Finding innovation everywhere — the Maison Bleue story
Despite what many think, innovation is not just about technology or products. At root, it’s about identifying the unmet needs of a group of people and creating better ways to help them. As such, innovation can happen everywhere, and social entrepreneurs are often the ones innovating in the most surprising ways. This is the story of one such group.
La Maison Bleue (The Blue House) is the brainchild of a physician mother and her educator daughter, Vania Jimenez and Amelie Sigouin. In the mid-2000s, they realized that vulnerable pregnant women (e.g., those struggling with poverty, the challenges of recent immigration, domestic violence, and/or drug and alcohol addiction) and their young children have great difficulty accessing the services offered by the traditional health care system. Procedures, forms, wait times, language and cultural barriers prevent these women and their babies from getting the coverage and services they need, resulting in a significant negative impact on their futures.
After working with and supporting these groups over many years, Vania and Amélie had the insight that regrouping various services under the same interdisciplinary roof, outside of formal health care channels, would reduce the initial friction the women faced, increase their access to needed services, and give providers a better view of the broader context these women face. Moving from idea to implementation, they put together a team of doctors, nurses, educators, social workers, and midwives to provide all of the necessary services under one “roof”. They identified government funding sources for the health care professional salaries and created a not-for-profit organization to cover other costs.
La Maison Bleue started out as a small home with a blue front — supporting 90 women in its first year. After years of iteration and improvement, the model is now running very well. A multi-disciplinary academic research team recently published a paper outlining the outstanding impact the Maison Bleue model is having on vulnerable women and their babies. Today, the Maison Bleue operates two homes in Montreal and helps 630 families a year. A third home will open soon, and two more will open before 2020.
Beyond their success in helping these women, the founders of Maison Bleue are also examples of how to do innovation right. They began with empathy, intuition, and a set of identified constraints — Vania and Amelie had experience with vulnerable women and deeply understood these clients’ real needs. At the same time, they knew that any answer to those needs would have to function within the context of the current health care system in Canada. Their answer — co-location — is revolutionary particularly because of its simplicity (as many great innovations are). Once the concept was agreed, they had to make it a reality, which is where design, testing, and data gathering came to the fore. Rather than going the “institutional” route, they moved quickly to launch a minimum viable product, convincing the right people to fund the first few years and help them develop a proof of concept, while also measuring, revising, and improving the services provided as they went. With the research team, the Maison Bleue formalized its process, gathered enough data to prove it worked (for example, Maison Bleue babies have a low birth weight rate of 3.9% vs 5.7% for the province as a whole) and built the structures to ensure that the model was replicable.
Innovation is so much more than fancy products and new operating systems. It is the process through which creativity is realized and improvements are made to the lives of those in need. At its best, innovation is altruistic and grounded in a desire to help others. How that help is delivered, and what needs are focused on are personal, economical, and political choices. But whatever your perspective is, the Maison Bleue is a great entrepreneurial and innovation success story. Not only that, it serves as a wonderful case study of how innovation tools can be used to go from need to concept to execution and scaling.
Davide Pisanu & Mike Ross are co-founders of Juniper (www.jnper.com), a boutique strategy and innovation consulting firm and Davide is a board member at the Maison Bleue. This post was written with Blanche Ajarrista.
First published June 21, 2016.
