“Fighting Ebola: A Grand Challenge for Development” taught the U.S. Agency for International Development a couple of things.
It became clear that the grand challenge model worked well as a way to rapidly source and deploy innovations, but also that the midst of an outbreak was not the best time to call for those ideas, said Wendy Taylor, director of the Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact at USAID. With a new grand challenge responding to the Zika outbreak, USAID is putting those lessons to practice, funding innovations with applications beyond Zika, including threats that have yet to be identified.
“We want to make sure we aren’t fighting tomorrow’s outbreaks with yesterday’s tools,” Taylor told Devex.