(Embrace story) The Embrace organization started as a class project in the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability class in 2007. The original design brief asked the student team to build an infant incubator, to be used in the hospitals and clinics of Nepal, that is less expensive and easier to maintain than traditional Western incubators. Team member Linus Liang traveled to Nepal to experience the problem first-hand and to engage with doctors, nurses, mothers, and babies. When he arrived at the hospital in Kathmandu he saw a lot of functioning donated Western incubators. What surprised him was that they were mostly empty. When he asked a doctor about it, the doctor told him that most premature babies were born in the rural areas outside of the city and that mothers were unable make the trip to the hospital or afford the care. This was a huge insight. The original brief directed the students to design a cheaper, more durable incubator for hospitals, but Linus had discovered there were thousands of premature babies who would never reach those hospitals.Based on this finding, the team re-defined the problem. They forgot about traditional incubators and all of the requirements of incubators. Their mission became to help give rural women “the means to give their dying premature baby a surviving chance.” (flip slide)
A group of students were tasked with redesigning an infant incubator for a hospital in Nepal. Actually went to Nepal and spoke with hospital staff, doing empathy to understand how to build it better and cheaper.Noticed that the incubators in the hospital were all empty. Asked why, and not because they were broken, but because mothers couldn’t even get to the hospitals in time. They were having babies in their villages, and the infants were dying en route to the hospital. Quickly realized that the user wasn’t the hospital, it was the new infant and mother. Reframed the problem and did interviews in the villages and developed the Embrace warmer: small sleeping bag for infants. Last long enough to get the child to a hospital for medical care. Main point: reframe a problem