Four For Friday | April 5, 2024

LF117 | Griffith's Challenge-led innovation playbook, financial return on lifespan, wildfire's death count and McKinsey on the $2tn wellness market.

Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!

A ‘challenge-led’ innovation playbook

Australia’s Griffith University’s Center for Systems Innovation has created an excellent handbook for ‘challenge-led’ innovation. This is a definitive How-To guide for those looking to deliver bold society transforming projects, in the spirit of Mariana Mazzucato’s mission-driven innovation.

This approach changes the language (missions are associated with colonial exploitation in Australia) and provides a more practical approach to dealing with complexity at scale (and not just merely ‘complicated’ projects, such as a moon landing).

We’ll be putting this framework to the test at upcoming Healthy Habitats reimagining care workshops in San Francisco and London. If you’re in either town and want to help us explore how to change the system, do join us.

The So What? Democratising and de-mystifying the sometimes jargon-filled discourse of systems change, and making them practical and accessible to all. Huge!

Make America Live Longer Again

There’s a lot to like about this call for a moonshot for improving lifespan in the NYTimes by New York’s Health Commissioner. It recognises the need to focus society on goals other just economic growth at all costs, it recognizes health is the responsibility of the whole economy, not just one sector; it suggests we shift from acute, reactive care to preventive care (currently only 3% of the health budget), and suggests a new metric of ‘lifespan return on investment’ – connecting economic investment to lifespan.

Regular readers of this newsletter would probably agree that healthspan rather than lifespan is the way to go, though that comes with more complicated measurement challenges. Frankly, if we can get more lifespan, it’s a start.

More depressing perhaps are the comments which generally say, good idea, but impossible given our dysfunctional system. When our society not only fails to implement good ideas, but there’s widespread agreement it’s not even worth trying, it’s time to do some radical and transformative rethinking (see first article…).

The So What? Some great ideas here with an outside chance that it will make it into a political manifesto, but good to see an opening to think about whole-person health.

The tragic health impacts of wildfire air pollution

According to the NewScientist (subs. reqd) smoke from wildfires is set to cause 10,000 extra deaths per year by 2050, accounting for most economic costs than other climate impacts combined.

It’s obviously a bit hard to make an impact scorecard when there’s a non-zero chance of existential events happening, such as the East Antarctic ice sheet (which accounts of 80% of all ice in the world) threatening a 52m metre increase in seal levels.

The So What? Increasing pressure to include wildfire health impacts in life and health insurance, plus new incentives and regulatory crackdown on this key externality.

Trends in the $1.8tn wellness market

McKinsey’s new report on global wellness estimates a nearly $2 trillion global market, and almost half a trillion ($480bn) in the US alone, growing at 5-10% per year.

‘Eighty-two percent of US consumers now consider wellness a top or important priority in their everyday lives.’

The reports breaks wellness down into six categories: health, sleep, nutrition, fitness, appearance, and mindfulness.

The report outlines five key treneds: Health at home, bio monitoring and wearables, personalisation via Gen AI, a shift towards clinical effective over ‘clean’ (ie ineffective?) products and a new rise in trust in doctors’ recommendations (relief to see in the chart above, that social media is not more important than medical advice…).

The So What? Expect more startups and investors funding the space, and new business models that combine medical care with recognition of the drivers and metrics of wellness.

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That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.

- Stephen