Monthly Archives:: August 2013

How do we know when we’ve solved a Grand Challenge?

Posted by & filed under Personal Reflections.

When Dr. Singer prompted the Grand Challenges Canada team to ponder what it would look like when a Grand Challenge had been solved, he might as well have been asking: when can we close a program and move on to address other grand challenges in global health? It was in this moment that I realized that Grand Challenges Canada is moving in the right direction towards the denouement of international development as an industry.

Counting the ‘Stars’ of Global Health

Posted by & filed under Personal Reflections.

Research should not be conducted for the mere sake of conducting research. This is the beauty of the Stars program – it is like no other Canadian global health initiative, in that it supports innovator-defined projects driven by entrepreneurs in Canada and low- and middle-income countries (LMIC).

Storytelling in Proposals

Posted by & filed under Proposal Talk.

You should tell a story in your grant proposal to engage the reader about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and what the impact will be if the project works. The story you write should lay out a step by step process of the what, why and how of your project.

‘Scaling’ Up My Learning Curve

Posted by & filed under Personal Reflections.

Working with my supervisor, Raymond Shih, and the rest of the Financial Innovations team at Grand Challenges Canada, I was able to gain insight about and appreciate the difficulty of evaluating the financial viability and scalability of global health investments.

On being Tweet-smart and what it takes

Posted by & filed under Personal Reflections.

Linking to trending hashtags, veering away academic jargon to a conversational tone (while maintaining a sense of gravitas), and sometimes, simply reading a tweet aloud to think about how it ‘sounds’, are tools that help keeping content from sounding dull.

Proposal Development Workshops in the Field

Posted by & filed under Proposal Talk.

We feel that researchers around the world, whatever their area of study, can benefit from freely available and expert-generated tips, advice, tools, and resources to help plan and write stronger, more successful grant proposals in global health. We regularly update the content on our online proposal development resource to help build capacity in proposal development, especially among low- and middle-income researchers.

Xcelerator Blog 2: Operationalizing – Context Analysis and Strategy Mapping

Posted by & filed under What's Happening?.

Context analysis is a method to analyze the environment in which innovations must be utilized by users and start-up efforts must operate. This is just one of the tools teams learn to effectively measure risks, test assumptions, secure resources, and build relationships with the individuals and institutions that will be the recipients of their innovations.