Task
Metro Manila, Philippines
(Luca Bucken / Unsplash)
Our task
is to build a platform that can serve as a part of the foundation for a 21st Century Arsenal of Democracy, so that:
1) science, technology, and innovation are used in ways that strengthen democratic societies and advance sustainable development;
2) democratic states with open societies and a commitment to human rights maintain or regain leadership in science, technology, innovation, manufacturing, and the provision of critical infrastructure;
3) anti-human technologies — technologies that erode human rights and dignity — are not loosed on the world, carelessly, or in a spirt of competition among nations;
4) democratic societies generate and retain in perpetuity the capacity to act forcefully and independently in favor of the ends above; and
5) by mid-century, the world will have largely realized the post-War vision embodied in The Four Freedoms.
Platform
Planks
1. Information
Information superiority is at the heart of effective strategic action. Auxso’s platform will systematically track and digest the political and economic context; problem and solution spaces; and available resources:
Relevant general and specialist news and analysis
Problem space for selected sectors, sub-sectors and/or problems (globally and/or regionally)
Science
Data and forecasts
Case studies and analyses
Solution space for above sectors, sub-sectors and/or problems (globally)
Organized public and public-private initiatives
Active and potential sources of finance
Applied science and technology development that is or could be relevant (academia, public sector, non-profits & start-ups)
Resources (within geographic foci)
Science & technology development
Innovation finance
Manufacturing
Development finance & organization
Specialized service providers (e.g. law, IT)
2. People & Organizations
The sheer amount of scientific research and technology development ongoing around the world; the quasi-infinite combinatorial possibilities offered by the current stage of technology; the linkage of supply chains by internet and global logistics; the new possibilities for action at a distance offered by tele-presence, the Internet of Things, and bits-to-atoms; and a dozen other developments present almost a paradox for innovation.
Some other shop elsewhere — or several — has made (or can make) the sub-assembly you need better than you. That is, if only you can find them, trust them, contract them, and work with them effectively across borders and time-zones. And with dozens of other shops in parallel — or thousands (if you are building a new Boeing). Distributed innovation is at once the solution and the problem.
Accordingly, the platform will develop or adapt inventories, technologies, and resources for distributed innovation, with particular reference to our selected sectors, sub-sectors and/or problems. More specifically, the platform will undertake to:
Develop standing networks of experts and organizations (largely from within our geographic foci)
Equip networks with standardized, cutting-edge tools for remote collaboration
Source (or develop) and test new systems and protocols to systematize and speed up search, contracting, financing, and execution of distributed innovation
3. Finance
Sources, methods, and facilities for financing the integrated innovation, manufacturing, and global dissemination of technologies and products for development mainly do not exist. To the extent they have been cobbled together from a variety of for-profit, non-profit and public sources, they have sometimes been adequate within the context of timelines in years and decades that have been accepted until now.
The post-COVID era calls for the development of new sources, methods and facilities that can deliver truly integrated financing at scale and up-front, thereby collapsing innovation-to-dissemination timelines by a factor of 5 or more.
A major thrust of the platform will be to conceptualize and broker the creation these new sources, methods, and facilities.
4. Law, Regulation, & Policy
Innovators are prone to take the legal and regulatory context for innovation largely as a given. The number and scope of the problems that demand effective answers within the next decade or so are unusually large, however. And the competitive environment globally is in flux. For these reasons, and still others, it is vital for innovators to be active in understanding and shaping the legal and regulatory environment at all levels and around the world. Only in this way will they be able to avoid mis-steps and create the tailwinds needed for much faster innovation-to-dissemination cycles.
The platform will actively track law, regulation, and policy relevant to its ends in jurisdictions at multiple levels:
State / Provincial (US, Canada) & National (Europe)
National (e.g. US, Brazil, S. Africa, Nigeria, India, Indonesia) & EU (Europe)
Global Regimes & Standards
Multilateral - e.g. WTO, WIPO, WHO, ITU
Bi-lateral, Regional, Country Groups - e.g. AU, ASEAN, G7
It will develop recommendations for reforms in key jurisdictions, and work in coalition to lobby for them.
