The William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan is excited to announce the call for applications for the 2024 Global Health Commercialization Competition. This innovative competition serves as a dynamic platform for U-M faculty visionaries based on the Ann Arbor, Flint, and Dearborn campuses, who wish to contribute their scientific and technological solutions to the most pressing global health challenges of our time.
Co-hosted by the U-M Center for Global Health Equity (CGHE) and the William Davidson Institute (WDI), the competition showcases U-M’s commitment to global health equity, with a unique market-driven approach. The competition relies on interdisciplinary collaboration to create sustainable and impactful innovations, aiming to improve healthcare in low- and middle-income countries around the world.
Competition participants will present their business case within a 15-minute timeframe to a panel of industry experts, followed by an informative 10-minute Q&A session. The winning team will be awarded substantial funding of $30,000, provided jointly by the CGHE and the WDI. Additionally, the winning team will be eligible for further consultative services provided by MBA students from our Ross School of Business, as a part of the Multidisciplinary Action Projects (MAP) Program.
The competition also provides extensive proposal review, guidance, and mentorship to all its participants, increasing their likelihood of success. Each shortlisted team is also entitled to a one-on-one consultation session with a member of the Fast Forward Medical Innovation (FFMI) team, who will review the project and provide constructive recommendations to enhance its prospects.
Proposals are due by April 5, 2024, providing an opportunity for team participants to fine-tune their pitches and maximize their chances of success. Application forms, template presentations, and more information about the event is available on our website.
Read more about last year’s competition
Medical Access Uganda Limited (MAUL) is a premier healthcare supply chain management organization in Africa whose mission is to enhance human health by providing efficient and sustainable healthcare supply chain management solutions. WDI completed a benefit-cost study to understand the impact of a procurement investment MAUL recently made.
WDI collaborated with Aceso Global on a project for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to examine how the organization might engage more with the for-profit private health sector in multiple low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to help achieve its objective of eradicating the three diseases and inform the development of its next five-year strategy.
WDI and Aceso Global conceptualized and carried out a landscaping study of multiple aspects of the for-profit private health sector in LMICs, including health service delivery, supply chain, how care is paid for, and digital health. The team analyzed challenges and barriers to engage with the for-profit private health sector. Recommendations based on the research were presented in a final report on how to expand the Global Fund’s engagement with the for-profit private health sector. Additionally, six case studies were developed to give the Global Fund deeper insights in selected countries, of which WDI developed case studies on South Africa and Kenya.
With a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the WDI Healthcare team explored the feasibility and potential structure of an affordable insurance product that protects against loss of Gavi- and Global Fund-supported health commodities and contributes directly to broader supply chain risk management and incentive alignment. WDI conducted desk research, interviews, and an online survey to complete this analysis and proposed a number of potential solutions.
An effective and efficient supply chain is critical to building a strong health system, however, identifying and implementing high-performing supply chain designs can be a challenge for many healthcare leaders. Data on supply chain costs and performance are often lacking, as are benchmarks for understanding how much a supply chain should cost. Analyzing potential future design improvements is difficult without expensive, specialized modeling software.
WDI’s Healthcare Team, in collaboration with VillageReach, is addressing this gap by developing and disseminating an Excel-based rapid supply chain modeling tool. The goal of this tool is to simplify the process of creating, testing and analyzing different supply chain design scenarios within a given country context. Through this simplified approach, WDI’s tool can help health program leaders more quickly and easily identify ways of improving the efficiency of their supply chain.
The global reproductive health community is increasingly seeking to engage the private sector in meeting the needs for reproductive health in low-resource regions of the world. Countries such as Malawi in Eastern Africa have a high level of donor dependence and market conditions which inhibit commercial sector development, particularly for serving the more rural and remote areas.
In this project, WDI’s Healthcare team conducted a contraceptives distributor landscape analysis and delivered actionable and stakeholder receptivity-tested concepts for stimulating the private sector provision of family planning products and services in rural, remote and other underserved populations. The landscaping assessment involved field research and in-country discussions with market actors, but also utilized a stakeholder-centric methodology to generate ideas for market building. The results and recommendations are being shared with Malawi country stakeholders, as well as with funders and implementers for potential market building efforts, in Malawi and similar countries.
Vaccines play a critical role in improving global health. While the return on investment of vaccines is on average higher than any other health intervention, there is a still a critical need to evaluate the expected return of each individual vaccine presentation. The key driver of the expected return on investment of a vaccine is the price of the vaccine relative to the value that it is expected to generate through increases in coverage/equity. While simple on its face, estimating price and value is often complex since both are multifactorial.
The objective of this work was to provide the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Gates Foundation) and partners (buyers) with a structured way of evaluating and negotiating potential investments related to the manufacturing of specific vaccine presentations. WDI team members hypothesized they could facilitate negotiations between buyers and manufacturers of vaccines by developing a flexible tool that incorporates their respective investment decision drivers and key levers related to price and value. To accomplish the objective, WDI had three aims (1) Understand the investment decision drivers for the Gates Foundation & partners, and potential manufacturers; (2) Identify the key levers that would form the basis of a contract that the Gates Foundation and partners could use in negotiations with potential manufacturers; and (3) Build a tool that the Gates Foundation and partners can use to evaluate scenarios with potential manufacturers. The output of this work is currently being applied to Gates Foundation-related investment questions.
An effective and efficient supply chain is critical to building a strong health system, however, identifying and implementing high-performing supply chain designs can be a challenge for many healthcare leaders. Data on supply chain costs and performance are often lacking as are benchmarks for understanding how much a supply chain should cost. Analyzing potential future design improvements is difficult without expensive, specialized modeling software.
WDI’s Healthcare Team, in collaboration with VillageReach, is addressing this gap by developing and disseminating an Excel-based rapid supply chain modeling tool. Funded by the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition (RHSC), the goal of this tool is to simplify the process of creating, testing and analyzing different supply chain design scenarios within a given country context. Through this simplified approach, WDI’s tool can help health program leaders more quickly and easily identify ways of improving the efficiency of their supply chain.
Populations in low-and-middle-income countries face a variety of barriers to receiving vaccinations, such as vaccine stockouts, cold chain breakdowns, difficulty traveling to a clinic or a lack of sufficiently trained clinic staff. New vaccine technologies have the potential to reduce or eliminate many of these barriers, but the impact of such reductions on actual immunization rates is not clear.
To address this gap, WDI’s Healthcare Team is developing a model to estimate the change in immunization coverage rates associated with a new vaccine introduction. The model includes six main barriers that can be addressed by new technologies. It first considers the prevalence of these barriers in the target population and then considers how effectively a new technology can address those same barriers. Those two factors are combined to estimate the change in population experiencing a barrier, which in turn influences overall immunization coverage levels. This model will help inform donor investment strategy by identifying high-priority new vaccine attributes and pairing them with high-impact target populations.