Via Change.org, I discovered this story about Mobile Healthcare.  Briefly, a Stanford undergrad and co-founder of FrontlineSMS:Medic is training Malawians to use cell phones to coordinate community health activities.  What I find interesting is how they’re able to use relatively inexpensive and donated cell phones as a stand in for the sophisticated emergency response systems we have here.

Obviously, public health systems in the US can’t to coordinate their activities, but this looks like its an early stage disruptive innovation.  It’s cheap, it’s “good enough” where it’s deployed, and it’s sufficiently ad-hoc that it could start popping up unexpectedly in scenarios that normally call for more sophisticated solutions.  That’s the classic pattern of disruptive innovation.

More info:

• The BBC on a mobile health campaign launched by the UN, Vodafone, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
• Clayton Christensen describes disruptive innovation in his book The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth