Role of entrepreneurship in shaping the health of ONE BILLION - Lisa Shufro

Lisa Shufro (0:01)

Kstart Podcasts.

My name is Lisa Shufro. I am the founder of Apertivo, which is a consultancy for designing conference programs with speakers. I'm the former managing editor of Tedmed, and now I work with different organizations to provoke people with new thoughts, new talks, and new speakers. The question I've been asked today is, what is the role of entrepreneurship in shaping the health of a billion people? And this is always a scary question because entrepreneurship so frequently gets divided between two categories. There are the organizations that are after social impact and the organizations that are after commercial impact, and no one has really figured out at scale how to combine them both.

When I look at the speakers that I work with and the trends going on in health, I think it's important to remind entrepreneurs getting into the space not to look at where things are. In other words, I wouldn't even look at the health of a billion people. I would be looking at where health is going, which is the health of the four billion people who are going to move into Africa in the next decades and the mass migration patterns that are going to happen and change where people live and what they need and what the resources and infrastructure are that they have. So think about the four billion moving to Asia and the four billion moving to Africa and what that means for potential entrepreneurship. When you think about four billion, you're able to look at business and opportunity and enterprise with a degree of nuance that might look ludicrous in today's timeframe.

And I think one of the exciting things is that we've reached a state in tech and data collection and data processing capability where we are able to look at both a micro and a macro lens.

What I see happening often that gives me a little bit of a faint heart is it says when you have that much predictive power, we're tempted to look for certainty. The speakers and the ideas that I find have the most impact and the most promise that I'm the most hopeful about are the ones that actually look for a little bit of certainty, but actually use this micro and macro lens to encourage intuitive leaps that they can then test with the unprecedented speed that that technology allows. So I would encourage entrepreneurs thinking about the health of a billion or four billion people wherever they are to look at the untouched spaces, the things that have traditionally been seen as too complex, too soft, too poorly defined. And as an example, I'd say that in health, we're moving away from looking purely at a pathogen or a germ, call it tuberculosis, and looking at treatments or vaccines or interventions for that. Data and technology now allows us to think about what is called host-directed. Thinking about the impact that that pathogen has on the body, for example, and if we can develop techniques to keep the body resilient so that the pathogen doesn't have to be eliminated. That's one avenue that's becoming possible. And then it's also becoming possible to look at the environment in which that person lives. It's the most complex power, whatever. But if you're thinking about where are things going as opposed to where things are, remember that that complexity is now more possible than ever. Now, I'd say that our ability to address that in the health space is pretty early, and it's exciting. But in order to address that, the next thing that I think has to happen, and this is an opportunity for entrepreneurship, too, is that you have to allow more minds and new minds into the process. I think the traditional model of a startup in the health space is someone comes up with a great idea. That scales very quickly. I think that we have to go past the guy who writes, or the girl, who writes the great algorithm and comes up with a good intervention. The next stage is about really being savvy about participation, inviting more minds into that network, using them to sense broader patterns, allowing them to co-create and ideate, and then encourage them to make collective actions.

This would allow them to do things like, instead of in developing countries, which is what this billion usually refers to, it would allow them to stop importing western infrastructure and just optimizing it for these new environments, but begin to design for very different populations and the conditions that they're actually in, because none of the technologies that were developed in the west and the developed countries really were designed to address the mobile populations, the displaced populations, that we're going to see more and more of as things like climate instability and growing economies and overpopulation. The convergence of this means that you want to be thinking about the conditions that you have today. You're going to need to stop, I think, focusing on an intervention, a thing, an app, a platform that allows you to do an action or create a product. I think the next role for entrepreneurs in shaping health for all people is about relationships, using the power of processing to change the relationships between patients and doctors and care providers. And when I say care providers, I don't just mean nurses. I mean people who aren't doctors or nurses or experts or professionals in that sense, letting those minds in and letting go of the outcome, letting them tell you what needs to be developed next. Researching individuals and populations who aren't local necessarily. So could we have, instead of teachers, could we have people who come in from around the world to educate or engage?