How does innovation help to solve the most pressing global problems?

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” is a line Charles Dickens is using when he begins ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ to pre-pare us for a story about London and Paris during the time of the French Revolution. But, what he is also doing is illustrating how different groups and people might experience the same world. Depending on where we are in our own life, educational background, and life experiences we will have different views on the same reality. Taking into ac-count scientific facts, we should all agree that we do live in unprecedented times where we need a quantum leap, and not incrementalism when it comes to innovation.
The Revolution of our lifetime is happening right now. Now is the time when all of us must be smart and direct this revolution towards creating a better, healthier planet. We need to address questions like “How do we want our world to look like?”, “How can we become environmentally friendly & infinitely sustainable?”
We need to start bridging the gap between traditional industries and cutting-edge academic research to build long-lasting impactful products. We do have both London and Paris of our age and now we need to be smart in how we match the components to create the next level of humanity. Here we need to think about “how do we want to evolve as a society” and start structuring our approach towards that goal.
Even today, we still have traditional industries fighting the notion of change. For example, climate change is seen by traditional industries as an enemy! A product of academia. Luckily, we are seeing improvements to the awareness of society and a willingness to change [ ... ]