CDL Rapid Screening Consortium
Supporting the launch of workplace rapid screening across Canada
CDL Rapid Screening Consortium
Winner - PMI Project of the Year Award
Project Management Institute Celebrates Contributions to Project Management Industry with Winners of 2022 PMI® Awards
PMI® Project of the Year Award – This award is the highest project honor and recognizes a single project leading the way in the project management profession. Projects winning this award have achieved excellence of project management practices including superior organizational results, innovation, collaboration, and making positive impacts on society.
Sonia Sennik
Executive Director, Creative Destruction Lab
Executive Director, CDL Rapid Screening Consortium
The urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic demanded innovation. Highly disciplined project management processes and imaginative organizational design were essential to setting up the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium for success.
Though structure was critical, at the heart of our project was the tireless effort and spirit of the community. Their willingness to trust the process, rely on each other, and pay-it-forward to share data and mentor other companies, including industry peers, is what brought the project to life. This recognition celebrates the generosity, hard work, and creativity of our community. Over 2,000 organizations participated in the consortium — together, we were one team.
Our mission
To develop a cost effective system for reopening the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Who are we
The CDL Rapid Screening Consortium is a private-led, not-for-profit initiative formed in August 2020 with the goal of establishing a robust rapid screening system and operational implementation strategy to be delivered as a public good to Canada and then the world. The Consortium was led by Creative Destruction Lab.
This was an unprecedented collaboration among businesses, researchers, and government working together on a singular public-interest objective.
Founding Consortium Members
Why it matters
Early detection of infectiousness was key to stopping the spread of COVID-19 and reopening the economy.
Nationwide implementation of rapid screening strategy protocols developed by the Consortium in partnership with the provincial and territorial governments supported Canada’s management of COVID-19 in the following key ways:
Developed operational knowledge and an implementation strategy
Our members provided an enormous and diverse workforce pool for pilot opportunities. Current members include over 30 organizations with more than 500,000 employees across Canada.
Reduced load on healthcare systems
The rapid screening system allowed Canadian healthcare resources to focus their screening efforts on infected people with the ultimate goal of rolling out the screening protocol across Canada.
Review our project summary documents here for more information about the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium Pilot & Scaling phases:
Origin story
The World Health Organization in Geneva declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020. It was immediately clear that COVID-19 represented a novel crisis. Novel crises require novel responses. Novel responses require innovation, often predicated on insights from science. CDL’s mission is to accelerate the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind. So, in March 2020, we decided that we must redeploy some of our resources to focus on the crisis by applying the CDL model and community to rapidly translate science into solutions.
In April 2020, CDL launched a new program, CDL Recovery. The program focused on innovations in two domains: 1) public health, and 2) economic recovery. At the same time, CDL Chief Economist Joshua Gans published the first book in the world on the economics of COVID-19. The main thesis of the book is that while most people think of COVID-19 as a health problem, it is also an information problem. In the absence of information on who the small fraction of people are who are infected, we must treat everyone like they could be infected, and that results in shutting down a large part of the economy. This would become the underlying intellectual framework of the Consortium.
While CDL Recovery attracted brilliant inventors, entrepreneurs, and scientists from around the world, we realized that we also needed clear insight into the specific problems creating frictions preventing people from being able to go back to work. So, in May 2020, CDL launched the CDL Vision Council - a group of business leaders of large corporations and thought leaders like Mark Carney and Margaret Atwood. The Vision Council’s mission: Identify the primary problems at the root of the crisis to provide insight into what types of technology-driven solutions might have a first order impact on stimulating economic activity, restoring or creating jobs, and enhancing society such that human civilization emerges stronger and more stable than before the COVID-19 crisis began. This group discussed and debated a number of topics. As the virtues of rapid testing kept resurfacing as a key piece of the recovery puzzle, a small group of CEOs decided to move beyond talking and take action. In August 2020, the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium was born.
CDL was founded in 2012 by Professor Ajay Agrawal at the University of Toronto. Today it operates at twelve universities, including the University of Oxford, HEC Paris, Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of Washington, ESMT Berlin, University of Tartu, University of British Columbia, University of Calgary, HEC Montreal, Dalhousie University, and the University of Toronto.