My friend Sarah who runs Columbia’s Center for Neuroscience Initiatives was talking about seatbelts the other day. Whether you secure yourself with a basic rope like a Cairo taxi driver or a fancy automatic seatbelt in a German car, the seatbelt is now fairly well accepted in society. It has not always been that way, and its creation in the 1800s significantly impacted the world and changed behavior.

Such a simple creation changed the way people think about their standards for safety. In some countries, policy was drafted to require them. Demand forced car manufacturers to begin adding the seatbelt as a standard safety feature which led to other standards such as airbags.

It saves many lives, lives which are contributing to our economy. It has perhaps saved lives of some of those who might be on their way to discovering an AIDS vaccine or creating the next Internet, string theory or algorithm for world peace.

Sarah asked: Where is the next seatbelt? ….simple idea, big impact.

The bednet project I will be working on in Tanzania has many parallels. Malaria causes more than one million fatalities annually. Furthermore, a Harvard study showed that Africa’s gross domestic product would be 32% higher if malaria had been effectively controlled 35 years ago. To address this problem, an exciting technology was created to manufacture long-lasting net material which is impregnated with insecticide and can be used over beds or in windows. Studies have begun to show that these nets are highly effective in preventing morbidity and mortality, especially when deployed in large numbers.

How do you change behavior so that people begin to value and adopt the use of bednets to significantly curb the cases of malaria—just as we did with the seatbelt? As you create a market, how do you ensure that the poorest segments of society can access the product?

This week our training is focused on "design for the bottom of the pyramid.” We had a great workshop today given by the world famous industrial design firm, IDEO. IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown and Chris Flink (Practice Head for Consumer Experience) led this two-day session for the Acumen Fellows on ‘design thinking’ as an approach to innovation. Design thinking, they say, is human centered innovation which starts with exploring what is desirable to people and then finding feasible technology or business. Great design thinking is both rational and intuitive, and the process has three phases: 1) inspiration = great ideas come from exposure to new experiences, 2) ideation = how you develop ideas through teams, processes, etc, 3) experimentation = how do you get things out into the world through prototyping, pilots, etc.

The most interesting part of today made me think about when I worked for Sally Osberg @ Skoll Foundation. She taught me to strive to build a culture of innovation—providing the right tools, processes, roles and environment for those in your company to explore new ideas, innovate and be entrepreneurial. This is the root of true success according to IDEO.

Chris & Tim's session today led us to the Google offices being built in Chelsea (NY). We observed construction workers in action and later used the design process to think of ways to improve the workers' ability to build office space. We eventually developed some ideas and built prototypes of masks and ladders (using clay, pipe cleaners and anything we could find in the office!)

As we learned about ‘generating ideas’ and not just ‘validating ideas,’ I thought about some of the possibilities for my work with designing a private market distribution strategy for bednets in Tanzania. It starts with just observing people and trying to view things from their perspective, not mine. This will help me understand the market on multiple levels (the mental, physical and intellectual experiences).

Hopefully someday the bednet in Africa will be as widely adopted as the seatbelt….better yet, perhaps my friend Sarah will be talking about her amazement of society's accomplishment in preventing "the crash" all together.