Intention Economy: Hackathon Will Look at Novel Recruitment Incentives, Eyeing Clinical Trials As One Use Case
InvenTrust is sponsoring a hackathon at Columbia University, allowing participants to apply novel digital incentives to the challenge of recruitment, with a focus on enrollment in medical clinical trials as a key use case. InvenTrust is making its platform for software code exchange, development and monetization available as a tool for registrations, applications and submissions in the hackathon.
Open to global teams, the hackathon is being promoted to the Columbia and University College London communities in particular. The on-site hackathon at the Columbia Lab-to-Market Accelerator Network is set for the end of March. However, the hackathon is hybrid online/on-site, allowing participants to work on their submissions prior to the on-site event, and allowing remote participants to make submissions as well.
In the Attention Economy, companies, universities, political organizations, and even artists invest billions of dollars in advertising and other marketing efforts to win the attention of customers, academics, voters, and fans. Target audiences are often defined through profiling and personal data.
However, more valuable than attention is intention — of those defined by their willingness to respond to calls to action. Where the Attention Economy focuses on shoppers, eligible voters, and spectators, the Intention Economy focuses on purchasers, actual voters, and donors (of both time and money).
One pillar of the Intention Economy is recruitment — of employees, donors, and supporters — which is the lifeblood of businesses, philanthropic organizations, and political campaigns. For example, it has been reported that U.S. Democratic Presidential primary candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent $7.5 million in three weeks on Google paid search ads. That works out to roughly $140 for each of the roughly 50,000 voters whose votes were decisive in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election — in just THREE WEEKS. Of course, there are U.S. laws against paying for votes, but might there be a better way of recruiting political support?
This hackathon invites those interested in the Intention Economy to submit applications and then to participate as teams in developing solutions for one particularly important recruitment problem — medical clinical trials. The hackathon asks applicants to submit ideas and/or build solutions applying digital incentives to recruiting. Blockchain approaches could be relevant here. For example, for looking at ads, users can receive Basic Attention Tokens as rewards, which can then be used to support publishers.
Slow and inadequate recruitment and low retention of participants for clinical trials are major sources of research inefficiency, in terms of cost, timely delivery of research, and reliability of findings. ClinicalTrials.gov currently lists over 300,000 clinical research studies, but roughly 80% of U.S. clinical trials fail to timely recruit the required number of patients. Roughly 20% of cancer clinical trials fail due to inadequate participant recruitment. Small differences in enrollment rates can result in large additional costs for trials. As reported recently in the Wall Street Journal, the recruitment challenges, high costs and delays of clinical trials are prompting pharmaceutical companies to consider other options for at least some parts of the treatment approval process.
The clinical trials recruitment use case was recommended for testing in graduate student course work, which led to its being the subject of a Columbia University Innovation Challenge in 2019. For more details, please see Can A Media Crypto Token Improve Clinical Trials? Columbia Innovation Challenge Says … and posts referenced therein. Clinical trial recruitment is different from other, more typically commercial, use cases leading to consumer transactions. Nevertheless, the pharma industry is no stranger to marketing, and one particularly valuable audience for pharma messaging is in fact the patients who are eligible to participate in the clinical trials essential to having new treatments come to market. This hackathon fundamentally addresses informing and incentivizing the right audiences to support trials for new treatments that could improve and save lives.
An existing development site for recruitment will serve as inspiration for hackathon submissions. Imagine getting a look at Google’s AdWords when it launched in 2000 and being asked to come up with improvements or tools (e.g., tools that search engine marketers could use) to improve on the nascent search pay-per-click model. That’s one of the unique opportunities in this hackathon.
Learning more is easy: register at InvenTrust and receive regular updates as the hackathon’s application deadline and finale approach. Sponsors are welcome to join the effort. Everyone is welcome to contribute in their way to improving recruitment for clinical trials, and the benefits of those trials for us all.
After practicing corporate and securities law, I began my career on Wall Street as an equity research analyst in the technology media telecom sector at Deutsche Bank in 1999. Since 2017, I have advised clients on media investing and fundraising, blockchain applications, and the use of digital incentives in advertising. I have a BA in Economics and MBA from the University of Chicago, a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, and am a CFA Charterholder.
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