Cross post by Alex from over at Tales of Water in Africa:

Over the last year or so, I’ve encountered a tremendous push for innovation in the fields of development and disaster relief. Organizations big and small are looking for the ideas that will catapult millions of people out of poverty. The next clever gadgets that will cheaply and quickly filter water, prevent malaria, and stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. These ideas are almost by definition just over the horizon – because once an idea has been around for a few months, it’s not that innovative anymore.

And so what happens to those innovative ideas? What happens when the clever creator has received his fellowship grant and begins to work out the tricky details? From what I’ve seen, the funding organizations have moved on to the next ‘innovation’ and left the creator to work out the Boring Stuff on their own. My experience in Africa has pointed to the Boring Truth – 90% of what’s needed is not innovation but ‘capacity building’ – training, logistics, and equipment purchases. Building systems that can scale up to help thousands more people.

Take for example the work my fiancée does in health care. She is deploying an innovative new computer and mobile phone-based system to track and process health claim forms. It promises to reduce overhead and errors, increasing the rate at which health providers are reimbursed by funding agencies such as KFW (the German development bank). And yet the health providers she partners with, while supportive of her new claims system, are more excited by the equipment and training she is giving as part of the research. They’re excited about the opportunity to purchase laptops, check email, and learn how to track patients on Excel. And they want to do it on laptops, not smart-phones, as are being so heavily touted in development circles. They want to do things like we do in developed countries. Given the option, they’re taking the boring stuff before the innovative.

To a large extent I’ve found the same to be true in the work I do with water. The basic work – building gravity flow systems – has been done since the Romans! It’s not exactly cutting-edge technology. But the great improvements are coming from the Boring Stuff – GPS devices to mark pipe and tank locations. Creating a database to manage the hunt for new sources of water. These behind the scenes changes are making it much easier to build and manage a water system.

But unfortunately the Boring Stuff isn’t sexy enough to get funding. The truth is, nobody wants to fund it because they can’t put their names on it. The funding organizations can’t brag to their peers and donors about the Boring Stuff – “look we gave $10,000 to train X health practitioners on how to enter and process data!” But when they put out $10,000 to fund the Next Big Thing, out come the press, book agents, and dollars.

This trend points to a glaring fact – we in the developed world are more interested in creating a system that makes us feel good rather than creating a system that provides the resources people in the developing world need to succeed. And I will be the first to confess of this – I want to feel good about myself just as much as anyone else.

Now, all this is not to say that innovation is inherently bad – far from it. It is only to say that innovation should not be the absolute focus, or even the primary focus. We need to support the Boring Stuff, the physical and educational infrastructure that will be the foundation on which the vast majority of people are lifted out of poverty.

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Yesterday we were invited to sit in and meet the CEO of GSK, Andrew Witty, as he announced the new GlaxoSmithKline Open Innovation Strategy To Aid Poor Countries. The following entry is by one of our new bloggers, Sarah Searle (@sarahsearle on twitter) from the Johns Hopkins International Health program:

“Big Pharma as a Catalyst for Change”: GSK “Open Innovation” strategy

It’s estimated that one-third of the world’s population go without essential drugs–often drugs for treating diseases that disproportionately affect the world’s poorest. The pharmaceutical world proves to be especially difficult to navigate for those seeking to provide such medicines to underserved populations, however. Pharmaceutical science is a field with billions of dollars in R&D, ironclad patents and intellectual property rights that are prohibitive to making drugs available to the poor. Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, claims that he’s looking to change this nature of big pharma, in the same way that the open source movement has revolutionized the tech world.

I love the word “innovation” combined with anything related to global health, so the prospect of sitting in on a blogger’s roundtable with GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty was exciting enough just from the topic at hand: “Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation and Access to Medicines in the Developing World.”

The ante was upped in a press conference this morning, when Andrew Witty announced GSK’s “Open Innovation” strategy to make drugs more available and break down barriers to access. This strategy includes several components.

“Open Lab” initiative
$8 million in seed funding has been provided establish an “Open Lab” at GlaxoSmithKline’s research facility in Spain. As many as 60 scientists from around the world will be able to work at this lab, which will be devoted to research for drugs that target diseases of the developing world.

13,500 malaria-combating compounds in the public domain
This is perhaps the most exciting announcement. GlaxoSmithKline has been collaborating for years with PATH and other organizations in the development of a malaria vaccine. Scientists at GSK have screened all compounds that have ever been created in their labs, and identified 13,500 compounds that successfully combat P. faciparum, the deadliest form of malaria. The big news? The chemical structures and other recorded data regarding these compounds will be open sourced, in hopes that malaria vaccine research will be accelerated.

New pricing model for GSK’s malaria vaccine candidate
GlaxoSmithKline is in the process of developing the world’s most advanced candidate for a malaria vaccine—it’s the only vaccine in Phase III clinical trials, and could be available to the public as early as 2012. Maintaining that a tiered pricing model simply isn’t feasible for a drug which is needed almost exclusively by the world’s poor, Witty announced a pricing model for the vaccine which covers the cost of the vaccine with a marginal return for GSK, all of which will supposedly be channeled back into R&D for “next-generation” malaria vaccines.

It goes without saying that some present at the roundtable were wary of the corporate world’s ability to selflessly decide change the mechanics of drug information and pricing in order to benefit the world’s poor. Witty has struck a nice balance between acknowledging that GSK is a profit-driven company but maintaining that he strives to keep a “restless” socially-conscious agenda.

And let’s be honest—GSK won’t be suffering much financially with this move. First of all, the malaria drug market isn’t very competitive to begin with, because of the very fact that it is a poor person’s disease. Secondly, GSK is already the developer of the leading candidate for a malaria vaccine. It’s unlikely that, even with the compound information made publicly available, anyone can come up with a vaccine to rival GSK’s in any short amount of time.

Indeed, as Witty acknowledged, making drugs and drug knowledge more universally available is an investment in the future. Drugs will not be provided for free, he stressed, but rather provided at a marginal price that won’t completely alienate other pharmaceutical companies from healthy competition for lifesaving drugs.

Regardless of motivation, it’s refreshing to see big pharma recognizing the issues of access to medicines for the world’s poor. Moreover, Witty’s emphasis on being in step with progressive intellectual property movements is laudable. Whether or not GSK’s initiatives will stimulate other pharmaceutical companies to follow suit remains to be seen.

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