Social innovation; Diffusion of innovation; Sustainability; Social systems; Healthcare

Orsi Ihasz is a researcher in (responsible) innovation management and sustainability at Cranfield University, act as an Enterprise Technology Lead and lectures on the MsC of Management and Corporate Sustainability.  She is also a member of the Centre for Science and Policy and involved with the work of the Institute for Sustainability Leadership to support entrepreneurial ventures geared towards finding solutions to the SDGs.

Her current research contributes towards understanding the role of social systems in the diffusion of innovation in low resource markets including the world’s poorest 3 billion. This work focuses on the WHO’s Be He@lthy, Be Mobile digital health initiative – the first UN initiative to use population-wide mHealth prevention services at scale and is the largest scaled mHealth initiative for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in the world to date. Prior to her research, she spent 12 years’ in entrepreneurship education at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and worked as a policy advocate with Department for International Development, the EU DG Youth, and the UN to promote youth-participation within policy.

Orsi’s motivation to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals through the participation in Cambridge Global Challenges is the belief that access to healthcare and knowledge is a basic human right and (responsible) innovation is a great vehicle to support this call.