3
YEARS OF
I MPACT
HU RRAY WE'RE 3! OpenIDEO is an open innovation platform for social impact. Since the platform’s launch in 2010, our 58,500-member OpenIDEO community has collaboratively participated in 21 design challenges addressing a variety of social, environmental and economic issues. This collection of impact stories is our way of saying thanks to our global community and our challenge sponsors – thanks for sharing your inspirations and insights, collaborating to design solutions and building on each others’ ideas and initiating long-lasting projects and partnerships to drive true impact out in the world. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved together and look forward to celebrating more stories of impact in the years to come.
THE STORY OF OPENIDEO HOW IT ALL STARTED
Often we hear from folks curious to know how OpenIDEO came to be. It all started with a question back in 2008:
What would happen if, instead of 500 IDEO designers globally solving problems, we had a network of 50,000? What kind of positive impact might we have on the world?” The solution: an online space to allow people from across the globe to design better, together. Based on IDEO’s experience leveraging collaboration amongst professionals from different backgrounds, the OpenIDEO team knew it was key to create a platform that was collaborative, inclusive, communitycentered and optimistic. Also drawing from IDEO’s experience, the OpenIDEO team modeled the platform’s collaborative process around design thinking stages: research, ideation and implementation.
After months of learning, testing and iterating – and with a clear North Star goal of enabling a global community to achieve real-world impact – OpenIDEO was born. Our first design challenge – to create an OpenIDEO logo – was launched internally with IDEO designers in June 2010. A few months later, with a fresh logo on hand, we were ready to open up the platform to a global audience.
OPENIDEO'S IMPACT IN OUR FIRST GLOBAL CHALLENGE During our first public challenge, launched in August 2010, we partnered with world-renowned chef, author and advocate Jamie Oliver to invite a global community of design thinking and social innovation enthusiasts to tackle how to raise kids’ awareness of fresh food. Since then OpenIDEO has hosted design challenges on a variety of issues, including improving sanitation and maternal healthcare in low income areas, encouraging healthy ageing, increasing the number of donors on the bone marrow registry, revitalising abandoned urban spaces, recycling e-waste and inspiring creative confidence amongst young adults. These varied challenge topics have led us to work with sponsors from a host of industries and sectors – from the corporate and nonprofit worlds to academia and local governments.
THE REAL WORLD
While we might have anticipated that OpenIDEO’s work and platform would grow over time, we couldn’t have envisioned how the diversity and optimism of our global community would so invaluably enrich our collective learning and impact. In fact many OpenIDEO community members, sponsors and partners have frequently commented on how their experience with the platform has changed their behaviour in positive ways. The inclusive and collaborative tone of the community and the platform has empowered them to feel more creatively confident, to more openly share their ideas and to be willing to receive and contribute constructive feedback. Other community members have noted that they have changed the way they tackle problem-solving. Some of our challenge sponsors have even introduced new innovation models to their organisations after being exposed to the OpenIDEO design process. Whether it’s using OpenIDEO challenges as a library of inspiration for external projects or drawing upon winning ideas to develop a new product or service for world benefit, our global community has embraced our ‘build upon’ ethos – using OpenIDEO ideas as a starting point for achieving real-world impact around the world. While we’re incredibly eager to see how OpenIDEO continues to grow with time, we want to be sure to pause and celebrate the inspiring and high-impact efforts of our community, our sponsors and our partners who have brought ideas to life. The following stories highlight just a few examples of individuals, teams or organisations who have been inspired to realise OpenIDEO ideas and challenges.
WHAT KIND OF IMPACT DOES OPENIDEO CREATE?
Institutional Impact Community Impact
Individual Impact
People coming together, either leveraging existing networks, or starting new ones to create change collectively.
From individual actions like changing daily habits, to prototyping new ideas and even starting new social ventures.
Often our Sponsors and partner organisations create impact in a range of ways from their employees’ changing their behaviour, developing and launching an idea from one of the challenges, or using their influence to make positive change happen.
