Pioneer and Prize Philanthropy

Can we innovate in how we “do” philanthropy in order to improve health and health care? I would argue that we can. The Pioneer team has the opportunity to explore new approaches to philanthropy that could better support our goal of sustainable impact. One approach that we are beginning to test is prize philanthropy.

The Games for Health Competition is our first foray into prize philanthropy. We see it as an opportunity to extract innovation from both the health and game industry to develop games that focus on health and health care. Our thinking is that we can use competition, and a prize, to incentivize people to begin to think about games in different ways. We have no idea what we are going to see in the submissions. But that is really the whole point. We are betting on the creativity of both of these industries to think differently about how we can develop games that can improve health and health care.

What we do know is this: competition can galvanize creative people to think about an issue they normally would not consider. We hope that great ideas can be generated through this type of philanthropy. Stay tuned to see how we use this concept in other ways to improve health and health care.