The Profound Impact of a Simple Social Innovation

Jane Chen: A warm embrace that saves lives | Video on TED.com

Thinking about social innovations that serve as creative solutions to social problems, this week’s topic, I came across this social innovator featured in a TED Talks. (Video link above.) While working in India, Jane Chen saw the need for incubators for premature babies that are portable, sterilized, and low-cost. In this video, Chen describes how 4 million premature babies die each year. Moreover, babies that are able to survive a premature birth, often unfortunately develop long-term health problems as a result of fighting hypothermia, negatively affecting organ development and growth, because their parents lacked access to an incubator.

Chen describes the tactics that desperate parents implement in order to keep their babies alive and healthy, including putting hot water bottles around their babies and placing the babies under light bulbs. The social innovative spirit is there, but the solutions are not optimal, and in this case also potentially dangerous.

This product will not only save lives, but also reduce population growth; families will have fewer children as the likelihood of survival of each child increases. The multiple social impacts makes this a particularly important innovation.

Being in the field and encountering the absence of incubators enabled Chen and her team to identify the need first hand and realize that they were able to develop a simple and effective solution. The necessity to be in the field to understand the needs is critical in this process, and I believe a limiting factor we face today in fighting poverty as the isolation of many impoverished nations and communities.

Connecting this product to our readings for this week, I realized that by definition, social innovations have a triple bottom line as the value created accrues to our society; both to individuals directly impacted which transfers to the community at large. When people are able have access to basic necessities and therefore live a higher quality of life at the most basic levels, all society benefits. In the same way that this product will potentially reduce population growth in India, in addition to saving the life of a baby and enabling them to have a more healthy life, what other innovations have a similar impact on multiple fronts?

This story highlights the need to develop localized solutions. This video also reminded me that despite my indoctrination as an American that more is better, over-engineering is in fact not always better, and frugal engineering holds great possibilities.

In addition to frugal engineering, what other ways of common and broad scale thinking must we (as Americans) transform in order to be more effective social innovators?