PBS Documentary To Feature Stanford’s Extreme Design MBAs

The project trip to Bangladesh took on special meaning from Pamela Pavkov, left, whose grandparents are from the country

‘THERE’S NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE WAY I LOOK AND THE WAY THESE MOMS LOOK’

The students traveled to Bangladesh over spring break where they had eight days to interview doctors and nurses who could potentially use the device. The assignment took on an intensely personal meaning for Pavkov: Her paternal grandparents and maternal grandmother are from Bangladesh. During their hospital rounds, Pavkov interviewed a young mother who had lost three children. The experience was an emotional one. “I think it’s really hard being here. There’s no difference between the way that I look and the way these moms look; they’re basically the same. It’s kind of totally random that I’m a Stanford student in California with every opportunity to treat my child and she doesn’t [have that],” Pavkov says. “I hate that.”

Stanford MBA Seth Norman also felt compelled to join the Design for Extreme Affordability class to contribute to something larger than himself. A first-year MBA at the time, he was eager to tackle mission-driven projects, a legacy of his service as an Army platoon leader in Iraq. “I knew that I could only work on projects that I felt were important,” he says. “I wanted to be attacking serious problems and really helping people who needed it.” Seth’s team included an engineer, a medical student, and a fellow MBA from Australia. They, too, were assigned a challenge in Bangladesh: Their objective was to create an affordable IV infusion pump.

Once in the country, they quickly discovered that simple tasks in the U.S., such as securing plastic tubing for the pumps, became make-or-break obstacles in the developing world. For instance, they would need to source their parts from a haphazard supply store in the local market, and some supplies were prohibitively expensive. “It got very, very real at one point in there,” Norman says.

A FACULTY PSYCHOLOGIST, OR D.SHRINK, HELPS TEAMS GET ALONG 

It also got very real back on campus, where tensions on Norman’s team rose to a fever pitch as the deadline approached, and the MBAs butted heads with the team’s engineer. The class instructors anticipate some team angst. “We take team interaction seriously and intentionally,” Patell says. “You can take the team assignment as the cards you are dealt, or you can decide to have a good team experience and take steps to manage that.” The course’s instructors include psychologist Julian Gorodsky, known as the d.shrink, who helps mediate dysfunctional team dynamics.

MBA Seth Norman, a former Army platoon commander in Iraq, wanted to tackle a mission-driven project

Luckily, Norman’s team pulled it together and eked out their prototype just before the deadline. The class’ out-of-the-box thinking clearly came into play when they did something unheard of and scrapped the pump from their pump project. Instead, gravity and the body’s own systems would do the work in their infusion device. To the visible relief of the team, and even the judges, the device proved successful. Patent issues prevented them from turning their product into a business, but Norman has since teamed up with three of his former partners to create a balloon-based IV pump for military situations. He says the team dynamics taught him a thing or two about pairing up with a diverse group of people. “I still work with engineers and I bump into the same issues, but I handle it a lot better,” he says. “I learned an appreciation for other peoples’ thought processes and how to make sure everyone has a voice.”

PAVKOV’S TEAM FINDS INSPIRATION IN AN AQUARIUM PUMP 

Back at Stanford, Pavkov’s team also employed design thinking to tackle their challenge. Rather than pumping pure oxygen into infants, which presents its own challenges, they opted to use the air in the room. Basing their design on an aquarium pump, the four created Inspire, a diaphragm pump that works off a rechargeable battery and costs only $24. The results were so promising that Pavkov’s team raised funds to return to Bangladesh to show their prototype to the hospital staff. They pursued the project as a startup idea into the summer of 2011 but ultimately found that none of them could feasibly move to Bangladesh to continue their work. They handed the idea off to Stanford partners where it’s still waiting for further development.

Despite taking the Design for Extreme Affordability course two years ago, both MBAs say they are still using many of the techniques in their full-time jobs. Norman, now director of customer engagement for Tiatros, a cloud-based healthcare platform, says the course taught him to seek out client feedback. “You can never make assumptions about what a customer wants, you have to ask them and observe their work day and see stuff that they do that they weren’t even aware of doing.”

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