We are rearchitecting Designing Innovative Public Health Solutions in Spring 2014 to focus on a single theme that is critical to both global and US health. Our next challenge? Food.

In each of the first three years of teaching this course, we intentionally formed cohorts that worked on team projects addressing a diverse set of public health issues, from community water access in Mexico to community support for the elderly in disaster situations in California, from marketing for a maternal health social enterprise in Nairobi to increasing access to publicly-funded healthcare in Santa Clara County. We believed in the importance of cross-pollination across these projects. And we still do. But now we’re taking what we’ve learned from these first three years and flipping our strategy on its head. Starting in 2014, each class will focus on one theme throughout the semester. In Spring 2014, the theme will be food.

We’re still figuring out what this will look like, but we’re working hard to make sure that the course is still about the innovation process at its core. We know that changing a good thing comes with risk. But we also know that we cannot claim commitment to innovation unless we are willing to take risks with how we teach. More to come this fall.

Photo: Cooking animal fat in a ger, Sukhbaatar province, Mongolia (J Sandhu, 2007)