Question

write a 250-300 word paper explaining the following topic. What is the Ingenuity Gap, and where do you see it growing within the healthcare industry? 

Answer 1

Ingenuity gap

When we refer to the basic dictionary meaning of the word "INGENUITY", it refers to Creativity, Originality or even Resourcefulness and Insight. The term "Ingenuity Gap" was first coined by a political scientist and advisor to the White House ( which is the official residence and workplace of the President of the United States ) named Thomas Homer-Dixon.

The term suggests an idea used to understand how well societies can manage their problems at the individual, national and even global levels. This concept emerged out as a result of exploring the relationship between environmental degradation and security. The core issue of the evaluation was as to why some societies can adapt to scarcities in environmental resources in an easy way while in case of other societies it leads to dislocation, instability and even violence. In this context, T.H.Dixon quoted that " the varying abilities of the societies to adapt were related to the size of each society's 'Ingenuity Gap'.

As mentioned in the beginning, the basic meaning of the word "ingenuity" itself refers to creativity or originality in ideas that can be applied to solve problems of the world in order to achieve certain goals. So when we say Ingenuity Gap, we mean the gap or lag that occurs when the requirement for ingenuity is not met. That means the level of ingenuity required to maintain the quality of living rises faster than the supply of ingenuity. In common economics, we may cite when demand exceeds supply or supply cannot meet its demand. The gap definitely holds a significant meaning for the future as the gap between the rich and the poor widens around the world, the shared reality of Human Beings is increasingly fragmented. We may conclude saying that the Ingenuity Gap addresses the moral and spiritual changes necessary to address the arising and upcoming problems. It proposes that we must redress the technological hubris and triumphalism that has affected the global elite to ignore certain problems and the resourcefulness and insight knowledge of human beings should be poured into developing the sense of community that will help in pulling down the gap.

The Ingenuity gap can be seen rapidly growing in the healthcare industry where we are presently trying to deal with rising antibiotic resistance and chronic health care crisis. This is a part of technological ingenuity ( the other type of ingenuity being social ingenuity) which leads to failure in the health care industry to simply solve AIDS pandemic.