Innovate or Die

Disruption is the business buzzword of the day. As the economy evolves, companies like Uber and Warby Parker shake up whole industries, rewriting the rules on how we get around town or buy eyewear, in order to remain relevant.

Students present market-ready ideas for fighting Ebola

So goes public health. With federal grant funding becoming scarce, the Mailman School is channeling the same transformational energy, putting itself on a course to disrupt familiar funding models. Since last fall, Dean Linda P. Fried and a dozen or so faculty members have met regularly to identify innovative ways to advance the School’s research enterprise.

With initial guidance from a Monitor Deloitte consultant, members of this Faculty Innovation group discovered their inner entrepreneur by introducing novel innovations embedded in scientific rigor. Mady Hornig, associate professor of Epidemiology, described her vision for a unique health assessment technology that would leverage Dr. Hornig’s knowledge of the links between the human microbiome and health. Other new ideas would market faculty expertise to help governments analyze health policies or entice corporations to keep their workers healthy. The bottom line: harnessing the power of the market to improve health. As Dean Fried wrote in Huffington Post, public health challenges “require the active participation of business if they are to be overcome.”

Some of this agenda is already underway. The Mailman School’s GRAPH program is helping NewYork-Presbyterian assess community health in Washington Heights. The School is in communication with Chinese company Perfect World to design a videogame to promote cognitive health in older people. And a soon-to-launch startup called SK Analytics will market infectious disease forecasting methods developed by Jeffrey Shaman, associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences, to business and government clients.

In another recent innovation, Mailman joined forces with the Engineering School last fall to orchestrate a student design challenge that prototyped products to help in the effort against Ebola in West Africa. Last week, USAID announced that one of the products—a dye additive for disinfectant bleach—won the agency’s Fight Ebola Grand Challenge. The product’s creators have already started a company they’ve named Kinnos to capitalize on their success.

Playing Catch-Up

Diana Hernández, assistant professor of Sociomedical Sciences and a member of the Innovation group, painted a bleak picture of the traditional faculty route of getting government grant support in the current environment. Many of her peers are dejected by the Sisyphean scenario of repeated application and rejection. “These are brilliant people, the ideas are amazing, but the game has changed,” she said. “I’m at a place in my career where I don’t take NIH support for granted. We have to seek out new sources of funding. It’s like the old adage: innovate or die.”

New funding avenues—perhaps even on Wall Street—can give faculty the freedom to pursue projects not dictated by government grants, and realize change well beyond policy briefs. “In the past, research translation meant briefing your local health department,” explained Hernández. “Being entrepreneurial gives our research the wings to go new places and make a difference in new ways.”

Hernández admits that entrepreneurship comes with risks, particularly for time-strapped junior faculty in “publish or perish” mode. Other researchers may shy away from partnerships with corporations that are seen as adversaries, like so-called Big Tobacco and Big Food.  

In the coming months, the Faculty Innovation group will work to reorient the School to innovation and what Hernández calls “a culture of optimism.” The Grand Rounds lecture series beginning in the fall will showcase the business world and case studies on topics like social entrepreneurism. “The concept is to get the School to think in new ways,” she said.  “We want to inspire people.”

Students too are part of this transformation. Hernández, who has written on the subject, says students want to help with financial literacy and team-building skills. “What if we trained a whole set of socially conscious entrepreneurs and business leaders?” she asks. “We’re more than halfway there: we already have the social consciousness piece.”

Columbia Entrepreneurship

A recent meeting of the Faculty Innovators group hosted representatives from Columbia Entrepreneurship, a new university innovative to incubate fledgling enterprises. An observation by one of its principals, Richard Witten, highlighted deep connections between the worlds of business and public health. Startups he said “zig and zag” from one model to another as they test the commercial waters. “It’s the same way with the scientific method,” observed Dean Fried.

“Entrepreneurial thinking is, and has always been, at the heart of public health practice,” said Witten, who serves as special advisor to Columbia President Lee Bollinger. “That’s because both are fundamentally about solving complex problems, ones that, by definition, can't be solved by linear thinking.”

“Anybody who’s in the science of public health is already interested in innovation. That’s clear,” the Dean added. “Our business is being disruptive for the public good.”