Winner
COPD Crowdshaped: Advancing ideation in the pharmaceutical sector
Summary of work
Imagine having to fight for every breath. Your world becomes smaller and, one day at a time, you become more isolated. This is life with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) for 210 million people globally. But imagine if innovation could change that. In June 2015, Health Unlimited, Novartis Pharmaceuticals and the COPD Foundation crowdsourced 50 of the world’s most progressive thinkers to help address the global challenge of COPD. COPD Crowdshaped: 2 days, 50 visionaries, 1 cause.
This was the pharma industry’s first open-innovation event to involve non-HCPs in a live attempt to solve a health-related problem; with no predefined outputs and no IP owned by the agency or the client.
Business leaders, technologists, actors, journalists, engineers and data scientists from companies and institutions including Boeing, Google, 23&Me, Qualcomm Life and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attended all with one thing in common - a commitment to improving lives.
Directly from the event multiple products are in last-stage testing. By bringing together brilliant minds who approach problem solving differently from the pharma norm, COPD Crowdshaped is generating genuine person-led solutions that could go on to change the status quo for millions with COPD.
Judges’ comments
An inspiring piece of work that we would have loved to have been involved with. It showed exceptional stakeholder engagement and threw out the rule book to produce a creative and innovative conversation that thought leaders wanted to be part of. It was big, bold and brave, and has already provided some really tangible outcomes that are clearly already benefiting patients. There were real, real-world outcomes and the work clearly changed internal behaviour, producing in the process some really insightful lessons.
