AscendRural is an innovation hub launched by Sourcewell to help bridge the gap between innovative tech solutions and the unique needs of rural communities. By connecting startups with rural organizations to pilot, validate and scale technologies that improve well-being, AscendRural is helping ensure that innovation reaches places too often overlooked.
In a previous blog post, we explored how AscendRural, an AgeTech Collaborative™ (ATC) participant, is on a mission to bring AgeTech into rural America. Now, as AscendRural prepares to launch its new Bridging Distance to Care and Services Innovation Challenge, we spoke with Eryn Johnston, Innovation Strategy and Design Lead at AscendRural, about the organization’s focus on rural populations, why it can be hard for startups to make inroads in rural communities, and how the new initiative will connect promising technology companies with rural communities and create new opportunities to improve access to care and services.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you tell us about AscendRural and what needs it was created to address?
There are a lot of technologies out in the world that help people solve challenges related to their well-being, and we see those technologies entering urban markets all the time. But when those companies try to enter the rural market, they often discover that it’s not the easiest thing to do.
So there’s a gap that we see between the potential of these technologies to help people in rural communities and the companies actually being able to come in and serve them. AscendRural was created to bridge that gap and uplift and support those rural communities.
Why do companies sometimes find it hard to enter the rural market?
Rural communities are different — they’re not just smaller versions of urban centers. They have different needs, economies, structures and ways of working. They’re smaller and more tight-knit than cities, which is an incredible thing. In particular, relationships are core to rural communities.
That means if you’re an outside company that comes in and tries to sell your technology into a rural area without building relationships or truly understanding the realities of that particular community, you’re going to have a pretty hard time. To add another layer to this, rural communities themselves are different from one another, with different needs and constraints. So understanding the needs of a specific community and building relationships in it is very important.
How did AscendRural get interested in serving rural communities?
AscendRural is a program of Sourcewell, which is a unit of local government that serves a five-county region in central Minnesota, so it has that rural focus. Sourcewell has gotten really good at something called cooperative purchasing. In that capacity, Sourcewell also serves national nonprofits, educational institutions and government agencies, helping them procure technological solutions and many other things through competitively solicited contracts.
As an innovation arm of Sourcewell, AscendRural finds companies that understand the unique barriers that rural areas face and that build solutions that overcome those hurdles — working around a lack of reliable broadband internet, for example. That means we often look at startups in particular, because startups can serve rural markets in ways that larger organizations may struggle to — because it really is about understanding individual communities and building those local relationships.
Currently, we’re working with community organizations like nonprofits and local government agencies that serve older adults. For example, maybe there’s a local agency on aging that wants to try out a monitoring technology for people aging in place. We can help identify a technology solution that has the potential to work in that particular setting and then support a pilot program.
You mentioned lack of broadband internet as one challenge that rural areas might present. What else do innovators often misunderstand or overlook when developing solutions for rural populations?
A very common mistake is assuming that they know what their solution can do for a community before they listen, learn and understand the realities of that community. You might have a terrific solution that works in a city, but that doesn’t mean that it will work in a small town.
For example, local organizations might be running on a limited budget and so need to be very strategic about where they’re “placing their bets” on new technologies. But if a company has no route to actually funding that solution long-term or creating a return on investment, then the solution is less likely to be viable.
Implementation readiness is another area: Startups can’t assume that a community organization has lots of infrastructure — such as a dedicated IT department that can just set everything up, for example. Startups also need to understand that for many people, new technologies aren’t part of their day-to-day lives, and not everyone speaks the same language as a startup. You really have to meet people where they are.
How does AscendRural work with rural communities to identify these needs, test solutions and support implementation?
We always start our work with what we call discovery, which is about listening first and grounding everything in a community’s actual needs. This is especially important because national data sets and other publicly available information often aggregates or overlooks a lot of rural populations. We source partners through community cohorts, where we explore what problems technology could realistically solve for those groups.
At the same time, we source technology against those problems, solutions that are grounded in the real needs of those communities, to make sure that we’re surfacing innovative approaches that can actually deliver results.
