Soo Kelly did an excellent job of summarizing most of day 1's events. We networked and made some awesome connections that will hopefully help take us further in the product development phase of our project. Despite a suprise rain storm at the end of the day we managed to see a little of yale's very harry potteresque campus. Overall it was a successful day!!
Towards the middle of the day the team decide to break out and attend different sessions. As a member of the marketing subgroup, I decided to attend Dr. Elizabeth Bradley’s workshop, “Innovation Dissemination and Take-up: What works?” Throughout the conference, a critical message was echoed: in order to successfully implement new innovations in the field, a good business model must be in place. Rather than following a traditional model for innovation implementation which assumes that products will be well-received within a community without consideration of cultural or social norms, Dr. Bradley took a more community tailored approach. Comparing her business model to the viral replication process, Dr. Bradley spoke of the importance of good receptors within the community to disseminate information of new health innovations. Perhaps one of the most important take-home points of the presentations was that innovations need to fit within the community. The community is a set entity in which the innovation can be easily integrated to best addresses the community’s needs. This concept can be directly applied to our project seeing that no cold chain is the same. Our product needs to be easily integrated into cold chain as it exists today while considering the cultural and social norms of the country in question. The conversation we had with Dr. Gammino of the CDC reflected this point when she spoke of her experience trying to implement a new type of cold box in a low-resource nation (she was talking super fast so can't specifically remember which country it was, oops!). The box was designed to have straps that go across the body in order to make it easier to carry for both men and women. At a presentation, a worker from the field commended her on an excellent idea, however, he commented that the straps were "too nice." Dr. Gammino asked why he could possibly not want "nice straps." The gentleman said it was because soldiers would use the straps to carry their weapons...just a short example of some cultural situations that should be considered.
More blog posts to come!!
-Amanda
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