As we look ahead to even more opportunities to collectively design for social impact, we at OpenIDEO will continue to think of our platform and our approach as being ‘in beta’ – always prototyping, learning and iterating with our community and our partners to create the best space to encourage collaboration and innovation for social good. So, stay tuned for new challenges, new partnerships and most importantly, new stories of impact over the months and years to come. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this collection of inspiring community stories – and we look forward to continuing our collaborations with you on OpenIDEO.com.
CONTENT
COMMUNITY ACTION One of the most exciting community exchanges on OpenIDEO is when online members choose to collaborate offline to bring change to their local communities. Sometimes this is as simple as one person offering to prototype someone else’s challenge concept in their neighbourhood. Other times it’s more elaborate, with community members who have an affinity and passion for a project coming together to start a new social enterprise. Check out these stories of OpenIDEO community members who’ve chosen to collaborate in order to make an impact in their local areas.
How might we restore vibrancy in cities and regions November 2011 - January 2012 facing economic decline?
IMPLEMENTERS AND IDEATORS JOIN FORCES FOR URBAN VIBRANCY During the Vibrant Cities Challenge, OpenIDEO and challenge sponsor Steelcase invited our community to share ideas to revitalise struggling cities like Detroit, Michigan and others around the world. Currently, many cities face critical issues like population loss, unemployment and an erosion of social/civic services – causing community disruption and economic or safety problems. During the Evaluation phase, OpenIDEO community member Eric Ho reached out to the OpenIDEO team asking for help connecting with the authors of some of his favourite community ideas, including Sarah Fathallah, Matthew Rouser, Matthew Goble, and Rebekah Emanuel. His hope was that they’d be interested in collaborating with him to implement some of their challenge ideas in his local neighbourhood, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, NY. Ultimately Eric’s goal was to unite people in his community while using entrepreneurship to activate the local economy.
“Vacant lots and stores are everywhere in the Lower East Side of New York,. When I read through the many well thought-out and diverse ideas that came out of OpenIDEO’s Vibrant Cities Challenge, it was natural to make the connection and take the first step towards realising these ideas.” Eric Ho Over the course of a number of video chats, the team decided to collaborate more deeply to bring renewed vibrancy to the Lower East Side. Months of planning and strategising later, Eric, Sarah, Matthew and Matthew have been joined by members of the local community group Fourth Arts Block. Together they’ve formed an initiative called Made in Lower East Side (MiLES), a multidisciplinary, 12-month design research project to co-create solutions for vibrancy – specifically in ways that best meet the needs and aspirations of local community stakeholders.
“We are very lucky to have a team of dedicated and talented individuals working on MiLES in their spare time – but we wouldn’t be working on this without our fellow OpenIDEO community members who inspired this project!”
Community Impact
MILES WHAT'S HAPPENING NOW? MiLES continues to evolve its pursuit of opening underused New York storefronts to fresh possibilities. In 2013, they launched a crowdfunding campaign and raised over USD $30,000 in order to carry out their initiative. Their latest project is the MiLES Storefront Transformer – a set of modular furnishing that provides basic infrastructure to adapt pop-ups for a variety of uses. Each iteration of this neighbourhood hub will speak to a different theme: Show, Play, Learn, Share, Make, Shop and Eat. Imagine a shape-shifting storefront – one space, many possibilities: from an GET INVOLVED IN YOUR COMMUNITY independent arts space one week to designer fashion Keen to try out a Vibrant Cities idea in your boutique the next local area? Check out the winning ideas: http://ideo.pn/vibrantcities What would you hope to see in a vacant storefront near you? Share your ideas with the MiLES team: info@madeinles.org. To learn more about MiLES, check out http:// www.madeinles.org/
How might we use social business to improve health in low-income communities? Grameen Creative Lab and the Government of Caldas, Colombia.
USING THE OPENIDEO BANK OF IDEAS TO CREATE SUSTAINABLE WORLD IMPACT In 2011 OpenIDEO hosted the Social Business Challenge sponsored by the Grameen Creative Lab and the Government of Caldas, Colombia.
