Describe the five major stakeholders for your project and their motivations.

The first major stakeholder of our project is the communities we plan to help in Sierra Leone. These villages and people are motivated by the fact that if our project succeeds we will be able to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. The issue you at the moment is that this group is more passively motivated than actively. Ebola is not a problem right now, so they have no real reason to help us because they have greater active problems. The second stakeholder in our project is the government of Sierra Leone. The government motivation is to prevent its citizens from dying, but also from a monetary point to use what little cash they have in the most efficient way possible. Ebola is a disease that can easily take over governments medical expenditure. The government by helping us complete our project helps it, citizens, while at the same takes out a sort of insurance policy that will hopefully lower the likely hood that this terrible disease does not crop up on their shores again. With what they don’t spend on Ebola they can spend elsewhere. The next stakeholder in our project is basically any NGO, like UNICEF or MSF. They basically have the same incentives as the government with the way this impact people, money, or resources.  WIth these stakeholders, though they have an added incentive that if they don’t spend their money on Ebola, these groups can spend it elsewhere in the world, with greater problems. Now the issue with this is that like the community and the government they are more passively motivated to solve this problem because there are greater problems in the world. The fourth stakeholder in our project is the United States National Insitute of Health.  The NIH is motivated to help us discover more about Ebola for two reasons. The first being the NIH is in it for science and the discovery of data that can help them better understand the disease, as well as how diseases like it behave. The second reason they are motivated is that they are funding some of the projects. They gave us this money, so they are motivated to see that money as well used as possible. Now, are they technically sort of a passive partner since they have already given us the money, yeah. But, that is not really relevant since we are spending their money, so they should be motivated to make sure we spend it the best way possible. You don’t give your money to a startup and walk away.  If you do there is no guarantee you will get it back. You stay and give your advice to make sure you got the most amount of money back. The final stakeholder, for this list at least, is the group. By group, I mine professor and students. Now the motivation of the professors might be a little different than the students. They are getting paid to publish papers, do research, and do something like this for a living. The students are doing the same thing except instead of a nice paycheck, we get to pay 76k a year to participate. Technically we are getting paid during the summer, but to be honest 10 weeks of 400 bucks makes only a dent, so to say we are motivated by money Is not necessarily true. Though we differ in forms of economic motivation, professors and students are both motivated by the prestige of publishing work, doing the right thing, and Lehigh prestige. It’s not a zero-sum game, we all win in the end. Lehigh gets to say they collected data for the NIH, the professor publish work with students, all of which benefits Lehigh Reputation and status.

Describe three ways in which you will validate your project and enhance your credibility over the course of the semester.

One of the ways we plan to establish credibility to our project is to mention as much as we can that we are funded in part by the United States National Institute of Health. Mentioning that we are funded by the NIH should help with our credibility for sure. We can also validate our project by getting people from the CDC as well as the UNICEF to do a little consulting. If we can get these groups to say they worked with us, we will be able to mention them as defacto partners which will help with our credibility. The final way we can really validate our project is to have an actual product to show and that we can use. From a time point of view this is sort of unrealistic since the actual application/collection method will be built over the summer, but if we can get a demo product then we have something to show not an idea to show. This would hopefully help us with credibility.