Sectoral Foci
Our platform will focus initially on four key development sectors, and especially, on technologies and products at their intersections:
Energy, climate & environment
Transport
Water & Sanitation
Health
Geographic Foci
Beyond its planks, and focus sectors, a platform of the sort we are building needs geographic focus. We have chosen two areas within and between which to begin to build organization and cooperation:
Northeastern United States & Eastern Canada (New England States-Québec; Mid-Atlantic States-Ontario; East North Central States)
Western Europe (UK-Benelux, France-Italy, Switzerland-Austria-Germany)
These two super-regions — each driveable edge-to-edge in a day — possess an unmatched density and diversity of organizations with technical expertise in the problems of global development; know-how in science, technology, and innovation; access to financial capital; and manufacturing capacity. In addition, they each contain one of the United Nations’ HQ locations (in New York and Geneva, respectively), and offices for key UN-system agencies.
This is not to slight globally important concentrations of organizations in other parts of the democratic world, most notably in the Western United States, and in sites in South Asia and East Asia. It is to say that these two foci are the most logical places to begin to build bridges among democratic centers of innovation and manufacturing.
We intend to add third and forth focus regions — one each in Africa and Asia — in the second half of the 2020s. Even in this initial phase, specific projects will enlist partners based outside these two focus regions as needed (see Our Approach / Co-innovation).
Outcomes
A fully built-out platform for the integrated innovation, manufacturing, and dissemination of technologies or products key to solving major problems of development will have characteristics we can identify up-front. Given a problem susceptible to technical solution, the platform should be able to create “on the fly” a complete one-off mechanism for managing the three major streams of the work in relation to each other and to external requirements. For instance, for the innovation stream, the platform should be equipped with all the tools needed to rapidly map the technical solution space; identify promising solutions; source key partners; engineer on one or more candidate solutions; test the candidates; and support these efforts financially and administratively. These can be conceptualized as “platform outputs.”
But platform excellence will distinguished by overall outcomes — how well the platform performs against the time-cost-quality tri-lemma relative to current or competing mechanisms. By way of illustration, prior to the United States’ entry into WW II, the United States began to design, mass produce, and deploy a huge array of implements for its allies, from military aircraft to freight ships, under programs known collectively today as “The Arsenal of Democracy.” One of the signal features of this effort beyond the sheer quantity of material produced, was the introduction of major technical innovations (e.g. welded, rather than riveted ships) and social innovations (e.g. women welders) in order to speed production by orders of magnitude compared to “business as usual.”
In building platforms for the innovation, manufacturing, and deployment of technologies and products for development, we should seek to emulate the best aspects not only of the Arsenal of Democracy, but of the techniques built up in the 75 years since in the world’s most competitive high-tech industries. Today (or prior to COVID-19 at least), it often takes between 10 and 20 years for innovations developed initially for OECD markets to be adapted and deployed at scale around the world. For instance, triple combination therapies for HIV/AIDS became the standard of care in the United States in 1997; 20 years later, in spite of considerable global and national efforts, only about 60% of people with HIV infection were receiving sustained antiretroviral therapy.
Our platform will aim to speed up the cycle from innovation to global-deployment-at-scale by a factor of 5 using a variety of techniques, including: parallel rather than sequential design for high-income/commercial and lower-income/developmental markets; securing conditional finance for global deployment up-front; performing deep planning for manufacturing and dissemination not only during, but in close concert with, early innovation phases; structuring overlaps between adjacent cycles; and others.
To build a strong platform,
Auxso’s approach blends strengths
of the for-profit, non-profit, & public sectors.
Kalinga Province, Luzon, Philippines
(Joshua Kyle / Unsplash)