We do like technology and innovation at The Gates Foundation.
But I have to say that when I hear technology or innovation I often think about a widget
or a new thing or an object.
What I love about being at the foundation is our affinity for innovation comes in a
lot of different flavors.
It may come in product development, it may be a new vaccine or a new approach to how
we store or keep cold vaccines or move vaccines around.
It might be using phones to make sure that we have compliance or we can find people when
they need to be vaccinated or their kids need some care.
But one of my favorite forms of innovation here at the foundation are innovations in
ways of operating.
Our passion is to solve problems.
Let me give you an example.
Last year when Ebola became a huge global issue because of the outbreak in West Africa,
The Gates Foundation didn't have programs in those West African countries and we didn't
have a program in Ebola.
We had a relatively small emergency fund for things that often had been things like a flood
or a tsunami or an earthquake.
So I went to Bill and Melinda after many phone calls that me and my colleagues received about
Ebola and suggested to Bill and Melinda that we should put up $50 million to try and help
with Ebola.
And Bill and Melinda graciously and rapidly agreed that we should do that.
Well, having no programs and no work and seeing the enormity of the problem, we looked right
away at a couple of things.
One is how could we help?
We could move money quickly, flexibly and make sure that people on the ground in these
West African countries could rapidly get the help they needed.
We could partner with organizations that ranged from the WHO to UNICEF to the Centers for
Disease Control and work with these partners and the ministries locally in the countries
that were involved to make sure that those supplies, that money got to where it needed
to get.
And so I think Ebola, in many ways, showed our foundation at its finest.
Flexible, moving quickly, but knowing how we could play a role together with others,
and every step along the way we were focused on what can we do?
How could we use our resources, our intellect, our human capital to help fix this problem?
I think those are the kinds of collaborative innovations, how we communicate, regularity,
teamwork that sometimes involve high-tech.
We might use video conferencing or we might use a smart phone, but often are how human
beings interact together in novel ways to get things done.
And that's at least as important a way that we use innovation here.