The focus of the challenge was on improving the health of low-income communities globally and in Caldas – where 26% of the population at the time lived in extreme poverty. Grameen’s goal was to achieve this through the creation of social businesses - self-sustaining organisations that reinvest all of their profits back into the communities they serve.
Following the challenge, which led to ten winning ideas, an entrepreneurial team with the experience and eagerness to take action performed their own analysis these solutions.
BIVE
The Colombian team – made-up of medical doctor Jorge García, business manager Diana Quintero and master in development projects Felipe Tibocha – saw in these ideas a blueprint for a new social business to improve life in Caldas and beyond. Working with Grameen Caldas they refined these ideas and incorporated them into a business plan which received funding in November 2011. This funding enabled the team to found Bive, a social business which provides affordable, quality and expedient healthcare services to Caldas’ low-income communities.
Community Action
FROM IDEAS TO REAL WORLD IMPACT While Bive was exploring what services were viable for a sustainable model they prototyped two ideas from the challenge. One of which has become a business in itself. The first is a concept by community member Sarah Fathallah called Madre Cuidadora (Caring Mothers), a network of community ‘mothers’ who are trained in general health promotion and prevention. For the BIVE team, working with the OpenIDEO community during and after the challenge offered a great insight into exploring potential viable services that could be economically profitable and socially relevant. The second idea that Bive implemented from the platform – and that has since won a national competition held by the Colombian Ministry of Technology – is, Manish K Singh’s [http://ideo.pn/ManishProfile] idea to create an SMS health advice service [http://ideo.pn/ManishsIdea]. Bive piloted this idea by first focusing on pregnant women. MAMI (Mamás más involucradas - Mothers more involved) allows mothers to receive three SMS per week with pregnancy advice, notifications of their baby’s stage of development and reminders of upcoming appointments. According to the BIVE team, “MAMI was so successful during its first year, including being supported by the World Bank, that it has now become an independent venture.” BIVE has seen impressive growth: it currently has 1,300 users in two cities and aims for 5,000 users by the end of 2014. The BIVE health network is made up of 45 different providers providing 42 types of services, including general medicine, specialised medicine, diagnostic services, pharmacists and fitness centres. Based on the success of their services, BIVE plans to be economically sustainable by 2015.
SUPPORT BIVE'S EFFORTS The Bive team is looking for volunteers with experience in business development and administration Contact them: info@bive.co Learn more: http://www.bive.co/en
CURIOUS ABOUT HOW SOCIAL BUSINESSES CAN IMPROVE HEALTH? Check out the challenge’s winning ideas [http:// ideo.pn/SocialBusinessWinning] and share your comments and thoughts.
How can we manage e-waste & discarded electronics to safeguard human health & protect our environment? ITAÚ Unibanco, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, June - September 2012
EXPANDING ON EXISTING IDEAS FOR E - W ASTE In the summer of 2012, OpenIDEO launched the E-waste Challenge to find better ways to manage our used and end-of-life electronics – and ultimately avoid them ending up in landfills. Right around this time, The Restart Project, a London-based social good start-up with the mission of empowering people to reuse and repair their electronics, was established.
As it happens, the E-waste Challenge was a perfect opportunity for Restart’s founders, Janet Gunter and Ugo Vallauri, to share their vision for this young organization with a fresh, global audience and start collaborating with other like-minded individuals who are determined to innovate the way we refurbish and reuse electronic gadgets. During the challenge Janet and Ugo joined conversations on the platform and shared their learnings, questions and challenges with the community to get their feedback. In the end, the Restart team was especially inspired by two winning ideas from the E-waste Challenge. The first was a concept by Design for America students at the University of Illinois Champaign Urbana for an E-CycleTruck, a mobile platform for awareness raising and waste prevention inspired by the food truck phenomenon in the US. Building on this idea, Janet and Ugo thought – why not create a Repair Rickshaw, even greener and more appropriate for London? The Restart team has refined the Repair Rickshaw idea and are planning a crowdsourcing campaign to get it off the ground. Restart envisions the Repair Rickshaw as a mobile vehicle promoting local repair businesses at Farmers’ Markets and other area hot spots. In fact, Janet and Ugo got the idea of using outlets like Farmer’s Markets after reading OpenIDEO community member Carol Shu’s idea, Farmer’s Market “(e) waste not” Booth.
