Four For Friday | May 3, 2024
Four For Friday | May 3, 2024
LF121 | Designing Missions Swedish-style, Bhutan's new mindfulness city, home insurance crisis and digital tools for brain health
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!
Designing missions
This impressive magnum opus from Dan Hill, formerly with the Swedish Innovation agency Vinnova, provides a detailed playbook for designing missions to help drive transformational change.
Among a variety of helpful frameworks and approaches, it suggests eight design principles:
Grounded. Use the reality of systems converging in place to hone ideas and interventions, enabling local ownership, adaptation and care.
Tangible. Locate public-facing interventions in everyday infrastructures, for meaningful shared futures learning from real things in real places.
Upstream. Address fundamental conditions behind symptoms and sticking plasters in order to unlock richer approaches for holistic value.
Integrated. As everything is connected, act like it. Develop integrated environments through deep collaboration and diverse synthesis.
Iterative. Innovation never sleeps. Nothing is ever done. Systems grow like gardens. Enable ongoing iteration, adaptation and learning.
Participative. Work with people and place, benefiting from rich participation cultures and enabling shared design, ownership, and operation.
Adaptive. Work with existing infrastructures, whilst continually building new systems to meaningfully adapt to changing circumstances.
Scalable. Develop platforms, infrastructures and ideas that can replicate and translate to produce systemic change, scaling in diverse fashion
A particularly useful idea is a ‘delivery-driven policy process’ by which rather than doing planning —> implementing, there’s an iterative approach, echoing the lessons learned in startup development:
The So What? Together with the Challenge-led Innovation playbook profiled in LF 117, this is a solid practical resource for those looking to make movements that are both inclusive and deliver impact.
Bhutan’s new mindfulness city
This bold new redevelopment of a city on the Bhutan / India border is envisioned as Bhutan’s new economic hub – an opportunity to capitalize on the economic corridor linking South Asia to Southeast Asia.
The 1000 square kilometer development will serve as an ‘economic hub and gateway to the rest of the country’ and be a low- to-mid-rise metropolis built around a series of inhabitable bridges:
Each bridge will “house” key features of the city: a new international airport, a university, a health-care facility for Eastern and Western medicine, a hydroponic greenhouse, a cultural center, a spiritual center, a market for local goods and a hydroelectric dam, according to the plan.
The So What? Two so-whats. First, cities are moving from becoming economic and social players to realizing they have a major role to play in driving health outcomes. And second is the increasing importance of mental health (or brain capital) in policy and budgeting.
The crippling home insurance crisis in North America
Another one to add to the increasingly loud chorus of complaints about home insurance in North America, this time an associate editor of the FT feels the pain of a combination of broken insurance company business models and inadequate local policies.
The So What? Further evidence of the need for fresh thinking around insurance business models in the light of climate change, and the need to sit around the table with policy makers and community representatives.
Digital health and neurodegenerative diseases
A survey of digital health’s applicability to neurodegenerative diseases by 7wireVentures, with the following six categories of applications, based on disease stage and level of patient involvement:
It sees several emerging innovation trends: streamlining the pathway from diagnosis to treatment, payors providing vendors who can most accurately identify candidates for treatment, new solutions to reduce caregiver burden and a growth in AI tools and digital therapeutics.
The So What? An ever expanding range of applications and market opportunities for digital health companies in this important impact area.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen