Altran Assists IICD In Thinking About Innovation
Oct 08 2009, Netherlands [NL], Mali [ML]
- Source:
- Lesley White [lwhite(at)iicd.org]
- Country:
- Netherlands [NL], Mali [ML]
- Sector:
There is a lot of creativity in Africa when it comes to innovation. This much became clear at an internal innovation seminar at IICD headquarters, hosted by partner Altran. In the seminar examples were given such as how car parts are used to create an incubator or power cables to transfer radio signals.
Speaker at the seminar was Jeroen Rietjens, Innovation Consultant at Altran. This company assists IICD in thinking about innovation. Rietjens specialises in Neo, an innovative solution that combines innovation techniques and strategies with a solid project approach to open new orientations within a very short time frame.
Boosting creative solutions
In his presentation Rietjens discussed how systematic innovation, or thinking about solutions in a different way can actually boost creative solutions. The Innovation Consultant from Altran mentioned the IKON Teleradiology project in Mali. In Mali doctors in rural areas are not always able to make a good diagnosis of a patient’s injury, because of limited expertise. There is a contradiction in this case because on the one hand a diagnosis should be made where the patient is (in a rural area), but on the other hand the diagnosis should be made where the medical expert is, which is mostly in central hospitals in urban areas.
One of the strategies Altran’s Neo methodology provides is to separate these contradictions between ‘parts and whole’. The injured person is seen as the whole. That patient stays in the rural hospital and only ‘part’ (a digital copy of an X-ray) is sent over the internet to the medical expert in the central hospital. In this way neither patient nor doctor needs to travel and the quality of the diagnosis is far better than usual. This solution is called teleradiology.
Tip of the iceberg
Other examples of the methodology were given, but what remains clear is that thinking differently can provide very interesting results. Wietse Bruinsma, country programme manager for IICD in Ecuador was pleased to be introduced to the system. “It’s definitely worth to see if the Neo systematic innovation approach is also useable in an IICD-setting. This was just the tip of the iceberg. There was much more to the methodology than I thought.”