Healthy Innovation at the Unite for Sight Conference

To round out this year’s spring conference season we attended the Global Health and Innovation Conference at Yale put on by Unite for Sight. It was great to be back in my home state of Connecticut, and the conference proved to be a compelling intersection of technology and social enterprise. As a bonus, there was less medical jargon than I expected. I was impressed by the emphasis on innovation and creating models in which it thrives, and I found the conference presenters to be a very diverse mix of leaders from the non-profit and for-profit space.

The conference kicked off with some networking with the exhibitors at Shubert Hall. I was excited to meet the entrepreneurs behind Nokero, a Denver-based social enterprise making the world a safer place by providing kerosene-free lighting alternatives for people who live where electricity is less than reliable. They have a number of innovative and well designed products for lighting and for charging mobile phones.

We met another Coloradan, Ned Breslin of Water for People. Ned gave a great talk about how reporting was broken for water projects, and what technology can be used to fix it. I’m looking forward to hearing more from Ned and Water for People in the coming months as they further develop their software and reporting mechanisms. Ned is both hands-on and disruptive, using a whiteboard rather than a powerpoint, which was great.

Gutenberg Bible at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

We watched a series of great social enterprise stories and approaches from respective folks at KIND, Kopali, Deans Beans, and FeelGoodz. I was really impressed by the social motivation mechanics KIND is doing in their do the KIND thing program. We also connected with another great speaker and disruptive thinker, Scott Henderson of Cause Shift. We followed up with Scott and he even did an interview spot with us for his Podcast series New Empire Builders.

We even managed a visit to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library which has an original Gutenberg Bible (or Bible.is 0.1 as we like to refer to it at HiDef). We look forward to heading back for more GHIC conferences and the collaborations that come out of it.