At a solutions lab in Manila, young entrepreneurs workshopped their innovations to reimagine what’s possible for their country. One of Chemonics’ own innovation leads shares lessons on what these entrepreneurs are getting right.
What does it take to design and scale up niche solutions to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues? This past fall, 150 young Filipino changemakers gathered at Manila’s historic University of Santo Tomas for UNLEASH: an innovation lab designed to accelerate solutions for the country’s most pressing challenges.
Over the course of the week, participants co-created solutions addressing health equity, food systems, and resilient infrastructure. The result was a collection of powerful ideas — and a shared vision for a more inclusive, sustainable future.
Arielle Berghammer-Ziegler, one of Chemonics’ innovation leads and UNLEASH advisor, shared three takeaways about what made this lab special — and what it can teach other changemakers about designing and scaling big ideas.
Start with the challenge, then work backwards.
It may sound obvious, but often entrepreneurs are so fixated on their solutions or innovations, that they lose sight of their end goal.
Arielle sees this frequently: “It’s incredibly common for entrepreneurs to develop tunnel vision and fall in love with their solutions without giving enough attention to understanding the core problem and the users.”
“This is a mistake,” she explains. “If you don’t fully understand the problem you are trying to solve and the lived experience of your user, your solution will likely miss the mark.”
Instead, designing a scalable solution starts with taking a step back. Entrepreneurs must take the time to intimately understand the challenge: the pain points, the context, the systems, and the people most affected.
When they do, the magic really happens. Thorough problem framing often reveals unexpected insights that sharpen the solution or even change its direction entirely.
For example, one team mapped out the challenges that wholesalers were having in the highlands of Bukidnon. During wholesalers’ long journeys to market, their produce would often spoil due to heat, air pressure, and poor ventilation.
Initially, the CropSure team jumped to assumptions about which cooler systems might work best to solve spoilage during transportation. But after mapping out the full produce journey to understand the end-to-end value chain, the team was surprised by what they discovered.
They were able to better pinpoint the critical role of the wholesalers and determined that rather than create something from scratch, a retrofitting system for standard bongo trucks could protect crops from damage and extend shelf by up to 30 percent.
That’s why the UNLEASH methodology always starts with problem framing, from root-cause analysis and stakeholder mapping to worksheets and activity cards that help teams challenge their assumptions and clearly define the challenge.
Lead with local insights. Design for global scale-up.
In the past, UNLEASH brought together thousands of young entrepreneurs from different countries around the world to participate in an annual innovation lab. Although these global labs were productive and impactful, global teams often lacked the deeply direct experience with the issues they were trying to solve.
UNLEASH Philippines marked UNLEASH’s first-ever country-specific edition. The goal was to support innovators in and from the Philippines to help solve some of the country’s most pressing challenges. Organizers selected innovators from all 17 regions of the Philippines, ensuring participants brought a diverse range of experiences and perspectives from across the country.
“That meant every single participant had firsthand insight into the challenges they were trying to solve and a vested interest in continuing to pursue a solution beyond the innovation lab,” explains Arielle.
Participants worked across three tracks: health equity and biomedical innovation; resilient agriculture and food systems; and sustainable cities and communities. Although all of these are global concerns, many of these issues are urgent and immediate for the Philippines.
For example, participants were workshopping their climate solutions in real time as Super Typhoon Ragasa, the strongest storm of the year, ripped through the country.
“One consistent theme across every technical track was the impact of climate change,” Arielle reflected. “Experiencing the typhoons during the program made everything more real. It reminded us that addressing global issues like climate change requires centering the experiences and insights of the people most affected and recognizing the unique contexts in which they navigate these growing challenges.”
For example, one team leveraged their firsthand experience dealing with extreme weather patterns to ideate Project SAFE: a mobile navigation app that uses real-time data and intelligent routing to help essential workers travel safely during floods. By combining data around weather and traffic, the platform will identify accessible, flood-free routes to hospitals and clinics.
While local perspectives should lead the solution design, global expertise can also play a key role in assessing how those solutions might be strengthened, adapted, or scaled elsewhere.
At UNLEASH Philippines, Chemonics’ Efrain Laureano, who brings deep experience in natural resource economics, provided teams with concrete feedback to help bridge their lived experience with broader strategic considerations. “When locally driven solutions are informed by insights on how they might translate to other contexts, that’s when we start to see real potential for broader, sustainable impact,” explains Arielle.
Rethink power and partnership.
When it comes to successful innovations, entrepreneurs should never underestimate the importance of partnership. Yet in fast-paced startup environments, partnership and process often take a backseat to deliverables, ROI, and tangible outputs.
“With so much pressure to deliver quickly, entrepreneurs sometimes overlook the softer approaches, like trust-building, co-creation, and inclusion, that ultimately determine whether an innovation will actually solve a problem for users and ultimately succeed,” Arielle explains.
One of UNLEASH’s defining features is its commitment to inclusion and partnership from the outset. The platform aims to be the world’s most inclusive space for mobilizing young people to co-create a sustainable future, especially for those who are closest to the challenges being solved.
For example, an UNLEASH finalist developed a health solution called ArthSense, a wearable sleeve designed to help frontline workers in rural communities to detect early signs of cardiovascular disease.
By intentionally engaging people who have historically been underserved or overlooked, innovators gain insights they would not otherwise see: like the constraints that rural clinics face, the cultural barriers to accessing care, and the practical adjustments required for a solution to work. These perspectives don’t slow innovation down: they accelerate it.
“At the end of the day, even the most compelling business strategy or breakthrough technology won’t deliver impact without the right mindset,” says Arielle. “Innovation isn’t defined by novelty, it’s defined by whether it meaningfully improves people’s lives. And that begins with designing solutions that honor and reflect the realities of the communities they aim to serve.”
More About UNLEASH
UNLEASH Philippines was the first phase of LIF Launchpad, an initiative by the Royal Academy of Engineering. This three-month, early-stage program supports innovators in the Philippines with the potential to solve some of the world’s most complex environmental, economic, and societal challenges. UNLEASH Philippines participants are now refining their solutions in the Phase 2: Prototyping Program, with UNLEASH support, through April 2026.
Through its programming, UNLEASH has worked with 9,000 changemakers in over 170 countries to create more than a thousand global solutions to some of the world’s toughest challenges.
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