“At Farmer’s markets, we hope to collect broken e-stuff and return devices a week later for a pre-arranged fee. We may even set up mini repair workshops alongside the rickshaw so that folks can watch and learn about simple repairs.” Janet Gunter, Founder of The Restart Project
THE RESTART PROJECTv
Restart is still in touch with various members of the OpenIDEO platform around the world and continues to keep the conversation around e-waste alive through their daily work.
SHARE AN EXISTING IDEA ON OPENIDEO In upcoming OpenIDEO challenges don’t be shy to share what you are working on when it’s relevant. You will find a global community keen to collaborate and share feedback to help your idea grow.
BE ON THE LOOKOUT If you live in London keep your eyes peeled for the Repair Rickshaw. For more information check out http://therestartproject.org/ or www.facebook.com/ RestartProject
Community Action
Since participating in the challenge, Restart received a grant from Project Dirt and Timberland Europe. The team was also shortlisted for a grant from Nesta and recognised for their work by the Transition Network, Unltd and Lloyds Bank Social Entrepreneurs Programme.
How might we improve maternal health with mobile technologies for low-income countries? Oxfam & Nokia, January - April 2011
THE POWER OF REALWORLD PROTOTYPING For our Maternal Health Challenge we partnered with Oxfam and Nokia to explore how mobile technologies can be used to improve maternal health in the developing world, particularly in pregnancy and childbirth.
During the Ideas phase, community members from around the world – many of them students – shared 182 concepts to address this issue. After the challenge ended, OpenIDEO received word that one group of students – a classroom of undergraduate Colombian design students called Estudio 6 – had decided to prototype their idea in a low-income neighborhood in Bogotá. Let’s Meet Your Baby is an outreach program to low-income communities to conduct ultrasound procedures.
Even though their idea didn’t ultimately win the challenge, the students still wanted to dig deeper on this idea’s feasibility and value so they went on to prototype it with real mothers, families and a medical support team.
Community Action - Health
LET'S MEET YOUR BABY “We were inspired to take the Idea to the real world to gauge it’s impact. Till then it was just thoughts, ideas and words – imagined from our own points of view.” Luz Gallo To start, Luz drew upon her own volunteer experience and network to leverage connections with a low-income community in Bogota’s neighborhood, Buenos Aires. The Estudio 6 team then rented an ultrasound scan and co-ordinated transport for their project team. They set up consulting areas in local classrooms, had medical students take medical histories, an obstetrician conduct the ultrasound and volunteers who were responsible for easing the experience of visiting mothers and family members. They also set up an area outside the improvised consulting rooms so that visitors could gather and socialise with each other and project volunteers.
Luz shared this video featuring mothers and families seeing an ultrasound of their babies for the first time, since they most often don’t have access or financial resources for these type of services. Inspiring evidence that even small prototypes can have a big impact.
GET PROTOTYPING Have you been developing an idea that can be easily prototyped? Share your story of creating impact through prototyping with the OpenIDEO community] Do you know a pregnant woman or mother who might have insights into this challenge? Our conversation continues on OpenIDEO. Add their input – or your own– to the winning ideas: http://ideo.pn/maternalhealthwinners
I NDIVI DUAL ACTION Although the OpenIDEO community often creates impact through collaboration, it turns out that small, individual behaviour changes and actions can add up to large-scale impact, too. Sometimes this individual impact takes the form of mindset or perspective change – simply by participating in a challenge, a person’s perspective and understanding of the world can positively shift. Other times, lots of individuals can become a network of change agents acting independently yet collectively for social impact. Check out these stories of individual OpenIDEO community members who’ve driven social impact through their own actions.
