Our Third Round of Innovation Next Recipients

While working with IDEO in 2008, Power to Decide used the process of human-centered design to successfully reimagine sexual education for adults, creating Bedsider.org. With funding from the Office of Adolescent Health, we want to find and support individuals interested in giving teen pregnancy prevention a complete makeover. Using the Design Thinking framework, Innovation Next recruits and works with teams to define challenges, develop technology-based solutions, and refine their concepts so that they can successfully move from concept to scale.

Recently, we announced our third cohort of award recipients. Each team is composed of three individuals and aims to answer one “how might we…” question. The teams and their questions are:

• Sexpert: How might we increase dual method use and subsequently decrease teen pregnancy among 15-18-year-old Black and Latinx adolescents?
• Luna’s Last Week: How might we use digital media to thoughtfully engage adolescents in experiences of teenage pregnancy and resources for the prevention of teen and unplanned pregnancy?
• NObility: How might we employ digital learning tools to expand and enrich access to sexual and reproductive health education for adolescents and young adults with diverse learning needs?
• Power Up: How might we leverage existing entertainment preferences to engage young men in sexual health education?
• Healthy You, Healthy Future: How might we create culturally and linguistically relevant opportunities and materials for young refugee women aged 18-24 in the U.S. to access and engage with sexual and reproductive health information in a way that equips, empowers, and protects their sexual and reproductive health experiences?

 “Our team is excited for the opportunity from Innovation Next to work with young adult refugee women on a human based design solution that will empower those young women to plan for healthy futures,” said Grace Paulsen of Healthy You, Healthy Future Team.

“We are elated at the opportunity to transform potential into power and nurture the limitless ability of New Orleans youth for the next innovation generation. We invest in what we value. Thank you to Innovation Next for recognizing the abilities in students with disabilities,” said Sheryl-Amber Edmondson from Team NObility.

Since peaking in 1991, the teen birth rate has declined 67 percent, and the related savings to taxpayers have been significant. However, progress isn’t victory, and unplanned pregnancy rates for Latina and African American teens are still more than twice as high as compared to their white counterparts. In addition, more than 19 million women in need of publicly funded contraception live in contraceptive deserts, where they do not have reasonable access in their county to a public clinic that offers the full range of contraceptive methods.

The teams will spend the next four months applying design thinking to each of their respective challenges, and will pitch their final ideas to a panel of judges in June 2019.