The Futures 100 Innovators Awards are go!
You’ve probably heard or had this this conversation so many times over the past few months, so forgive me in advance for boring you.
It goes something like this. You’re talking about the climate crisis, the pandemic, global inequality or perhaps the decline of democracy – tick where appropriate – and somebody parrots out the following: ‘We can travel to the moon, plan missions to Mars and get billionaires up into space, but we can’t solve X.’
Then somebody who thinks they’re being original argues that we could be using all this innovation – and money – to solve something much closer to home, be it a social, humanitarian or climate concern.
But this misses the realities of how innovation happens, disruption bubbles up and change for the better occurs – by challenge, by constraint, by necessity, by risk, by daring to be different, or contrary or vexed enough by how old technologies have failed us that we ask ourselves why not the new rather than knee-jerking against it.
As we’ve seen throughout history, innovation occurs when crises were either happening, pending or receding. And now, more than ever, we need innovators to crack big tech, defend nature and confront the societal challenges that we are about to face in these post-Covid times.
This is why The Future Laboratory is launching its annual Futures 100 Innovators Award – to celebrate those among us who are taking on those challenges that some of us may regard as unimportant, unworthy or unrighteous. They’re the people using new approaches, and sometimes counter-intuitive processes, to tackle those age-old problems of inequality, inclusion and levelling up that will still sit with us unless we innovate and imagine differently.