By Daniel Licht (@thedvl)
Recently Zemoga worked with PSFK on concepts for their new report in conjunction with UNICEF. Now those are some big names. PSFK, for those that don’t know are the leaders in innovative ideas and trend spotting. If I need to explain UNICEF then you need some rethinking of your news sources and world view. This new report focuses on the future or the health industry. PSFK spotted the trends they think will be the future and then looked to us (and other great agencies) to ideate on solutions to the problems groups like UNICEF face everyday.
Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK invited us into their offices for a briefing with the other agencies and some great folks from UNICEF. While at the briefing we reviewed the initial version of the report. The best part of this was the insights from UNICEF’s team. They were able to give us examples of innovations already made and why they worked. I went away energized and ready to throw our ideas into the mix.
After an internal briefing with Fabian Garzon, Zemoga’s Innovations Director, our team began brainstorming on new concepts that had never been done before. This proved to be harder than some of our other ideations; say, compared to Retail or Social media in Pharm. The reason being that PSFK did such a great job zeroing in on the bleeding edge of what’s being done in the health space. But by using some of our most advanced brainstorming technology (Post-Its and Sharpies) the team began throwing up idea after idea. Once we had our ideas out and up on the board we then began to rank them by several criteria. First, did it fit into one of the 15 trends PSFK had identified? If a concept did fit the first criteria then we asked if it fit into the ten critical challenges faced by the Health industry as well as groups like UNICEF. These are challenges like how to identify community health workers or difficulty in distance training. After this, we looked to how impactful the idea could be and how can it be carried out. Does the tech exist? Can we do this with the limited technology of an SMS enabled Nokia 1100 (UNICEF found this was the most common phone in remote villages in Africa)? Would our idea help those with no education achieve the ability to help themselves?
After a few days of this process we came to our final 6 concepts:
- Messages trough the sky – Google Earth Health Codes
- Dr. Cube – Basic medical diagnostic and data collection device
- Teach-Shirts
- AR Training
- Charit-i, Collaborative Change
- Application to manage communications on emergency situations
We then began the process of creating our visuals and our description of each. Given the template we had to use, we sought out to create the most impactful and descriptive visuals we could.
We are very proud of the 6 concepts we have created and we are honored that all of them made it in to PSFK’s report. We think there is a lot of future in the Teach-Shirts idea, and who knows – perhaps there will be a line of them in the future?
Have you stopped to think about how you can change or create new methods to reach those most in need of our help?
