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The innovations you’ll read about in the pages that
follow are poised to address these crises and more. Ed-
ible chopsticks, for example, fight deforestation and
reduce waste. Increased access to bankruptcy protec-
tion, an incredibly beneficial financial tool that’s too
often out of reach for those who can’t afford lawyers,
helps low-income Americans overcome financial hard-
ship. An elegant 30-story structure uses basic physics
to capture and store renewable energy in a way that is
both less expensive and better for the environment. An
emergency-call app, created by two teenage siblings in
Georgia, offers quick help to the mentally ill. One major
company’s open-sourced invention enables people who
can’t use their hands to navigate the web; another is
making it simple to convert any existing diesel-powered
truck into an electric one.
Large corporations have remarkable power, especially
at a time when so many governments refuse to embrace
progressive change. To avert disaster, enterprise leaders
need to go beyond rhetoric—beyond philanthropy—and
make real investments to reshape the systems that have
created crises in the first place and to advance forward-
thinking policies and regulations. They stand to be re-
warded: Consumers nationwide indicate in survey after
survey that they want to give their money to companies
that operate with values they admire.
The ingenuity embodied by this year’s honorees
proves that we have the capacity to imagine our way
out of today’s crises if we move quickly and commit
sufficient resources so that the best plans can scale
and succeed. But do we have the will to act on these
and other potentially world-changing ideas? Can we
go beyond mere lip service? “Making the world a better
place” has become such a keynote cliché that it’s been
mercilessly mocked in shows like HBO’s Silicon Valley.
If we want corporate impact to mean anything beyond
a punch line, we need action. We need results. It’s no
longer enough to claim you’re “giving back” and “using
business as a force for good.” This year’s WCI honorees
are reminders that some companies are going beyond
mere messaging: They are actively doing something to
help put out the fire. —Morgan Clendaniel
These 10 World-Changing Ideas were designed to address
intractable problems and urgent crises.
Buckminster Fuller, arguably the patron saint of world-changing
ideas, has a single, inscrutable phrase carved on his gravestone:
“Call me Trimtab.” As the legendary inventor and thinker explained
in a 1972 Playboy interview, “There’s a tiny thing on the edge of the
[boat’s] rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just mov-
ing that little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder
around. It takes almost no effort at all.” Any idea, in other words,
however small, can eventually nudge us in a new direction.
This year’s World-Changing Ideas honorees are all trim tabs. Pre-
senting ingenious solutions to some of our gravest challenges, they
offer ways to change our course, putting us all on a better trajectory.
At a moment when the world is quite literally burning, we need
bold ideas. Pick almost any area of our economy or environment
and it’s easy to find a statistic suggesting that we’re already at a
crisis point. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
says we have just 12 years to stop a devastating rise in the planet’s
temperature. We put 8 million metric tons of plastic into the ocean
every year. Forty percent of Americans can’t afford an unexpected
$400 expense.