Sci­en­tific inno­va­tions can do a lot to improve the lives of the poor. The Voice of Amer­ica has a story about a foun­da­tion that brings inno­va­tions to the under-developed world. The Lemel­son Foun­da­tion has pro­vided foot pumps for irri­ga­tion, warm­ing beds to keep new­borns healthy and much more.

From the Voice of Amer­ica, writer Mike O’Sullivan describes the work of the Lemel­son Foundation.

Jerome Lemel­son was one of America’s most pro­lific inven­tors. He was granted more than 600 patents. His ideas for processes or devices are used in bar-code scan­ners, auto­mated ware­house man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems, fax and auto­mated teller machines, the cry­ing baby doll, and Sony Walk­man portable cas­sette player.

Lemel­son died in 1997 at the age of 74, but the foun­da­tion that he set up pro­motes problem-solving through inven­tion and innovation.

One of its ongo­ing projects at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy hon­ors a dif­fer­ent inven­tor every year. Julia Novy-Hildesley, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Lemel­son Foun­da­tion, says hon­orees have made sci­en­tific breakthroughs.

“Some of these inven­tors have been design­ers of the human genome sequencer, incred­i­ble tech­nolo­gies around focus­ing sound in the same way have been able to focus light with lasers, health tech­nolo­gies like the stair-climbing wheel­chair and a portable dial­y­sis machine,” she said. “So the idea was to rec­og­nize these great inven­tors, hold them up as role mod­els for young peo­ple, and help young peo­ple see that aspir­ing to be an inven­tor is a great thing.”

The Lemel­son Foun­da­tion has estab­lished a cen­ter to study inven­tion and inno­va­tion at the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion in Wash­ing­ton, and con­ducts national pro­grams and com­pe­ti­tions for college-age inventors.

From its base in Port­land, Ore­gon, the orga­ni­za­tion also builds links between Amer­i­cans and part­ners in the devel­op­ing world who are using tech­nol­ogy to solve social and envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems. It has sup­ported the work, for exam­ple, of physi­cian Sathya Jeganathan in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. Novy-Hildesley explains, the doc­tor faced a high rate of infant mor­tal­ity in the clinic.

“And so she designed with local crafts­men a very low-cost infant warmer,” she said. “It was a very sim­ple wooden table with a fit­ted bulb that would adjust based on the baby’s tem­per­a­ture, and had it con­structed and imple­mented in her hos­pi­tal. And with that inno­va­tion, she has reduced infant mor­tal­ity by 50 per­cent already.”

The foun­da­tion has backed another Indian effort, a for-profit social enter­prise called SELCO. The company’s co-founder, engi­neer Har­ish Hande moved to an Indian vil­lage so he could under­stand the vil­lagers’ needs and what they could afford, before he started the company.

“And so he then went back and worked on tech­nol­ogy adap­ta­tion and designed very low-cost, small afford­able solar pan­els with fit­ted bulbs, maybe one or two bulbs per house­hold, made sure that the bulbs could be moved from room to room, depend­ing where peo­ple wanted the light,” she said.

Hande worked with banks to secure the fund­ing so house­hold­ers could buy the devices.

In Africa, the foun­da­tion works with the non-profit orga­ni­za­tion Kick­Start, which devel­ops inex­pen­sive tech­nol­ogy for small-scale farm­ers, and sets up local profit-making dis­tri­b­u­tion systems.

“Tools that will enable them to grow more crops, grow higher value crops, grow more crops per sea­son or per year, and then be able to earn income from those crops,” she said. “So Kick­Start went for­ward to design a range of agri­cul­tural tech­nolo­gies, the most sig­nif­i­cant of which has been the foot-powered trea­dle pump.”

The sim­ple mechan­i­cal pump draws water from a shal­low well or nearby stream or river for use in irrigation.

The foun­da­tion offi­cial says that poverty in the devel­op­ing world requires cre­ative solu­tions, har­ness­ing the power of both the non-profit and for-profit sec­tors, and nur­tur­ing inno­va­tors in devel­op­ing coun­tries, who may include future cor­po­rate founders and bril­liant scientists.

“We believe strongly that cre­ativ­ity is evenly dis­trib­uted around the world, and that peo­ple Bill Gates [of Microsoft] and Steve Jobs [of Apple] and Albert Ein­stein are born every day in Africa and Asia and Latin Amer­ica, but they often do not have access to the same kind of tools or resources that inven­tors and inno­va­tors in the indus­tri­al­ized world do,” she said.

She says the orga­ni­za­tion is work­ing to spread these resources, and is also steer­ing tal­ented Amer­i­can women and minori­ties into sci­ence and engi­neer­ing, to spur inno­va­tion in both the indus­trial and the devel­op­ing worlds.

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