Future First

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2    Embracing our biggest innovation challenges

Reconciling the 250 people who are born every minute with the finite resources of the planet will require enormous efforts of innovation. Tackling huge dynamics like exploding populations will never be successful without thousands or millions of different efforts. But these efforts will also not succeed with incremental improvements. In other words, seemingly intractable problems are the ultimate test of innovation. They force businesses to think creatively about huge challenges.

These challenges are not opportunities that are going away. Their worst feature, intractability, also guarantees a nearly limitless market for solutions. When a leader decides to innovate around the challenges of ...