How Innovation Can Drive Companies to Do Good

Empower People to Change the World. Booz Allen rolled out this new purpose statement earlier this year that enables our employees, our clients, and our communities to make their mark.

What is the secret to making this reality? Champion innovation. Innovation breeds creative solutions to complex problems, including those that threaten a people, a culture, or even a nation. Our world-class collaborative space supports and promotes new solutions as employees dream them up.

Social good innovation is a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, sustainable, or ethical than the status-quo. By tying innovation to social good, new relationships, collaborations, and capabilities ignite compassionate aspirations. To connect our employees’ skills to their passions, Booz Allen supports up-and-coming futurists and grassroots entrepreneurism. 

For example, we’ve launched the Data Science Bowl as the premier data science for social good competition together with Kaggle. The Data Science Bowl reaches the untapped potential around the world among those that strive to deliver on something greater than themselves. We forge meaningful connections within global communities that don’t normally intersect, like data scientists, technology enthusiasts, and organizations employing open data crowdsourcing initiatives. Most recently, in 2016 – 2017, nearly 10,000 competitors contributed an estimated 160,000 hours valued at roughly $7.5M in in-kind contributions/time, used anonymized, high-resolution lung scans from hundreds of patients provided by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), to create algorithms that can improve lung cancer screening technology. NCI is currently working with scientific community to develop ensemble models of winning solutions and integrate algorithms into clinical prototypes. 

Preliminary findings showing that the top teams’ solutions outperformed the current, best in class clinical classification models by an average of 10 percent. Volume generates results, but one voice can change the world. Booz Allen recently partnered with SEED SPOT, a social good incubator new to Washington, DC. Our partnership develops ambitious voices. Local entrepreneurs apply to SEED SPOT to practice their pitch and receive invaluable mentorship from Booz Allen employees. Ventures focus on diversity inclusive products, services, or technologies that positively impact the world. Already, organizations involved with SEED SPOT have impacted more than 1 million lives.  By fostering open conversations amongst idealists, concepts move from etches on a napkin to real-life solutions. We look forward to learning from our friends at SEED SPOT.

By mobilizing your teams around social issues they are passionate about and providing collaborative opportunities, your company can expand your reach to do good. Let’s get it done – together.