How might we all maintain our wellbeing and thrive as we age? Mayo Clinic, June - August 2013
GRANNY- CENTERED DESIGN: ELDERi I DEO During our Healthy Ageing Challenge, we asked the OpenIDEO community to share ideas to help people understand their options, make informed decisions and activate themselves towards a state of wellbeing as they grow older.
SYLVIA'S STORY Sylvia Stein – a self-described ‘OpenIDEO junkie’ – has been an active member of the OpenIDEO community since Fall 2012. An avid contributor to all of the phases of a challenge, Sylvia says that what she loves the most about the platform is seeing people from all over the world sharing ideas collaboratively.
“It’s amazing to share an idea and wake up and see that people from different parts of the world have contributed to it. It’s even more exciting when people build on your idea.” As an independent consultant, Sylvia believes that being part of OpenIDEO has also changed the way she works with clients. Previously she would feel the need to come to clients with pre-determined solutions; now her consulting is a collaborative and iterative journey with her clients to design a solution together.
Sylvia’s idea: Individual Action
informally dubbed ElderIDEO, is a series of design thinking workshops for older adults to identify issues that matter in their communities and use the design thinking process to create and pilot solutions to address them.
Imapct Through Collaboration Shortly after the challenge ended, sponsor Mayo Clinic decided to extend a last-minute invitation to OpenIDEO community members, including Sylvia, to present their challenge concepts at the 2013 Transform Symposium, a three-day, multi-disciplinary convening around health, innovation and design. The workshop served as a great chance for Sylvia to get feedback on her idea and to network within this diverse health care community. Sylvia notes that:
“...the feedback I got was very illuminating and opened up my thinking to include a much wider and more diverse group of stakeholders. It seems as though everyone wants to be involved in the design process!”
Since Transform, Sylvia has prototyped her idea with seniors in New York City and San Francisco. She’s also connected with partners interested in prototyping her idea, including a partnership with an organisation called TechEnhanced Life that developed when Sylvia collaborated on the platform with someone who worked there. Also, Matthew Moore, a designer at Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation, shared that he and his team have just begun their own version of ElderIDEO with residents of Charter House, a continuing care facility. “The participants have been very encouraging so far and open-minded to a very new thing. The process of innovation,” Matthew joked, “not simply coming up with ideas, but understanding needs and context to create meaningful and resilient solutions, is hard work!” When asked about her future plans as a collaborator on OpenIDEO, Sylvia says she “looks forward to sharing and collaborating further with the community because the more you put in the more you get out.”
LET'S START COLLABORATING Interested in improving the quality of life for ageing people in your community? Prototype ElderIDEO in a community you care about What do the older people in your life think about our winning ideas? Check them out at [http://ideo.pn/AgingWinningIdeas] and comment with your feedback
How might we increase the number of registered bone marrow donors to help save more lives? Haas Center for Public Service, Standford University, Feburary - April 2011
ACTIVATING I NDI VI DUALS TO SAVE LIVES So many of us have been touched by cancer. In 2011, we partnered with the Stanford University Haas Center for Public Service and the student group 100K Cheeks to ask the OpenIDEO community to find creative ways to expand the global network of potential bone marrow donors – particularly for patients of South Asian descent, for whom the chance of finding a match is 1 out of 20,000.
During our Bone Marrow Donation Challenge, the OpenIDEO community learned about bone marrow donation, dispelled our own myths and confusion about it and collaboratively designed concepts to encourage bone marrow registration and donation around the world. When the challenge began, the students of 100K Cheeks set a goal of getting 100,000 new registrations on the U.S. bone marrow registry. Shortly after the three-month challenge’s conclusion, they reached 115,000 cheeks swabbed. While the students’ efforts running bone marrow registration drives and building partnerships with like-minded organisations contributed to reaching this goal, it’s interesting to note that a portion of those 115,000 registrations came from individual OpenIDEO community members who, as part of an empathy exercise to understand bone marrow donation, decided to swab their own cheeks and sign up for the registry themselves. On their own, each cheek swab was a small act – but taken together, all of them represented a significant step toward reaching over 100,000 new potential bone marrow donors for patients in need.
