Uplifting RAN’s tradition and following the recent awards, details shared on http://www.ranlab.org/makerere-university-school-of-public-health-resilientafrica-network-ran-awards-8-more-innovations-worth-usd-89300-only, the RAN team further engaged with these beneficiaries on July 13-14, 2017 for the official innovators onboarding session. During this engagement, the new awardees had an opportunity to listen to the RAN overview, learn from the RAN resilience findings highlighting the results relation to innovations, appreciate RAN support to innovators including; support in areas of conducting NeedFinding to further appropriately align the solutions, documenting using MKITS-short informative videos, attaining Innovation visibility with the related advantages, developing and implementing viable Business Models, appropriately utilizing research outputs, Administrative guidelines and regulations, contract signing and identifying while discussing Impact Potential related issues among others.
It is also during this session when this set of innovators were introduced to Design Thinking (DT), Problem analysis-teams brainstormed on the problem they are addressing and came up with problem trees which they later shared with all, each team derived the objective tree from the problem tree and let the rest of the innovators learn from the same, stakeholder identification- each team identified their beneficiaries and other stakeholders they will engage and developed a pathway of change, additionally, each team brainstormed on the change their innovation will bring about, scanned the environment and identified what should be in place for their innovations to thrive e.g. (Who) should be (what) in order to (verb)? ‘It was a rich learning opportunity bringing all of us together and deeply tasking our brains to further think and openly share’ commented one of the award beneficiary.
