Managing innovation

Get ready for the great wave - the next big surge of innovation powered by emerging technologies and the approach of deep tech entrepreneurs. Its economic, business and social impact will be felt everywhere because deep tech ventures aim to solve many of our most complex problems.

The great wave encompasses artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic biology, nanotechnologies and quantum computing, among other advanced technologies. But even more significant are the convergences of technologies and of approaches that will accelerate and redefine innovation for decades to come. As technological advances move from the lab to the marketplace, and as companies form to pursue commercial applications, we see a number of similarities in how and why they are being developed — and a powerful ecosystem is taking shape to drive their development.

We witnessed the power of that ecosystem last year, as Moderna and the team of BioNTech and Pfizer separately took two Covid-19 vaccines from genomic sequence to market in less than a year. Although these companies did remarkable work at unheard-of speed, they benefited from the work of many others, including governments, academia, venture capital and big business. All of these are critical players in the coming wave.