“Solving the world’s challenges requires true global collaboration”
Andrew Chung, Founder & Managing Partner, 1955 Capital
Many of the world’s great challenges don't recognise borders and cause harm without regard for race, nationality or politics: how to grow the world’s food supply sustainably by billions of tons, deliver clean water to a billion people, save the 7 million lives lost annually due to air pollution, mitigate climate change, and effectively treat fast-growing diseases like heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Revolutionary scientific advances in animal-free foods, gene editing, vehicle electrification, energy storage, sustainable manufacturing, gene-based health diagnostics, new therapeutic discovery and delivery platforms, and AI-driven surgical robotics are the key to solving these challenges.
However, breakthrough technology is not sufficient on its own. The most cutting-edge research is often performed in countries missing the survival-driven need located elsewhere, including in developing countries. Investor interest, corporate imperatives, government support and consumer urgency – typically found where the need is greatest – are not always matched with the technology being developed. The world’s greatest challenge then is not the absence of “moonshot” solutions, but rather the difficulty of working across borders to allow such advances to access markets with the most severe need. Solving this will require policymakers to lower barriers to cross-border collaboration and to enable innovators to find trusted partners in regions desperate for their inventions. Technologists can no longer operate in silos and must let their solutions serve as an olive branch to unify nations against common obstacles.
Click over to The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’s website for other 2021 moonshots from Vinod Khosla, Kai-Fu Lee, Brad Smith, Vint Cerf, Vijay Pandy and others