Fostering innovation through the use of Web 2.0

Kate Carroll

doi:10.17918/etd-4023

The Thomas Scattergood Foundation strives to improve behavioral health services and awareness in southeastern Pennsylvania by fostering social innovation among its grantees and throughout the community. The Foundation enlisted two graduate students from the Drexel University School of Public Health to assist, as a part of their masters program's culminating work experience, in the conceptualization and implementation of the organization's new website. The Scattergood Foundation and the Drexel University Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice and the Center for Public Health Practice hope that this website will become a unique community resource, and that refinement and management of the website will be living project involving teams of future MPH students spanning several academic years. The resulting project's objectives revolved around the conceptualization and implementation of a web platform which would be a tool for hosting dialogues and engaging stakeholders in discussions around public behavioral health issues. Three key components were incorporated into the project. The first component is behavioral health, the topic area that provides that frames the focus of the website. A second component is web 2.0, which is a term that describes the most recent iteration of the internet and is characterized by user interaction. The final component is design thinking, which is a process that employs various strategies and methods to innovate solutions for a targeted problem (Brown, 2009). All three components intersect in a particular type of design thinking process, referred to as the "open design challenge" (see Figure 1). Design challenges are a method of innovation in which carefully formed questions or "challenges" are posed to teams of thinkers and brainstorming activities andgroup interaction are used to create and select solutions. The project's outputs included a design challenge model for the Scattergood website, a challenge topic, various web content, and a partnership with the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services. The significance of this project lies in its unique integration of the three main components in an attempt to produce a tool for innovating and stakeholder engagement. Potential implications for public health include: (1) creating a new platform for stakeholder engagement (2) developing an accessible tool for community organizations that can help institutionalize innovation and (3) exploring social media's potential as a tool for public health practice. The students' work contributed to that of the website's project team, which included Joe Pyle, president of The Scattergood Foundation; Jason Alexander, consultant; Larry Geiger, web designer; Dennis Gallagher, academic advisor; Dr. John Rich, academic advisor; and Kim Williams, executive MPH student.

Fostering innovation through the use of Web 2.0

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Fostering innovation through the use of Web 2.0

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