A story about ways to improve TB testing in Africa captured the spirit of a seminar on ways to promote innovation, organised by Strategy Regeneration. Its CEO Nicholas Sadron said that 89 per cent of CEOs believe that innovation is important – but only eight per cent do something about it.

“Why? Because it is so messy and uncomfortable,” he said, adding that when people were confronted with problems, they tended to keep banging their heads against the wall, rather than trying to approach the problem from a different angle.

One of the projects his company had worked on was in Africa, where villagers would trek to the nearest clinic to be tested for TB, but the tests were not picked up for days on end, and testing was slow and laborious because the lab technicians could only process 15 tests a day – with 70 per cent false negatives. In all, the process took six to eight weeks – which did little to curb the spread of the disease.

Instead of using lab technicians, cane rats were trained to sniff the samples and identify the presence of TB

But a bit of creative thinking found an unexpected solution: Pepsi. The soft drink company had numerous distributors and this network was used to get the tests to the lab, which Pepsi did as part of its corporate social responsibility. The consultants then recommended that the test results should be sent back by text, rather than by mail, but the most innovative solution was related to the tests themselves.

Instead of using lab technicians, cane rats were trained to sniff the samples and identify the presence of TB. The outcome was dramatic. The rate of false negatives went down to just one per cent, with rats able to test thousands of samples every day. The entire process was speeded up to just four or five days – and the $63 cost was brought down to $4.10.

The seminar, Innovation Accelerated, was organised by Impact Consulting with Strategy Regeneration, which is the network behind the world-renowned Blue Ocean Strategy. It was sponsored by Times of Malta.

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