Aside from their age, the seven young innovators who gathered before a packed Morningstar auditorium for Chicago Ideas Week’s “Innovation Around the World” session had something else in common. At some point in their young lives, these entrepreneurs all had a personal encounter with an urgent social need — and a firm belief that they could help solve it.
“We’re all trying to address problems that we ourselves experienced or saw firsthand,” Zak Kaufman, co-founder and CEO of Vera Solutions, said at the Wednesday session. “You have an infinite drive to solve a problem when you know that problem personally.”
Kaufman, a native of Madison, Wis., said that problem came to light for him in 2008, when he moved to South Africa and began working for an HIV-prevention program. His predecessor handed him a jump drive with six years of spreadsheets. Kaufman wondered why the organization didn’t track beneficiaries of its program with the same rigor as it tracked its donors. “That was the big a-ha,” he said. “So we set out to build a system that would do that.”
Vera Solutions moves organizations off paper and onto the cloud using low-cost and often free technology.
“The solution comes from an authentic experience,” said Beth Schmidt, founder and executive director of Wishbone.
Schmidt had her authentic experience when she taught 10th-grade English in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. “The students had deep-seated passions they couldn’t pursue,” she said. So she formed Wishbone to help them. Wishbone sends high-school students to out-of-school programs often hosted by universities. After teaching in Watts, Schmidt said, “you can’t really turn away and say, ‘That will be someone else’s problem.'”
A personal encounter with a societal problem led teenager Viney Kumar, founder of Alwaysvin, to come up with a potentially life-saving technology. Kumar, who lives in Australia, recalled a visit to India. One day, when he saw an ambulance stuck in traffic, “I felt I couldn’t do anything about this and there could be someone in that ambulance who could be dying,” he said. Kumar then had another thought: “Why can’t I do something about this?”
Kumar developed a mobile technology that sends early warning signals to drivers in high-traffic areas so they have more time to get out of ambulances’ way. His innovation won the 13-14 age division of the 2013 Google Science Fair.
When session moderator Benjamin F. Jones, a professor in entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, asked Kumar if anyone told him he was too young to take on such a project, the teenager smiled. “A lot of people,” he said.
Josipa Majic, founder and CEO of Teddy the Guardian, realized she had to come up with an innovation while working in a pediatric clinic in Croatia. She noticed that nurses were having a hard time measuring the vitals of impatient, irritated toddlers. The more stressed out they became, the less accurate the data.
Majic’s answer: Teddy the Guardian. It isn’t just a cuddly toy but a smart device that tracks the health of vulnerable users. “We want to create medical devices that are simple to use, especially for kids and the elderly,” she said. Whether teddies for kids or watches for people with Alzheimer’s, her devices target populations for whom wearable tech isn’t really feasible. “We’re making existing objects smart rather than making new objects to wear,” she said.
Notably, several innovations discussed here didn’t need cutting-edge tech. Ted Gonder, co-founder and CEO of Moneythink, said his organization uses the age-old practice of mentorship. Moneythink recruits and trains college volunteers to teach financial education to inner-city students.
“Our lessons are incredibly simple,” said Gonder, a University of Chicago graduate, “and they’re all embedded in pop-culture examples, like Kim Kardashian’s spending habits.” Because mentors who aren’t much older than their students speak in culturally shared references, Moneythink’s simple lessons stick: Spend mindfully, save money, use financial products safely and learn how to become employable.
Like Moneythink and Wishbone, Global Minimum is an education program aimed at underprivileged kids. Co-founded by David Sengeh, who serves as its president, Global Minimum helps young people find solutions to social problems in their communities within Sierra Leone, Kenya and South Africa.
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“We don’t want to be another organization that’s going in” to fix these communities’ problems, said Sengeh, a Sierra Leone native. “We want to create opportunities for young people to grow as leaders and have self-efficacy.”