Dr. InnovationLove (Part 1): Or How We Need to Empower Entrepreneurs To Change The World
Groundbreaking leaders throughout history are those who innovate, breaking boundaries which were considered the norm, challenging incumbents with entrenched interests to maintain the status quo.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen. — Aldous Huxley
Galileo was put under house arrest for the rest of his life for proving the theory that the Earth was round.
Einstein, the greatest scientist of the 20th century, was named a “dunce” by the headmaster and was expelled from school.
Clair Patterson, who single-handedly fought oil interests for 30 years to get lead removed from petrol and solve a critical public health issue, was denied research contracts by, rather ridiculously, the United States Public Health Service, and was removed from the National Research Council for his efforts.
The oil industry knew about climate change since the 1980s, yet funded faux scientist mercenaries to deny it and delegitimise any and all activists as tin-hat-wearing, tree-hugging swampy types for the next 30 years. Sound familiar?
Elon Musk, whose single-handedly moving the world toward sustainable energy consumption, making of humans a multiplanetary species, and interfacing AI with human brains, all of which making him a potential seminal figure of this millennium, is, along with his companies, regularly derided by naysayers.
Looking to the future, Steven Hawking and Elon Musk regularly raise the alarm bells about artificial intelligence ; clearly they’re part of the of anxious AI onlookers. Yet they consistently get told they’re wrong and that AI will definitely be amazing for humans by the cheerleader group. Time will tell whether they’re correct.
The list goes on and on.
The fundamental reasons can be summarised into 3 areas as to why change is executed by a mere handful of visionaries: lack of awareness of the problem itself (lack of information & education), lack of the required capital (human, physical &/or monetary) to solve it, and apathy (lack of a Massive Transformative Purpose) if not direct opposition (entrenched interests) to change.
The World Needs Innovation Now More Than Ever
There’s an accelerating need to decouple economic growth from resource consumption. Evidence of this grows louder by the day.
Climate change is destroying the planet. More important than the cost of doing something about it is the cost if we don’t. We recently had another warning from over 15,000 scientists covering a multitude of topics concerning the environment.
Severe destructive pressures on the ocean including catastrophic waste levels of 12 million tonnes of plastic going in to the sea each year harming birds, marine animals and fish — 90% of seabirds have plastic in their stomach. 25% of fisheries have collapsed and another 40% under threat from overfishing.
A third of the world’s soil is now acutely degraded from intensive agriculture.
Deforestation derived from agricultural demands leads to collapsing biodiversity where we lose global forests half the size of England on a yearly basis and its knock-on butterfly effects by debilitating global ecosystems.
Pollinators, on which we are heavily dependent for agriculture, are suffering a mass extinction from the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. They die, and we’re in deep trouble.
Humans now threaten tens of thousands of species with extinction, ushering in an irreversible 6th mass extinction on Earth. Indeed, we’re cutting down the tree of life (Avatar, anybody?).
The painful irony is that ecological damage caused by human activity reduces the planet’s carrying capacity whilst exponentially climbing human populations and ever-increasing consumption habits demand an increasing production from a weakened planet. Something h̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ will give. That something is Earth, the only home we have (thus far).
92% of the world’s population lives in a place where air pollution (see the global map) exceeds WHO limits. In Delhi recently it was 30x over the limit. In 2015 it was estimated that PM2.5 small air particles killed half a million people.
From a socioeconomic perspective, inequality is at its highest level in decades where a few dozen individuals own more than half the World’s population combined.
It’s entirely plausible that AI could cause mass unemployment in the short if not also the long term, and even could wipe humans off the planet (or turn us immortal) if we’re not smart before it becomes ASI in the bat of an eyelid.
Politically the world has bifurcated post-2008 crisis, where democracy globally is now in retreat. Even the apparent bastion of democracy, the USA, is now considered a flawed democracy.
Trust in government has reached all-time lows, whilst revelations from Snowden et. al. evidenced the lack of genuine oversight of government.
Almost 50% of the planet still doesn’t have internet access.
We are in dire need of hundreds, thousands, millions of innovators to be spat out by our educational system, yet our inability to respond to the above challenges is a symptom of our education system being fundamentally broken and inadequate for today’s fast-changing reality. In the information age, one’s ability to sort news from noise, analyse, synthesise and problem solve is vastly more important than parroting facts for exams a la traditional education.
The Innovation Ecosystem Is Being Empowered
Fortunately, there have been great strides in the strengthening and desire to be part of the innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem in recent years.
