This work is relevant for Innovation Lions because it is a case about inventing a new way to use technology - in this case the ubiquitous smart phone. Although there is some communication included in the case, the "creative idea" of DreamLab is a technology idea. And all the more creative for being that kind of idea.

It is particularly relevant for the Scalable Innovation category because it is an idea about how to further develop an existing technology for a new purpose and achieve greater results, impact and ultimately good for the world.

DreamLab is an app by Vodafone Foundation (UK registered charity number 1089625) that uses the collective power of smartphones to fast track cancer and covid-19 research. Researchers need supercomputers to crunch complex data. When you plug your phone in and power DreamLab, it downloads tiny parts of a huge research project from the cloud to calculate, and sends the results back to the research team. The more people who power DreamLab, the faster we can complete critical research. DreamLab was originally developed in 2017 in Australia by Vodafone Foundation AU, and following a successful launch was updated and expanded globally by Vodafone Group Foundation. In 2020, following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the app was repurposed to fight coronavirus in partnership with Imperial College London.

The idea is: Fight Covid-19 in your sleep. This idea is born from several parts. Firstly, the idea to use the power of sleeping users’ mobile phones to form an enormous super computer. Secondly, the idea to call it DreamLab, which simultaneously allows people to understand the purpose of the app and feel like they can join in. Thirdly, the idea to repurpose the technology, to fight against coronavirus and help tackle the global pandemic. These parts of the idea have come together at this moment in time to form a truly extraordinary “technology creative idea” that is genuinely making the world a better place, one calculation at a time.

2015 - Original DreamLab app developed in Australia by Vodafone Foundation AU to fight cancer.

2017 - iOS app developed

April 2020 - DreamLab repurposed to fight Covid-19

DreamLab is a specialist app, developed by Vodafone Foundation as an easy way for anyone to support cancer research while their phone is on charge overnight. While traditional experimental research and standard research methods could take years to develop, the mobile cloud-based processing approach of DreamLab can drastically reduce the time taken to analyse the huge amount of data that exists. A desktop computer running 24-hours a day would take decades to process the data, but a network of 100,000 smartphones running overnight could do the job in just a couple of months.

In April 2020, following the COVID-19 outbreak, a new Corona-AI project launched on the app, which uses the same technology to help in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak. As part of the Corona-AI project, we are pairing bespoke AI technologies, mobile supercomputing and big “-omics” data to narrow the search of combinations of existing drugs and/or food-based molecules to help in the fight against coronavirus epidemic.

The DreamLab app enables users to harness the collective processing power of their mobile phones to help speed up research into treatments for the novel coronavirus, as part of a partnership between Vodafone Foundation and scientists at Imperial College London.

The campaign has reached 464m people, generating 1.15 billion impressions. 738,000 people have downloaded DreamLab in the year since it was repurposed to fight Covid-19 (over the previous 3 years 448,000 people had downloaded the app). This has provided 7,776.64 hours of computing time. This time has enabled over 200m calculations to be processed, investigating over 300 billion molecular combinations.

It has also been proof of concept that this model of smart phone connections creating a super computer can work.

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