WBS Gillmore Centre & Economics Seminar with Manoj Kumar of Social Alpha
Innovation for People and Planet: Reimagining Capitalism. Focusing on addressing market failure by de-risking innovations, creating blended capital pools, and attracting mainstream business interest in the development sector. The talk will also highlight that aligning the incentives of society, state, and markets is necessary to attract entrepreneurial and investment risk-taking, the two most critical ingredients of the innovation economy.
Abstract-Around the globe, 800m people spend more than 10% of their household budget on health care, and nearly 100m of these are pushed into extreme poverty every year by out-of-pocket health expenses. A big hairy question facing us is: How can we make healthcare more affordable, and improve access to quality healthcare resources, for the people bordering the poverty line? Poverty remains our number one enemy, but increasingly and excitingly, we see opportunities to flip the situation and create mass prosperity. However, this requires a focus on agricultural innovations and allied livelihoods. So, the big question also morphs into: How can we improve productivity, reduce risk, increase income, and enhance access to essential goods and services for the poor? Global efforts to curb emissions and transition into a low-carbon economy can counterintuitively compromise economic progress in the Global South, leading to increased poverty and inequity. Another hairy question, then, is: How do we develop and deploy solutions to converge our development priorities with the overall emission reduction mission? The list is endless.
Low and middle-income countries need breakthrough technologies to address some of these complex problems, but an innovation ecosystem is required to address market failure and support entrepreneurial risk-taking. Social Alpha has created a Multi-Stage Innovation Curation & Venture Development platform in India that supports high-impact innovations by making them deployment-ready and investible through a full-stack lab-to-market de-risking model. It has demonstrated that some of the most challenging problems in health, climate and livelihoods can be solved to achieve sustainable development goals. However, this requires a convergence of science and technology, public policy, markets, and communities. In this talk, Manoj Kumar will focus on addressing market failure by de-risking innovations, creating blended capital pools, and attracting mainstream business interest in the development sector. It will also highlight that aligning the incentives of society, state, and markets is necessary to attract entrepreneurial and investment risk-taking, the two most critical ingredients of the innovation economy.