The Rockefeller Foundation, in deciding how to dispense tens of millions of dollars in grants each year, typically sends scouting teams around the world to search out problems impeding human well-being and organizations or individuals working to address them.

Adam Ellick for The New York Times Open sewers, like this one in New Delhi, create enormous health risks in many poor communities.

This year, the foundation tried something new, convening a hundred or so people from a variety of fields and positions at an “innovation forum” in Manhattan on Wednesday. The task of half dozen small groups was to explore ways to foster innovations aimed at sustaining access to water and food and sustaining cities — a particular focus of Rockefeller — as human appetites and numbers crest in coming decades. (I was a participant.)

Innovations can be technological, as in the design of cheap water filters or cleaner, more efficient cook stoves. This is the world of Paul Polak, the author of “Out of Poverty” and guru of a movement to “design for the other 90 percent” – meaning the vast majority of global citizens, for whom an iPad or Netflix or Nissan Leaf are not innovations with any meaning but who comprise an enormous market.

The innovations can be financial – the realm of microfinance — which has been a transformative force, although one suffering deep growing pains in India — and its less well-known cousin, microfranchising (a model best illustrated by VisionSpring’s network of homegrown entrepreneurs providing cheap eyeglasses in poor places).

They can also be conceptual, in taking an approach to problem-solving that isn’t focused on symptoms, but root causes. That was what the foundation’s leadership seemed to be looking for at the forum. (In my group, focused on sustaining cities, my prime point was the important role of colleges and universities, and particularly students — through learning-by-doing projects — in making a difference in communities, whether just outside the ivy-covered walls or spread across the globe.)

Judith Rodin, the president of the foundation and former president of the University of Pennsylvania, where she led an effort to take the university “out of the ivory tower and into the streets,” explained the foundation’s innovation focus in a speech at the meeting.

It’s worth excerpting at some length here because it centers on the power of innovation not only to create wealth and well-being for the top billion, but to directly address the profound challenges impeding the lives of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable populations.

Here are portions of her remarks, starting with the case study of an unconventional approach to wiping out hookworm in the United States nearly a century ago: Read more…