Access to Knowledge
The internet itself, increasing access to it, and falling computing costs have given billions of people access to free quality content and communication for the first time in human history. Its impact is still hard to overemphasise 20 years after the tech bubble.
With public education also way behind the curve, MOOCs’ disruption of the educational monopoly has led to tremendous success, where you can learn almost anything, in many cases for free; with all its criticisms, vocational over academic learning is the plat du jour. In terms of entrepreneurship, lists of blogs by top VCs give insight in to investor minds.
Promotional Activities
Shows like Shark Tank have had dramatic success and raised public awareness and interest in entrepreneurship. Hundreds of conferences and summits are organised each year, with lists made of must-visit conferences. Entrepreneur now has a TV station, and INC has made a list of must-watch TV shows. E&Y runs entrepreneur awards, as does Unilever for youngsters.
Linking Between Participants
The number of coworking spaces has rocketed in just a few years. This, in part, is due to an increasingly freelance economy — a staggering 40% of workers in the US are freelancers, or 50 million people.
Meetups about entrepreneurship now number 32,000 globally. SMEs employ 60–70% of all people across the OECD and create a “disproportionately large share” of new jobs, so building entrepreneurial ecosystems is a hot topic.
Ecosystem Strengthening
There’s also been a boom in the number of incubators and accelerators since 2008 now reaching 7,000 globally, formalising the entrepreneurial process and improving funding rates from a 3% average for startups to sometimes 100% in extreme cases.
You can get matched with mentors who give you free advice on MicroMentor. INBIA is the largest member-based entrepreneurial support network globally. Public initiatives also play a large part in developing the ecosystem infrastructure.
Importantly, some of the most renowned incubators are launching programmes specifically targeted to resolve issues, such as Y Combinator’s recent geoengineering batch to reduce carbon emissions.
Requirements of and Access to Capital
On the one hand, the internet and platforms like Wordpress and Shopify along with measurable performance digital marketing channels means launching a business takes a few percent of both time and cost compared with even 10 years ago.
On the other, booming accelerator, crowdfunding, angel investing, VC and more recently ICOs, as well as government investments and grants, have vastly increased access to start-up capital for hungry entrepreneurs.
We’ve Had Some Encouraging Results
On the one side there’s a strong push effect where today’s terrible job market forces younger generations to be more innovative than their parents from the outset of their careers. In the context of the 5 points discussed above, contemporary youth is increasingly informed, empowered with tools, and has a greater innovation drive.
On the other, there’s an equal if not stronger push effect, where increased awareness of issues combined with the tools to solve them has spawned a booming social entrepreneurship sector which looks for triple-bottom-line impact. On the one side, millennials want purpose as well as paychecks, whilst investor interest booms: just in the USA, there’s now almost USD 9 trillion impact-related assets under management. Crucially, we’re at an inflection point where consumer tastes plus resource constraints means impact investing can mean higher returns for investors than traditional financial-driven ones.
The circular (or cradle-to-cradle) economy looks to build sustainable loops versus the linear (cradle-to-grave, or the take-make-dispose) economy of the industrial era. The sharing economy can vastly increase utilisation rates.
This sustainability narrative increasingly penetrates high-level organisations globally. In 2017 the World Economic Forum created its Circular Economy Initiative. Philips, part of the WEF initiative, is at the forefront, an example being its lights-as-a-service product. Nike now uses recycled plastic in 71% of its shoes, whilst Adidas also launched a best-selling ocean-plastic shoe and eliminated the 70 million plastic bags it generates each year in its stores. How how about an ocean-plastic t-shirt? SpaceX now successfully returns its boosters, significantly reducing the cost of space travel. See here for others.
More generally, projects abound looking to solve the problems mentioned at the start of this article. Just as an example, TerraCycle wants to recycle all your waste — including used tampons and cigarette butts — into a new economy. Peak Democracy facilitates online citizen engagement. Perhaps Neuralink can put humanity on the same level as AI by interfacing it with human brains.
There’s also a fascinating Venn where, given the aforementioned empowerment, humans can be part of the solution at younger and younger ages. This 18-year-old has the humble goal of cleaning up half the pacific garbage patch — estimated at 1 to 20 times the size of Texas — in 5 years, who he can then sell to the Nikes and Adidases above.
It doesn’t need to be just start-ups. You can have gathered a deeper comprehension of global problems and acquire oratorial skill to confront the UN about climate change 3 times, hold a TEDx conference, sue the American government for knowing about and not dealing with climate change earlier, and publish a book, all by the age 17.
*See Part 2 here about what the specific challenges are to help entrepreneurs from a financial perspective.*
