ThinkPlace to present at Innovation Week 2020

We’re excited to announce that this year, for the first time, we will be presenting at Innovation Week 2020 - Latin America's largest public sector innovation event.

Innovation Week 2020 will take place online from 16th to 19th November 2020.

ThinkPlace will be leading an on-demand session from 8:00-9:50 am (Brazil time) on 18th November 2020. Jacqueline Oliveira, Strategic Designer at ThinkPlace Kenya, will share a case study of innovation, behavioural research and design for public impact. Registration is FREE.

Organised by the Brazilian National School of Public Administration (Enap), Innovation Week is a massive annual conference that brings together thinkers from across the globe to catalyse broad-reaching innovation across the public sector. This year marks its 6th edition and sees the event transformed from its face-to-face format into a captivating online experience that will be translated into English and Spanish. Fittingly for a year that has so dramatically disrupted our ways of living and working, the theme for 2020 is '(Re)imagining and building futures', challenging participants to give space to their imaginations and reflect on what we need to keep, to leave behind, and to change in order to create the futures that we want. 

Four days of activities, over 150 speakers, 100 partners, 200 hours of content, and an estimated 100,000 public administration innovators in attendence. It's going to be big.

How we're involved

ThinkPlace has been selected to present a case study on how we used focused and rapid behavioural design to create a fresh approach to an entrenched problem - and how this enabled us to provide innovative new solutions to eliminate a neglected tropical disease. Jacqueline Olivera, Strategic Designer at ThinkPlace Kenya, will be delivering and leading the session, which will be about our experience partnering with Sightsavers to advance the fight to eradicate Trachoma.

Trachoma is an infectious tropical disease that causes roughening of the inner surface of the eyelids, resulting in immense pain and eventually blindness. It's a preventable disease that has been on the decline in many areas of the world thanks to dedicated efforts to spread access to prevention and treatment. Unfortuntely however, there remain strongholds of the disease in various communities who have fallen through the cracks of conventional prevention and treatment programming.  

We travelled throughout some of the most remote regions of Ethiopia and Kenya to understand these communities and how we could rethink the approach to prevention and treatment to have them best impact for them. We applied ethnographic techniques to gain insight into how they engage, value and communicate with each other, and worked to develop interventions anchored in the reality of their daily lives. 

Why we're talking about this

This project is important because it made valuable strides towards to goal of eliminating a terrible and entirely preventable cause of blindness. But the project is also important because it contains big insights about creating meaningful change where there are consistent and embedded blockers in your way. The lessons to be learnt from this project have implications for behavioural and social change initiatives of all stripes. 

Innovation Week 2020 is an incredible opportunity for innovators to share knowledge and collaborate, and begin sparking the ambitious transformation we need to pursue in order to create the futures we want to live in. We're honoured to have the opportunity to share our experience with this community, and are excited the big thinking that is going to come out of the conference. 

Event details

ThinkPlace is presenting at 8:00-9:50 am (Brazil time) on 18 November 2020. Registration is FREE.

Register to attend the event: https://inscricao.gamifica.ai/semanadeinovacao2020

If you are not a Brazilian citizen, you can click here to complete your registration for the event: https://www.sympla.com.br/innovation-week-2020__1025142

Find out more: https://semanadeinovacao.enap.gov.br/palestrantes/atividades-tematicas/jacqueline-oliveira