We then bring both sides — communities and technology companies — together, often through in-person matching events, to explore what an implementation would actually look like and what barriers exist.
From there, we can support the communities and tech companies in a variety of ways, such as developing pilots, implementation plans and measurement metrics so that we can verify that the results of the implementation are real. Sustainability is also always top of mind for us: We never want to implement a pilot if there isn’t a plan on the other end for how that solution can be sustained in the long run.
How does AscendRural's relationship with Sourcewell support this work, and what opportunities can Sourcewell's contracting and purchasing capabilities create for startups?
In the public sector, a common problem is not that a solution or product is unavailable, it’s that an individual purchase may require its own procurement cycle, which can be a long, complex process, and especially challenging for small organizations going through it on their own.
A cooperative contract changes that. Sourcewell streamlines the procurement process by developing RFPs for national, competitive solicitations. Public agencies can then evaluate if the resulting Sourcewell contracts meet their compliance requirements, saving time and resources required to lead their own RFP process. That's the kind of infrastructure that AscendRural's next technology-focused Challenge will be built on.
The new Challenge you mention is the Bridging Distance to Care and Services Innovation Challenge. Can you elaborate more on that?
Rural residents need to travel twice as far for healthcare as urban residents. It might be easy to assume that the only answer to that problem is better transportation, but to us, it’s more than that. It’s really about how care services are fundamentally designed, delivered and experienced in rural communities.
The Bridging Distance to Care and Services Innovation Challenge is a problem-based RFP that AscendRural will be launching in late summer. It’s designed to address those barriers that distance creates for rural people in accessing the care and services that they need.
Rather than specifying a specific product or category of product and asking who can supply it, the Challenge is problem-based — meaning that it starts with the problem as rural communities themselves identify it, then invites a range of approaches to uncover what kind of innovations can support those communities and drive real outcomes.
The Challenge will be administered by Sourcewell. Instead of a prize or grant, at the end of the Challenge the strongest solutions will receive a competitively solicited Sourcewell contract that is usable by other government agencies. They’ll also have access to other supports like our accelerator program, matching connection days and facilitated demonstration opportunities.
What would characterize a strong submission to the Challenge?
It might sound simple, but it’s crucial that organizations align to what the RFP is asking for and show a real understanding of the rural problems and challenges that it outlines. A strong submission would also demonstrate outcomes that have already been driven by the company.
What do you hope the Challenge will ultimately achieve?
We want to identify strong solutions and enable rural organizations to access those solutions that will improve well-being in their communities in the easiest way possible. Part of that is removing some of the barriers that currently exist that prevent those technology solutions from creating impact, so our goal is to see that technology gets adopted in places where adoption has traditionally been a challenge.
A next step for any organization would be signing up for the Sourcewell procurement portal and making sure that they have alerts turned on to be notified when the RFP becomes available for them to respond to.
Is there anything else startups interested in the Challenge should be aware of, especially AgeTech Collaborative startup participants?
There will be a two-week quiet period before the RFP launches to ensure a fair and transparent process for all suppliers, so no one on the AscendRural team will be able to answer any questions or communicate with startups during that time. All questions will need to go through Sourcewell’s official RFP procurement process via the Sourcewell procurement portal. Organizations interested in this should sign up for the Sourcewell procurement portal and make sure that they have alerts turned on to be notified when the RFP becomes available for them to respond to.
I would also say that if this RFP Challenge isn’t a good fit for a particular company, they should know that we’re constantly releasing new challenges and new opportunities for startups. We’ve worked with ATC startups in the past, and aging will always be part of the rural equation, so we anticipate lots more opportunities to work with AgeTech startups.
For example, later this year we are hosting the AscendRural National Summit, where we’re bringing together stakeholders and exploring what’s working, and what’s next, in advancing rural well-being through technology. We’d love to see some ATC startup participants there!
To learn more about how AscendRural is making meaningful impact in rural communities, check out the organization’s website. And if you have an innovative solution designed to bridge the distance to care and services, consider visiting the Sourcewell procurement portal and signing up to participate in the Bridging Distance to Care & Services Innovation Challenge.
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