Innovation

We have to leave behind the myth that our economies are actually fit for the present that we understand, and the vision of the future we want to create. We need to redesign economics for our times.

Creator of the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainable development

The scope of entrepreneurial fulfilment, the scope of new entrants changing the world is broader than ever before, and that's great for society. That's great for everyone.

Prominent venture capitalist and early Tesla investor at Draper Fisher Jurvetson

BitTorrent is the first time in history that people found a way to make decentralised infrastructure work better and more efficiently than centralised. Transferring files through BitTorrent is 100-1000% faster than centralised infrastructure.

Founder of TRON blockchain platform & cryptocurrency entrepreneur

We can only solve our ecological problems by linking ecology and economy. If we can create the right economic environment, change will happen. If it's more profitable to be efficient than wasteful, we will be efficient.

Swiss Adventurer & Pilot of Solar-Powered Aircraft Solar Impulse

We must not only use the emotional part of exploration, but also the state of mind of exploration which encourages us to get out of our bad habits, beliefs, everything we know, our comfort zone, and even our way of thinking. The mindset of exploration encourages us to find new solutions.

Swiss Adventurer & Pilot of Solar-Powered Aircraft Solar Impulse

If you only listen to the voices around you, you'll amalgamate them into something that already exists… My view was that consensus isn't going to build something that will change the game.

Founder and CEO of Gymshark, fitness apparel company

When I came back, it didn't take me and my brother long to see that this was a failing business. It had been making the same product since the 1930s. The business was dying.

I'd never even heard the word 'entrepreneur' growing up – I didn't know what that meant. If I go back to my grandfather – he was the real entrepreneur. He developed things… he made spiked running shoes when he was only 15 (in 1895!).

I guess that's been my biggest quality – to understand what customer's want, 3 or 4 years ahead of time. That's more or less probably my biggest quality as an entrepreneur.

In December 2020, we published in the journal nature that we could turn on 3 genes in mice, that are normally only switched on in embryos. By doing this, we could reverse the age of complex tissues in adult mice. We used this system to restore eyesight to blind, old, mice!

Longevity researcher & Harvard Medical School professor studying aging and lifespan extension

You should try and copy everything you possibly can! It's just that if you run out of alternatives, if you run out of options to copy, you will realise that your entire life has conditioned you to not only be a great copier, but to hesitate when copying is no longer an option.

Co-Founder of Square & Mobile Payment Pioneer

The danger is that when we jump too quickly to the solution, not only is the floor littered with the inventions that never worked, but we risk designing solutions that never fit the problem.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

Incumbents are not doomed, and disruptors are not ordained.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

Fundamentally, we must slow-down the process of change. We should recognise that most change is not progress- and therefore, it is in our interests to slow down without interfering too much with actual solution making.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

At a point, we developed language sophisticated enough to transmit abstract ideas with precision from one mind to another. That enables high quality parallel processing of problems such that we literally have emergent cognition. When people gather, they talk about difficult puzzles they face, and the product of their thinking exceeds the sum of their individual capacity to reason through it.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

Super-specialisation at the expense of a breadth of knowledge is a modern-day fallacy. If you're super-specialised in one particular area, at the expense of that breadth, you are quite likely to make errors in other, bigger fields.