SWAB YOUR CHEEK Learn more about bone marrow donation and how easy and painless it can be to help save a life. Stay up-to-date on 100K Cheeks’ efforts: facebook.com/100kCheeks
Today the 100K Cheeks team is continuing their effort to raise awareness and lead bone marrow registration drives to increase the pool of potential donors.
115.000
SWABBED
CHEEKS
Individual Action
The Bone Marrow Donation Challenge also offered inspiration for the 100K Cheeks team to keep pushing their own efforts to raise awareness of bone marrow donation. After our challenge ended, the students were so inspired by a few different community concepts – including University-Based Open Innovation Awareness Websites build on a DIY Kit and Matchpoint – that they decided to build on them to create a concept of their own. They created an early website prototype, called Drive in a Box, that helped the team, their partners and other audiences quickly understand what their efforts might look like beyond the first campaign. It also helped them experience the interaction and flow that new site visitors would go through, which led to even more iterations and refinement.
INSTITUTIONAL ACTION Each challenge on OpenIDEO is supported by sponsor and partner organisations eager to advance a global conversation and identify innovative solutions for various social impact topics. Whether a company, a nonprofit, a government or educational organisation, these institutions represent an important channel through which impact can be achieved. Sometimes this takes the form of additional resources, skills or time that an organisation can dedicate to realising an OpenIDEO challenge idea. Other times it turns out that, simply by joining OpenIDEO’s process, institutions alter their own internal approach to innovation and collaborative design. Check out these inspiring stories of institutions driving impact.
How can technology help people working to uphold human rights in the face of unlawful detention? Amnesty International, September - December 2011
OPEN IDEO
MAKE -A THON AMY'S IDEA After the challenge, IDEO and Amnesty hosted a spirited Make-a-thon in London and pushed 4 shortlisted challenge concepts to their next iteration. One of these concepts was Amy Bonsall’s winning concept, PACT. Less than 36 hours later, PACT was refined, prototyped – and ultimately became known as the Panic Button app.
In Fall 2011 OpenIDEO launched the Amnesty International Challenge, asking our community to identify ways to use technology to support people at risk of unlawful detention – human rights abuses often imposed in the name of countering terrorism or national security. Over the three months of the challenge, the OpenIDEO community contributed 323 inspirations and 168 concepts – from which 9 winners were announced. During the Refinement and Evaluation phases, our community’s comments and contributions helped ideas get tighter and off-the-ground through prototyping.
Institutional Action - Safety
FIRST PROTOTYPE WORK IN NAIROBI
Devised as a tool for political activists, Panic Button encrypts a message on a user’s mobile phone which can be sent to select individuals in their support network to alert them of that person’s detention. Users can pre-populate the message with the notification of their choice. The function is disguised so that there is no indication that the tool is in use. A geo-location message is also sent every 60 seconds, until the battery dies, providing information on the location of the phone
After the Make-a-thon and with the help of institutional partner Thoughtworks, Amnesty developed the prototype further. In 2012, the app was ready to be live-tested for usability. Amnesty took the prototype to the front line in Nairobi and user-tested it with human rights defenders from Syria, Sudan, USA, Kenya and Nigeria. Contrary to initial expectations, political activists are somewhat accustomed to operating in situations of high risk and so speed (not security) was the utmost consideration. The tool initially had a lot of extra functionality but through live testing it became very clear that the key necessity is the ability to react simply and speedily in this stressful situation.
How can technology help people working to uphold human rights in the face of unlawful detention? Amnesty International, September - December 2011
GOOGLE GRANT
Currently Amnesty and Thoughtworks have developed a beta version of Panic Button. Thanks to a ÂŁ100,000 award from the Google Impact Challenge, the team is now heading to launch regional pilots around the world.
