The Global Health Hack Day was an "open innovation" event run by the Humanitarian Centre (www.humanitariancentre.org) and Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club (CUTEC - http://cutec.org) as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. Seven teams were formed, bringing together students and professionals from backgrounds as diverse as laser physics, criminology and management studies. The teams took on seven real global health challenges facing NGOs, consultancies and businesses. Each team had one week to find an innovative and viable approach to the challenge, and present their ideas to a live audience, a judging panel of entrepreneurs and development consultants and their organisational mentors.
The results? The teams came up with fantastic ideas: ideas that the mentors admitted they would never have thought of themselves. The mix of different backgrounds and perspectives, combined with the teams’ incredible enthusiasm, led to a lot of creative thinking. Several of the ideas are now being put into practice by the organisations, and have the potential to make a big impact on global health!
The Global Health Hack day was generously sponsored by Costello Medical Consulting (www.costellomedical.com), PHG Foundation(www.phgfoundation.org), ideaSpace(www.ideaspace.cam.ac.uk) and Idea Transform(ideatransform.org), and supported by the University of Cambridge.