Today at Cannes we were lucky enough to see some superb speakers, who gave talks on the various ways creativity can be used in the world of pharmaceutical and consumer health communications.
The one that stuck with me above all others though came from the very humble Dr Kent Brantly, a physician who was working as a missionary in Liberia at the time of the Ebola crisis.
He had a choice to leave Liberia with his wife and children and return to the safety of his homeland, the USA, when the crisis struck, but he felt the problem was ‘just too big to run away from.’ He stayed, he helped people in need, in the most dire of circumstances.
And then he contracted the disease himself.
He said at this point he felt awful – not because of the illness, but because he knew he was placing an extra burden on his already stretched colleagues by being another person they needed to care for.
Little did he know during this period that in Connecticut a young high-school student, Olivia Hallisey, was being quietly inspired by his work. She set about developing an idea for her 2015 global health science fair project that could change the way in which Ebola is diagnosed. She describes it as being like a ‘pregnancy test for Ebola’. Her simple tool is not reliant on refrigerated drugs/heat stabilisation, is language agnostic (as the instructions are made up with visual icons) and doesn’t need any machines to process the result. It also can be manufactured for around $5, which is significantly less that the current standard of care.
Her insight to her success was that she could look at this problem without the constraints that a diagnostic firm might be blighted by, because ‘she didn’t know what the roadblocks could be’ so wasn’t limited by the voice that said ‘that’ll never work…’.
Because of that, she was able to find a solution that will not only help people with Ebola, but could potentially be rolled out in other diseases such as Zika and HIV.
These two inspirational speakers showed delegates that by taking on the problems that are ‘too big to walk away from’, and approaching them without the negative voice that’s tells them the problem is insurmountable, game-changing creative innovations that save lives can be achieved.