LET'S KEEP THE MOMENTUM GOING! CONTRIBUTE TO AMNESTY’S EFFORTS The Panic Button Team is looking for developers and designers to help them with future iterations. Contact them at panicbutton@Amnesty.org SPREAD THE WORD Raise awareness about the app and the danger that millions of human rights activist face when being detained. Follow @ Amnestypanicbutton or #Amnestypanicbutton
Tanya O’Carroll, Technology and Human Rights Project Officer, in charge of the Panic Button app at Amnesty International, shared that OpenIDEO’s collaborative process and community served as a source of inspiration for Amnesty to rethink its own innovation process.
Institutional Action
“What we were able to do with this incredible community and platform is introduce a new process at Amnesty in terms of how we arrive at a solution. What has been interesting is how we take this process back to Amnesty. [It’s] a paradigm shift not only for Amnesty but for global organisations around the world that cannot afford to only talk to themselves. We need to be asking people, we need to be involving the individuals affected in that process.”
How might we create healthy communities within and beyond the workplace? BUPA & The International Diabetes Federation, September - December 2011
SMALL STEPS FOR BIG IMPACT Together with Bupa and the International Diabetes Federation, in late 2012 we asked the OpenIDEO community to explore how people can best be supported in the workplace to make positive changes to their health and wellness. The goal of this challenge was to collect insights and ideas to create a tool that would help millions around the world stay healthy while at work. After the Workplace Wellness Challenge concluded, a team of multidisciplinary designers from OpenIDEO, IDEO and Bupa came together to consider some of the most promising community ideas, including Vishal Jodhani’s idea to collectively climb Mt Everest, Ryan Warnock’s Lively London, Ibrahim Jivanjee idea and Sarah Galbraith’s idea to get people within companies to compete and collaborate together to reach collective goals, and Johan Löfström’s idea of gamifying exercise.
After weeks of iteration, testing and feedback, the team built on all of these community submissions and ultimately devised Ground Miles, a free app that keeps track of your walking totals and connects you with friends, family or work colleagues to create walking groups that help you reach a shared goal or win prizes. The app launched in late September 2013 and is part of Bupa’s overarching intention to positively improve the health and wellbeing of millions of people worldwide. In the end, Ground Miles goes beyond just being an app – it’s a collective community challenge that can help people meet their health goals in a more holistic and lasting way.
Institutional Action - Health
“We wanted to help people who are trying think beyond exercise and, not focusing on individual metrics such as calories, but instead celebrating the entirety of their achievement and acknowledging progress, big and small. It is more focused on health rather than fitness.” STINA JOHNSSON, SENIOR INTERACTION DESIGNER AT IDEO
LET'S GET HEALTHY TOGETHER How do you stay healthy at your workplace? Get inspired by our winning ideas and comment with your insights and experience [http://ideo.pn/HealthyWorkPlaceWinningIdeas] DOWNLOAD THE APP Follow @GroundMilesApp on Twitter. Look for the GroundMiles app in your appstore and join the global OpenIDEO group of walkers
How can we improve sanitation and better manage human waste in low-income urban communities? UNILEVER & Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor, November 2010- July 2011
ATOILET CAN CHANGE LIVES Our Sanitation Challenge, sponsored by Unilever and in partnership with Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), asked the OpenIDEO community to design ideas to improve sanitation in low income urban areas. In a unique approach, a team of designers from IDEO and IDEO.org were simulataneously exploring innovative sanitation solutions in Kumasi, Ghana. Throughout the challenge, the OpenIDEO community and the team of designers tackled the problem in two unique ways: the online community gathering global examples of existing sanitation solutions and related insights, whilst the design team went into the field to unearth local insights from end users, developing ideas, and prototyping a new service and business for Unilever and WSUP. Andy Narracott from WSUP was on the ground in Ghana during the challenge.
