There’s a joke that keeps showing on my feed. It centers around this idea that if an average person actually went back in time, they would be very incapable of proving they are from the future. While they will be able to speak of technologies such as computers and phones, they would neither be able to replicate, nor explain how they work. Most of us would face the same issue, having come up in a highly globalized, industrialized world with increasing distance between specializations, we rely on each other without even knowing it. Nothing worth doing ends up getting done by a singular actor.
In this environment, having the time and opportunity to seek out and actively collaborate becomes key to finding solutions. The International Maternal and Newborn Health Conference(IMNHC) 2026 provided exactly this to innovators, governments, researchers and policy makers from around the world, who are often looking at the same issues from different angles of specialization.
It was with all this in mind that Busara decided to participate by designing the innovation marketplace at IMNHC 2026. The marketplace was a 2 hour interactive showcase of 50 innovations from around the world in maternal and newborn health centered around the question: what propels a global health innovation from concept to change?
We knew that everyone coming to the marketplace would have a different perspective on the multiple facets contained within this question. This is precisely why we wanted our design to have room for these different views to be expressed and exchanged. Another ambitious goal we had was to capture and synthesize these views to share with the collective, so we could reach that space no individual can reach on their own.
We started with a simple concept – the hero’s journey. We took this to have two meanings. First, imagining the innovators who would be showcasing their work at the marketplace as heroes on their own innovator’s journey. The second meaning was marketplace attendees as heroes on the journey to uncover the answer to our key question – what propels a global health innovation from concept to change?
We then mapped these two concepts onto each other and created a choose your adventure style journey, where marketplace attendees would be prompted via a quest card to explore the marketplace through a gamified journey with prompts and activities bespoke to their hero profile.
The activities themselves were designed to capture the many different viewpoints on different stages of the journey, to support us in achieving our third objective of synthesizing the views of the collective.
After months of planning, stakeholder management, cocreation and everything else that comes with moving a concept through to implementation, the innovation marketplace happened on Thursday 26th March 2026. Despite the butterflies we made it through successfully. Everywhere in the marketplace you could see conversations moving beyond the usual surface level chit chat that comes with networking. People were sharing ideas in an open way, trading tips and tricks, and building with each other.
Now, we’re doing the work of synthesizing that information, we’re curious to see what we can gather from the multiple conversations that happened and share this information with marketplace attendees.
Looking back there are a few things we learned while working on this:
- Pro bono work needs to be treated like paid work — maybe more so
We took this project on because we had previously done work with the Jhpiego team and wanted to share this moment with our valued partners. Jhpiego were one of the first organizations we worked with in health, finding ways to get Oral PrEP, a lifesaving HIV prevention pill, to the people who need it the most. On the surface doing something pro bono might sound like it is just a financial issue i.e there will be no money coming in from the project. Fundamentally though this translates into a prioritization problem as well.
In the earlier months, it was hard to get people in the same room and commit to generating ideas. We had this sense that, because it wasn’t a paying project, it could wait. This led to some things that could have been accomplished earlier waiting until the last moment.
- Do your stakeholder mapping early, know when to engage your partners and leave room to breathe in your workplans
A proper stakeholder mapping exercise gives realistic expectations of layers of approval, who needs to be involved, and at what point everyone is useful. We also saw that knowing what to share and when can enable your partners to give you actionable feedback. With the innovation marketplace, we found conversations with our partners moved faster when we involved them once we had concrete ideas of our own. It is possible to collaborate too early.
The learning isn’t ‘collaborate less.’ It’s: assume that your partner wants to be in the editing seat, not the generating seat. Come with content. Come with visuals. Give them something to push back on, and they’ll give you much more useful input than if you’re asking them to generate it with you from a blank page. To make room for all this, it’s best to use workplans that have breathing space, leaving a month or two of buffer between each stage.
- Site visits should happen as early as possible, with the full team
The site visit was one of the most valuable things we did. When designing an experience in a physical space, it is important that you walk through the actual space together, taking detailed measurements and planning things out. This will make conversations at later stages much clearer as all parties will have the same points of reference.
Also on this, as a general rule, design for the space you have, not for the space you are imagining. It is easy to get attached to our ideas and fail to consider whether they are actually fit for purpose. Site visits allow teams to have grounded conversations about what’s actually possible.
No problem worth solving can be solved by a single actor. It takes a lot of us building on each other’s work to do something truly great, which is what made the innovation marketplace worthwhile for us all. We are truly grateful to the AlignMNH team for working closely with us on bringing this idea to life and honored to have created one more space where we can find ways to harness the power of each other.
