Innovation

In my lab, we can control ageing easily. We have mice where we can dial up the ageing process or reverse it. It's not that hard when you know how. Until recently, we didn't know there was a backup copy of the information which has been corrupted, and now we can reset it using an embryonic gene trick. Ultimately, I think we'll be able to pop a pill and reset our body's age.

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

Today, we have the tools to enable institutions to operate simultaneously at micro and macro scales. We have the tools today to allow us to get smarter faster. But we do have to learn how to do it.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

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

We don't need bigger or smaller government; we need better government. A leaner, more agile, more innovative government can solve problems faster, without necessitating more money being spent or the overall size of government increasing. This isn't a left or right issue; I think we can all agree on the fact that we want efficient government.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

Incumbents are not doomed, and disruptors are not ordained. When we started our research, we thought that all these new Silicon Valley businesses were going to come in and destroy the incumbents. What we actually found was that a number of incumbents were doing things that really allowed them to respond and be ready for change.

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

Super-specialisation at the expense of a breadth of knowledge is a modern-day fallacy. Fundamentally, we need to be able to address facts in an unbiased fashion. If you're super-specialised in one particular area, at the expense of that breadth, at the expense of clarity of vision, it is natural you will accumulate biases that will factor into your decision making.

Because these systems don't see the world the way we do, they can extrapolate things in novel and unexpected ways that we haven't identified. Systems like Deep Mind's AlphaGo are not beating humans at games through speed and brute force, they're discovering new ways to play which we never conceived.

Dean of Cornell University's Blavatnik School of Engineering

AI has been an area of technology for many decades, but the advances of the past five-years show us why this is one of the major technology events of the last several centuries. We haven't really had a technology like AI in the history of technological development – the closest analogy would be the movable type printing press, which came to the fore at the beginning of the enlightenment, some five hundred years ago.

Dean of Cornell University's Blavatnik School of Engineering

We didn't want to be the best shipper of plastic, nor the best streaming technology, we positioned ourselves as a great place to find stories. We could make that true in the DVD world and the digital world through things like our taste-engine meaning that whether the product came in the post or through a wire, customers saw it as the same.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

The layers of compliance that appear in companies are basically what the company does to protect itself against bad judgement. They build guardrails. At Netflix, we decided to flip that around – rather than building systems to protect ourselves from bad decisions, we built systems of judgement, systems that are optimised for the people who have good judgement.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

The right idea is one that fascinates you, that you can't get out of your mind, that's a puzzle you want to solve. The path from a raw idea to success is a long one- full of frustration, dead-ends.... If you don't have something that genuinely fascinates you, you're going to give-up long before the point you finally stumble on the thing that works.

Co-Founder of Netflix & Streaming Pioneer

It took Jesus 2000 years to reach a billion people. It took Larry Page, I think, around 12 or 10. It took Facebook around 7. And it's not unthinkable that something will happen today that will reach a billion users by the end of the year.

Former Google Executive & Author of "Solve for Happy

There's also a great metaphor from the world of automotive technology. The main naysayers against cars were probably the drivers of carriages in the streets of New York. At some point, the Model T factory was open. And suddenly you're looking around, you're looking at the friend that is driving a car and you're saying, wait a second – he doesn't need a barn to house your horse.

The problem is that you put cells in the same vat and ask them to grow and they're producing ammonia, you're going to have a nice glass of urine! We must solve all of that!!

Six years ago, I got a phone call in Boston, an investor asked me what I thought about cultured meat? ..my answer was that it's probably one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard in my life.! And the question is, why? It's supposed to be obvious! When you take muscle cells, fat cells, or stem cells (that can become both muscle and fat), those cells don't grow very well outside of the body – they stop.