Population Health

Cultivating social innovation and social entrepreneurship

A project team works on developing a social robotSolving population health challenges requires new models for bringing the innovative, evidence-based interventions that are developed at the University of Washington to the populations that can most benefit from them. In recent years, social innovation and social entrepreneurship have emerged as important mechanisms by which interventions that improve population health can reach communities.

The UW currently supports a number of entrepreneurial activities both in various schools and colleges across campus and through CoMotion. The entrepreneurial ecosystem is fairly robust for healthcare and biomedical innovations that have strong commercial potential. However, there are fewer options for sustainability beyond grant or philanthropic funding for innovations whose primary purpose is to benefit vulnerable or disadvantaged populations or focus on community-based and upstream determinants of health rather than clinical interventions.

To that end, the initiative is helping to develop a more robust ecosystem for social innovation and entrepreneurship at the UW that supports faculty and students to take on big population health challenges. Current initiative activities in this area include: