Social Innovation Asia

As part of our series on social innovation in Cambodia, we talk to Channé Suy Lan the Managing Director of InSTEDD's Southeast Asia iLab in Phnom Penh. InSTEDD stands for Innovative Support to Emergency Diseases and Disasters. It was founded by Larry Brilliant, who while working with a team to eliminate smallpox in India envisioned how technology could play a vital role in early disease detection and response. In 2006 he presented his vision in a TedTalk, which won the year's TED Prize and he used the prize money to launch InSTEDD. In 2008 they opened InSTEDD’s first iLab in Phnom Penh to spearhead innovations in Southeast Asia with the support of Google.Org and the Rockefeller Foundation.  Channé Suy Lan joined the iLab when it was launched and has since experienced first-hand the evolution in digital technologies. According to Channé, SMS was central to many of the technological solutions they developed in the early years of iLab but now the internet is widespread and also cheaper. However, she emphas