Strategies: Entrepreneurs hope to save world 1 baby at a time

— -- One of the reasons I'm passionate about entrepreneurs is they — including you — help change the world.

Most of us change the world in small but critically important ways: We create good jobs, develop products or services people need, and the dollars we generate support our economy (a more critical task for small-businesspeople than ever, since the big guys on Wall Street certainly don't seem to manage the task).

But some entrepreneurs change the world in a big way. One of them, Jane Chen, needs your help, and you don't even need to leave your computer. With just one click, you can help Chen save premature babies throughout the world.

Chen and her colleagues are finalists in the American Express Members Project contest to fund socially important programs. Their project, Embrace, is an innovative low-cost, low-tech incubator they invented that can help save premature babies in developing countries. The top five finalists will share $2.5 million, with the winner receiving $1.5 million. That would be enough for Embrace to become a self-sustaining enterprise.

Embrace was the result of an innovative entrepreneurship class at Stanford University — Design for Extreme Affordability. Business school and engineering students are given a task to devise an "extremely affordable" solution to a significant societal problem. Chen's team was challenged to create an incubator that cost less than 1% of a traditional incubator, around $20,000.

"We did research in Nepal and India," Chen said.

They discovered that the most important issue in the survival of low-birthweight premature babies was maintaining a constant body temperature.

"We realized that the majority of deaths were in places that had no access to electricity. They needed something extremely affordable, easy enough for a mother to operate with no training, that could be used in a home or clinic setting, since most births in these areas are in (the) home."

They came up with a device that looks like a very small sleeping bag, in which the mother inserts a pouch containing a type of wax that, when heated in boiling water for only 15 minutes, can maintain a constant 37 degree Celsius temperature for about four hours. A mother or caretaker in even the most remote village could use it properly and safely. They named it "Embrace" because it also enables a mother to hold her infant close to her body, unlike the mechanical incubators in Western hospitals.