Encouraging collaboration to improve digital health investments: Digital Square's Open Application Process
By: Jackie Clark, Global Goods Project Administrator, Digital Square at PATH
Digital Square’s Open Application Process (OAP) is an innovative approach to procurement that encourages collaborative thinking. The OAP is more than a standard competitive process; the OAP’s platform encourages applicants to share and engage with each other to crowdsource the most interoperable, adaptable tools and technologies for digital health investments.
The OAP leads the way for how the Digital Square operations team facilitates investments in global goods. Since its inception, Digital Square has released four notices using the OAP and quadrupled investors with this approach. The Digital Square Board has approved applications totaling over US$12M, resulting in Digital Square facilitating funding for two-thirds of these approved activities. Three-quarters of the 19 global goods successfully funded by Digital Square have participated in the OAP. This figure continues to grow as we finalize agreements with successful applicants from prior notices related to new and unique global goods.
Why co-creation?
At Digital Square, we found that co-investment sparks collaboration and that co-creation builds upon the Principles for Digital Development. The OAP improves digital health investments by validating ideas with the community through concept notes and then enabling co-creation. Throughout the process, Digital Square encourages the community to find commonalities between applications and work together to increase interoperability. We begin the OAP with a formalized brainstorming exercise, preliminary concept note, and then crowd-source input throughout the process. Concept notes allow interested applicants to put forth an idea, seek input and provide feedback, and find peers interested in collaboration. Following the publicly posted concept notes, iterative applications are also publicly posted to continue to provide opportunities for feedback. We have seen first-hand how this iterative application process results in better applications. Digital Square concludes the process with an inclusive decision-making process which puts forth validated approaches to our investors.
We look forward to your applications for the newly launched Notice E0 (Phase 1 Shelf Readiness) and Notice E1 (Client Registries) request for applications. I hope you join us to co-create digital health tools and technologies.