How Open Innovation Can Help People Living with Diabetes

February 25, 2012 By IdeaConnection
Image by Ambro
Image by Ambro

“Offering a $100,000 prize has yielded ideas in six months that would have taken four to five years to develop at ten times the cost.”

That’s the verdict of Sanofi’s Dennis Urbaniak, VP US diabetes who was commenting on his company’s previous open innovation competition that generated a wealth of ideas.

The multinational pharmaceutical company is hoping for more of the same this year, as it has just launched its second Data Design Diabetes Innovation Challenge contest.

The aim is to turbo-charge the development of apps and other innovative tools to make life easier for people with diabetes.

Participants have until March 23 to send in their submissions to www.datadesigndiabetes. They will be whittled down to five semi-finalists who will present their work to a panel of judges.

From this batch two finalists will be awarded $10,000 and will compete in a “community uptake exercise” and the overall winner will bag the top prize of $100,000. Entrants will retain the intellectual property rights to their ideas and concepts.

For Sanofi the benefits are clear:

  • It receives patient insights
  • Has potential products to develop
  • Discovers and cultivates new talent

In fact open innovation competitions run by pharma companies are a win-win scenario for all involved. New companies and start-ups can receive valuable inputs and increased profile, patients get new solutions quicker, and the pharmaceutical firms get more products.

Some key stats about diabetes provided by Sanofi:

  • More than 1 in 4 Americans is affected by diabetes
  • The overall cost to US healthcare is $2.6 trillion (this equates to about $21,000 per household in the US).

You can keep up-to-date with Sanofi’s competition by logging onto the innovation challenge’s blog.


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Reader Comments


Diabetes still has no permanent cure. You can only manage its symptoms and complications...
Posted by Hayden Soisson on November 3, 2012

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