Client:
Location:
Boston, MA
Seattle, WA
The Opportunity:
Create an interactive forum connecting researchers, scientists, academics, and industry leaders from public, private, and non-profit sectors to exchange ideas regarding product development to accelerate global health impact.
The Experience:
- An innovative “Challenge Workshop”: Small team collaborative sessions enabled participants representing diverse sectors/organizations to develop solutions to some of the most vexing challenges facing global health.
- Deep Dives: Diverse teams spent 8-10+ hours together over the course of 2-3 days immersed in a single challenge topic. Multiple teams, combining individuals from different sectors, disease areas, or modalities, worked on the same challenge to sparked new discussion that is often absent from other global health convenings.
- Funding Awards: Following a series of presentations developed by the teams during the conference, all attendees had an opportunity to vote for the best ideas or new approaches. The ideas with the most votes were able to further investigate the ideas with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Impact:
- Survey results indicated that attendees made numerous new connections which led to further collaboration.
- Discussions at the 2016 Forum led to the creation of CEPI which will significantly improve the speed of product development in a future pandemic.
- Click here for a summary of the most recent event from Trevor Mundel, President of Global Health at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.