East Asia & Pacific: Refinement Solveathon Workshop

What is a Solveathon?

A Solveathon is a virtual, high-energy workshop designed to build teams and strengthen applications for the Global Surgical Training Challenge.

During these Solveathon workshops, you will:

• Connect with professionals who are interested in surgical training
• Further your understanding of the Challenge and requirements to compete
• Build or expand your project team
• Refine your project through facilitated design thinking activities developed at MIT
• Learn to compile a skills assessment framework

We’re hosting Solveathon workshops in five regions globally. Each region will have three activities: online networking, a Team Building Solveathon, and a Refinement Solveathon.

What is a Refinement Solveathon?

If you’ve formed a strong team and want to build your project, the Refinement Solveathon is for you. In this workshop, expert facilitators from MIT and Nesta will guide you through a series of activities designed to strengthen your project. These activities are collaborative, engaging, and even fun! Participants will have the chance to get feedback on their projects from expert mentors from around the world.

At the end of this workshop, each team will have developed a theory of change, key product features, user journey, skills assessment framework, succinct pitch, and project overview on MIT Solve’s open innovation platform. These products will help you to apply for the Discovery Awards (applications open September 2020), which will grant at least 10 teams up to $200,000 to develop and test their surgical modules.

This is the one of two workshops focused on East Asia & the Pacific. Learn more about the Team Building Solveathon to network with multi-disciplinary professionals in your region. We encourage everyone to participate in both the Team Building and Refinement Solveathon workshops to prepare for the Discovery Awards.

Who can participate?

Creating novel surgical training modules can only be achieved by multidisciplinary teams with experience in resource-constrained settings. To make up these teams, we are looking for:

• surgical education specialists with experience working in resource-constrained settings
• clinicians with experience working in resource-constrained settings,
• engineers and software developers
• artists, medical illustrators, film prop creators, and designers

We anticipate many of you wishing to attend will already be working in such multi-disciplinary teams. However, we also anticipate interest from individuals from unrelated fields and we will work with you to place you on a team suitable to take on the Challenge.

Agenda

This workshop will last approximately 3 hours.

• Challenge overview
• Human centered design activities
• Expert feedback
• Virtual pitches
• Next steps