Innovating a Better World
Almost exactly 10 years ago, I came across Jane Chen, a pioneering entrepreneur who designed an innovative incubator to save children in the developing world.
I first came across Jane’s work on a trip to the Stanford d.school where her class project led to this pioneering invention. At the time, it struck me as an elegant example of design thinking. Human-centered design helps us innovate solutions that work for people because it reminds us to start by empathizing with a situation — really listening to understand where the challenge lies so that the answers we develop get to root causes and truly solve for the heart of the matter.
Jane’s d.school class had gone to India looking into designing a better incubator, and soon after arrival discovered plenty of unused incubators in the cities while babies were still dying in rural areas. Recognizing that the limiting factor was not the technology itself but the fact that both cultural custom and national infrastructure meant that when a baby was born far from a hospital in need of neonatal intensive care, it was unlikely at best that that the family or community would separate the baby from its mother, who was often too weak to travel, and that getting from the village to the city would often require a treacherous journey.
This insight led to the development of a low-cost, light-weight sleeping bag that…
