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During his multifarious career in the start-up world, George Kembel spent two years vetting early-stage companies for a venture capital firm with more than $2 billion under management.
The Embrace premature-baby incubator.But the start-ups he helps conceptualize these days - outside the bounds of venture capital and inside the classroom at Stanford University - must be far more rewarding for him.
Kembel is the executive director of Stanford's Institute of Design, or "d.school," which brings together graduate students in various fields to design products that can solve "difficult, messy problems," like stopping drunk driving. The designers are encouraged to work in the field alongside prospective clients, empathize with their needs and build prototypes for potential products - a process called design thinking.
In one class, "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability," students spend two quarters designing solutions that can improve the underdeveloped world. One of the more successful products developed from this class is a low-cost irrigation pump for farmers in poor countries.
Kembel, a former entrepreneur who worked at Mobius Venture Capital as an associate partner before co-founding the d.school in 2003, recently described one of the school's newest, fascinating ventures produced from that class (see video below). The students were asked to come up with a lower-cost incubator for premature newborn babies in Nepal. In order to understand the needs, the students spent time with families and doctors in the capital city of Kathmandu "to gain empathy of what they were going through," Kembel said.
The team asked to be taken outside the city to rural areas, and that's when they learned that the majority of premature Nepalese infants were born not in the cities, but far away from all the hospitals with incubators. "When they got that insight, they realized they didn't need to design a less expensive incubator" for a hospital, Kembel said. "They just needed to find a way to keep babies warm."
It would have to work without electricity, and be transportable, sanitizable, culturally acceptable and inexpensive. "And that small reframe of the problem statement opened up a wide-range of alternatives that they had othernwise not seen," Kembel said.
By the end of class, the team created a prototype of an incubator - what it calls a thermoregulator - that looks like a sleeping bag that wraps around the premature infant. It contains a pouch for "phase-change material" that maintains the baby's temperature for up to four hours. That pouch can then be recharged by submerging it in boiling water for a few minutes. Perhaps more importantly, the incubator is dirt cheap - $25 - compared to traditional hospital incubators that Kembel says cost about $20,000.
The students have since launched a company called Embrace that is offering the $25 alternative to the 20 million babies who are born prematurely in conditions like this. Embrace is incorporated as a non-profit and has raised seed financing from business-plan competitions. It's currently preparing for clinical trials in India and seeking more funding, at least $1 million over the next four years to take this product worldwide. You can donate to the effort here.
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