In 2020, the Center for Systems and Community Design at the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy launched a unique public health entrepreneurship platform known as Firefly Innovations - the first of its kind in the U.S.
Firefly Innovations works to identify, cultivate, accelerate, scale, and track impact-driven public health ventures with a particular focus on founders with lived experience of the problems they aim to solve. The platform has experienced significant growth in a few short years and now has a global community of hundreds of entrepreneurs, academics, innovators, and investors.
Despite multi-billion dollar investments, many significant public health challenges continue to grow – with widespread disparities experienced among minority and disadvantaged populations – because traditional public health research and development are not implemented and scaled in a way that meets the urgency of the staggering challenges we face. Highlighting this point, it currently takes 17 years to scale-up a mere 14% of public health innovations due to limitations in the traditionally grant-funded public health ecosystem. To solve this, Firefly Innovations is at the forefront in developing a more agile and dynamic system for scaling innovative public health solutions that incorporates entrepreneurial methodologies in public health education, research and practice.
To learn more about Firefly Innovations, click here.
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