Too many innovation projects, even successful initiatives addressing global challenges like climate adaptation, take place in the confines of national, institutional or expertise silos. Often even successful results prove difficult to scale from place to place, and from local to global. This makes it difficult to tackle many of society’s major challenges effectively.

This is why we are working to co-create a Global Lab for Societal Innovation, which can address important societal issues as collaborative innovation projects – orchestrated initiatives which allows different organizations in different countries to work in a focused way, at the same time, on diverse aspects of major societal challenges.

Objectives of the Global Lab initiative

• To work on creating breakthroughs on societal issues in an open, focused and orchestrated way;
• To address societal challenges as a collaborative innovation project, bringing together relevant players from around the world to pool expertise and work together;
• To become a laboratory for mission-driven innovation;
• To contribute to a worldwide wave of positive change.

A number of modest Initial activities have been taking place since mid-2019.

From a negative perspective:

More stress and uncertainty in the air which people breathe: social and political instability, society undermined by cyber-terrorism, and the collapse of our engagement with climate change. People living in ecosystems of fear and dread, belief systems based on “there isn’t anything we can do that will make a difference”.
A descent into fatalism so robust that nothing can surprise us anymore, or shake us awake.

From a positive perspective:

People are still individuals, of course, but we have come to understand that the quality of life we want for ourselves will only happen when it is shared by all people. Only when we stand up together for what we believe.

We’ll see strong ecosystems of hope and action: people all over the world coming together to urge politicians and captains of industry to rethink their priorities and re-frame their organizations and industries.

In 2030 Generation Z will be 20-something, Millennials are nearing 50, a new generation is on the way. Artificial Intelligence is doing the drudge-work  . . . and cleaning the oceans, the polluted dumping sites, and the atmosphere.

And what about us?

And from a third perspective, shaken straight down the middle:

We are only as good as the efforts we make to do good things, and when we work together, many ‘impossible’ things can happen.

There is work-in-progress everywhere.

This is the capacity to comprehend the possible consequences and implications of our actions and choices, understand what is signal and what is noise, and use these abilities to make decisions based on the well-being of things in a larger context: our children, their grandchildren. . .future generations . . . and the planet.