations of the projects can be seen on the site of the World Summit Award

 

BPN 1666: World Summit Awards recognizes social innovators

 

© Philipp Benedikt/Alexander Mattersberger
 

On Saturday, October 26, 2013 the conference was closed and at night the award ceremony took place. All delegates moved by train to the beach esort Mount Lavina for this occassion. My coleague from India, Madanmohan Rao, wrote a blog posting about the winners and drew his conclusions.

Every two years, contestants from over 150 countries around the world compete to win the World Summit Awards for best e-Content. The awards are given in 10 categories and are rigorously judged by an international jury according to criteria such as meeting the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

The winners are honoured at a gala and also participate in an international conference where they present their projects and discuss their plans and impacts. I was delighted to be a juror and moderator for the category of e-Inclusion and Empowerment. Here are my key takeaways from contributions of the winning entries, and recommendations for social entrepreneurs who wish to make a mark in this category.

Blindsquare from Finland is an augmented reality GPS application for the blind. It obtains information about the surrounding environment from Foursquare and Open Street Maps. Its algorithms enable it to determine the most relevant information, and then voice it out using high quality speech synthesis. For example, “What’s the most popular café within 200 meters radius?” or “How much longer before I get off my train?”

The Specialized Educational Portal from Romania is initiated by the Ministry of National Education. It services 14,000 students with special educational needs, and consists of an online environment to observe, discover, prove, verify and measure results of different experiments and simulations. The portal uses avatars to embody the roles of teachers, learners, peers and observers.

Sheeplive.eu from Slovakia was initiated by the civic association eSlovensko. It uses an animated environment with sheep as main characters to teach children about safer use of the Internet, mobile phones and new technologies. The project has developed 652 tools with over two million downloads in two years for products such as quizzes, ebooks, games, and wallpapers.

New Urban Mechanics of Boston and Philadelphia from the US is a multi-city civic innovation incubator and R&D network dedicated to improving the lives of city residents. It helps innovators connect with government through project proposals to improve urban civic life using.

TAM Hub from Saudi Arabia uses contests and crowdsourcing to help citizens identify pressing problems and then collectively put together solutions. The portal is used to link and expose entrepreneurs to contests and provide them with tips to clarify their ideas and projects. It allows the public to engage with entrepreneurs and express their opinions about the most liked ideas or projects. The initiative is expanding to five other Arab countries.

In the panel discussion at the conference, these social innovators had a range of useful lessons to share with other aspiring entrepreneurs:

1. The toughest moment for an entrepreneur is when you have a seed of an idea but no one believes it can become a tree. But don’t give up!

2. The best moment for those working in social enterprise is not money or prizes but when people thank you from the bottom of their heart for what you are doing, eg. a teacher’s best moment is when a parent of a differently abled child thanks you for teaching them.

3. Engage the entire ecosystem and not just the target audience, eg. the parents and friends of differently abled students.

4. Leverage the power of the crowd not just to solve problems but also understand the problem itself, frame it in different ways, and prioritise it with respect to other problems.

5. Use business models like syndication and licensing to spread your good work in social entrepreneurship. Partnership and alliance management strategies are key: choose partners who truly share the social values and ethical principles that you respect.

6. Don’t shun government: reach out to them and win them over as partners, because they can help truly scale your project in the long run.

The overall winner in this category was judged to be BlindSquare, a laudable achievement for a team which includes only app developer! If one app developer alone can achieve such excellence, imagine what millions of inspired app developers around the world can do!

BPN 1623: WSA Mobile content (3)

My WSA colleague Madanmohan Rao sent me three links to articles he wrote in the framework of the conference World Summit Award Mobile, held in Abu Dhabi two weeks ago. His blog postings are worthwhile reading as at least two postings are fine summaries of the trends in mobile.  

http://yourstory.in/2013/02/mobile-innovation-top-ten-trends-for-startups/
http://yourstory.in/2013/02/startup-pitches-ten-tips-for-success/
http://yourstory.in/2013/02/startup-communities-spur-mobile-innovation-around-the-world/

There are series of photographs about the event available on Flickr.

BPN 1602: Mobile in South East Asia

This morning I received a mail from my good friend Madanmohan Rao from India. This man is unbelievable. he thinks faster than the lightning of the light, he speaks faster than three people at the same time and he writes faster than the keyboard can follow. This man has produced again a report, named Mobile Monday Southeast Asia Research Report 2012. The accompanying press release reads:

"Southeast Asia has been a trade hub for thousands of years, and is a digital crossroads for Internet and mobile innovation now as well, according to our new research released today. The full report was presented to the media at the Mobile Monday Developer Lounge during the annual Communicasia conference and tradeshow. Titled “Crossroads of Innovation,” the 52 page document [PDF] showcases a wealth of detailed features including profiles of mobile markets and startups from across the region".

Overview: The focus of this report is on overall innovation ecosystems, which include a range of stakeholders: industry, entrepreneurs, government, academia and civil society. The report also addresses the crucial role of innovator networks and incubators, who truly make SE Asia a regional and global crossroads of innovation. Sustainability of the innovation ecosystem requires the right blend of bottom up entrepreneurial energy and top-down facilitation of investment policies and infrastructure. These roles are played by global+local networks of mobile startups and professionals, such as MobileMonday. MobileMonday has been active in Southeast Asia since 2006, with chapters in the capital cities of the six key mobile markets: Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Singapore, Bangkok and Hanoi. “In sum, across the length and breadth of the mobile ecosystem, innovation will be needed in incremental as well as disruptive modes. Sustainability of the innovation ecosystem requires the right blend of bottom up entrepreneurial energy and top-down facilitation of investment policies and infrastructure,” according to Dr. Madanmohan Rao, research projects director for MobileMonday, and editor of the report. The material in this Mobile Southeast Asia Report is drawn from interviews with over two dozen digital media experts and organisers of the MobileMonday chapters, plus extensive research from books, journals, news, and market reports. This research joins our collection of regional reports, such as the popular Africa series, and we plan to continue these efforts focused on other areas in the future.

BPN 1602