“The process was really energizing and helped us in the design team to collect a bunch of stories and feed the design process. The conversation with the OpenIdeo community was helpful to provide the basis and the context in the ground about some of these solutions.� Andy Narracot
Institutional Action -
Similarly, the advantages of this online/offline collaboration were not lost on one member of the team from challenge sponsor Unilever:
“The three of us have spent the last nine months researching innovations in sanitation trying to catalogue all that is out there. Within 2 weeks the OpenIDEO community had surfaced everything that took us nearly a year to find.� UNILEVER
Ultimately the design team developed a product and a service that was influenced by the collaboration of the OpenIDEO community and that today has become a social enterprise: The Clean Team Uniloo toilet. Based in Ghana, the enterprise rents portable toilets to families and charges a weekly or monthly fee to collect the waste. By the end of 2012, the Clean Team had 106 household customers (with the average household containing upwards of 10-15 family members) and had begun production of 1,000 new Uniloo toilets. Just one year later, the Clean Team was servicing 1,000 households in 2013 and aims to reach 10,000 households in 2014.
EAGER TO TALK ABOUT POOP? Check out the diverse ideas from the challenge : [ideo.pn/SanitationWinningIdeas] Stay Up To Date with The Clean team http://www.cleanteamtoilets.com/
BRINGING CREATIVITY AND COLLABORATION When we launched OpenIDEO, we knew it would become TO THE CLASSROOM a tool for collaborative, social impact design – but we didn’t necessarily anticipate how it could also become a tool for learning. Over the last few years, we’ve seen our community grow to include students and educators from around the world, many of whom have joined our challenges as part of a class activity or club event on campus. Wyn Griffiths is the Product Design Course Leader at Middlesex University (MDX) in the UK. A couple years ago Wyn decided to shift his normal curriculum, cancel all classes across the three years of his Product Design course and bring students and staff together to work on the OpenIDEO platform. The class first joined during the Workplace Wellness Challenge (2012) and then during the Creative Confidence Challenge (2013). For Wyn, participatory and sustainable design have both played a major part of his design life. In his eyes, design should be a force for social cohesion and a shared creative endeavor. OpenIDEO’s collaborative, international community seemed the perfect way for Wyn to help his students understand and contribute to this vision and to experience the joy and enthusiasm of sharing.
“ I started thinking about how to get my students involved with design projects that involved the community. It seemed to me that connecting with a global community was central for the process of our students, who wouldn’t have experienced this otherwise. We decided to cancel all the classes and encourage vertical integration between all years while participating in the challenge.”
Suffice to say, it was a hit. Wyn explains that, “the fact that students were sharing their ideas with the world – and the world was responding – was very inspiring.” Wyn’s experiment had so much success that now joining OpenIDEO for 3 weeks is part of the standard curriculum. After the Workplace Wellness Challenge, Wyn’s students joined OpenIDEO’s Creative Confidence Challenge. Because the topic was so accessible and resonant for students, Wyn believes that students went beyond simply contributing ideas and instead acquired creative confidence themselves.
ARE YOU A STUDENT AND INTERESTED IN DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL GOOD? Dive into any of the ongoing challenges, get real life feedback and see your ideas go out in the real world ARE YOU A TEACHER? Join our Educators Network a d download our University Toolkit to engage your students
“The atmosphere on the platform being very positive and very supportive helped students’ barriers break down. [Students] didn’t feel defensive or overwhelmed. Especially inexperienced designers, who are usually defensive, felt comfortable on the platform and had an easier time collaborating.
At the beginning of the Creative Confidence Challenge, we asked our students if they had creative confidence: 30 out of 100 students raised their hands. After participating on the Creative Confidence challenge for over a month, we asked the same question and 86 students said they felt creatively confident.” Overall Wyn describes OpenIDEO as an amazing opportunity for students to make real contributions to big issues, collaborate globally with an open innovation community and develop their creative skills and expertise.
Institutional Impact
ENGAGE STUDENTS
THANK YOU! It’s been three years since OpenIDEO launched, and what a wild ride it’s been! Cheers to our entire global community for sharing your time, enthusiasm, spirit and collaborative insights and ideas with us. We’re incredibly inspired by the impact we’ve achieved together so far and we’re eager to see how we can continue to design better, together in the years to come. Cheers, The OpenIDEO Team
OpenIDEO © 2014