Mapping health innovation globally for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Hello! 🎈
Thank you for visiting our project repo. This document will give you an overview of the project, where and how you can get involved!
- Health funders, policymakers and researchers do not have a “helicopter view” of the health innovation landscape which makes it hard to find novel solutions to the health issues that need to be tackled.
- It is sometimes difficult for health actors to find people to work with.
- Potential solutions to health issues are often buried in siloed, hard-to-collect and/or analyse datasets, limiting their reach and impact.
In summary, we lack a comprehensive database on health innovation that would enable actors in the domain to find collaborators, identify gaps and opportunities in health.
We develop a Health Innovation Scanner, an open, online platform that can be used to analyse innovations in health research, as well as activity in startups, apps and social ventures across the world.
Our goal is to enable users to explore the health innovation landscape and gain a better overview of which health innovations are emerging where, and what this means in terms of new trends and opportunities.
The Health Innovation Scanner will:
- Provide an open, accessible web platform to explore health innovation across multiple datasets.
- Enable users to share their findings with the wider community.
We are Chantale Tippett (researcher), George Richardson (data scientist) and Kostas Stathoulopoulos (data scientist). We work on the Health Innovation Scanner as part of the Innovation Mapping team at Nesta. We are team of data scientists, engineers, visualisers and researchers exploring the use of new data sources, data science methods and interactive visualisations to inform decisions about innovation and research in government and civil society.
The scanner is an application we are developing in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), a philanthropic organisation focusing on health, and Nesta's Health Lab. This project began when RWJF decided that to fund the best health innovations, they needed to expand their search globally and to find new technologies and practices.
Check out our contributions page to find out how you can get involved! We're looking for:
- Organisations doing similar work. Add your leads here!
- User testers for our platform. Sign up here!
- Ways to make our repository more inclusive. Log your thoughts here.
Do you have anything to suggest that does not fit in our CONTRIBUTING.md? Open a new issue! For anything else, feel free to contact Chantale, George, Kostas.
Chantale, George and Kostas participate in the Mozilla Open Leaders programme, however, ten people in total (Nesta's Innovation Mapping team) are working on the Health Innovation Scanner.