Nick Keller's Beyond Innovation Keynote Address
Our Founder and President, Nick Keller, kicked off this year's Beyond Innovation with an inspiring reminder about the importance of coming together to solve the worlds biggest problems - and how sport is perfectly suited to do just that.
"Our planet and society is under huge pressure at the moment," he said in his Keynote Address. "We can’t expect to achieve great innovations without bringing people with us."
Read Nick's Keynote in-full below.
Beyond Innovation 2019
Dodger Stadium, November 15
Human Beings have an immense capacity for innovation and change as we know. Some of the biggest leaps in technology happen when we are in peril and often driven by fear or danger, we seem to find amazing resource to solve problems. We only need to look at in the time of war where the splitting of the atom, the atomic bomb, we can look at vaccines when there is world health crisis. We really step up to the game. We respond and it’s amazing what we can do as human kind when we put our mind to it.
At the moment the speed and shift of change is bewildering – we seem to be solving so many problems and then creating so many additional problems as we go along the way. New technology from A.I, Virtual Reality, 5g and Augmented Reality shifts in how we think, what we do, how we do it and most importantly how we communicate with each other, has changed so significantly. This 4th Industrial revolution has been about corporate innovation as its heart – adapting, developing new opportunities for commercial gain and capitalism has been at its most rampant in the last decade.
Yet our battle to save our planet that has seen like a creeping danger has not sent us in to a collective “fight” or “flight” quite yet. Back in this turn of the millennium we – the millennium development goals were created by 193 nations to address issues that we are facing. They didn’t quite connect so well outside the global governance since the civil society business and to all of us really.
So, it was in 2015 that those 193 countries convened again to set a timetable around 17 crucial social issues that we see the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Today we ‘re looking at things like quality education, gender equality, sustainable citizen communities and climate action as being at the heart of some of this conversation. But all of us need to be well versed in those 17 issues to convene round them.
Timetables have been set because we need clear objectives now. We have to see whether we can protect 30% of the oceans by 2030, carbon neutral by 2050, limit our temperature rise by 1.5 degrees. Targets that we need to abide by and ensure.
But even though this was 4 years ago the short term hunter-gatherer that we are as humans has finally sounded the alarm in 2019 as Climate Change has become climate emergency.
The corporate language is changing and the necessity for change has become so self-evident in every news program you can watch and we are seeing it in front of us. Social investment is growing, and the private sector is incredibly engaged.
Our hope now is this 4th Industrial revolution of tech collides with the 5th industrial revolution of sustainability. It’s crucial it does. Yet we might now have the money, we might now have the engagement and the awareness. But we’ve seemed to have forgotten once crucial thing that’s needed, and that’s the human imagination and resource that’s going to solve some of these problems.
The lack of STEM educated students is well documented - I don’t need to talk about the stats you are all well versed in it. But the importance has now become even more poignant as we need these young people, we need more people to help and that terrified me because with that lack of diversity within the world of technology, with someone calling themselves web summit, where do we get the diversity of thought and background and experience that really is going to solve the problems. We’re not involving the people that are experiencing those issues first hand, that can probably provide us with the most information. It really was quite staggering.
Our planet and society is under huge pressure at the moment, we can’t expect to achieve great innovations without bringing people with us. Greater effort, imagination and resource needs to be applied to engage those on the fringes who have not yet been inspired, and this is where we step in. Sport has a role here to reach out to young people, to show them how relevant STEM is in everyday life and how it can breach that interest gap.
Today you’ll get an opportunity to discuss that more and see how your organisations can contribute to this conversation and we’ve seen such imaginative work already from some of you here and we’re delighted we’ve got the STEM support alliance here but there's all of you there’s so much great ingenuity going on – on education, whether it be the Dodgers working for the science and sport, from the 49ers working with Chelsea within the premier league as the American leagues getting stuck in SAP, EVERFI, the list goes on and on. And so we know that it works, we know we can make an impact and if we know that we now must be compelled to act in that same way.
As I look at what sport’s role in – around the UN and SDG’s, what we at beyond sport was obsessed by. It has never been more relevant now for sport to step up and look to solve some of these generational issues that we’re facing. And whether you see it through the polarisation, whether you see it how our young people are communicating, we have some urgent issues to address.
Just literally half an hour ago I took a phone call from a friend whose daughter tried to commit suicide purely based off social media, there was nothing else to do with it. And so these issues and sports role of how we can bring young people back into a very relevant conversation is absolutely crucial. This is the time for sport to step forward in the next 10 years. I also – when I reflect on education and the inspiration, and the remarkable people in this room, I talked yesterday briefly about there being too much information in the world and for young people it’s completely bewildering.
And how we turn that information into knowledge, into decision making is utterly crucial now. And as we look at what’s being taught in classrooms, when we look at how the neurology of young minds has not changed, your development as a young man starts at the age of 10 and runs through – it starts at the brain moves to the back, the rationality comes in round the age of 25, and it takes 15 years. In the old days that took time as we were given certain amounts of information over that time period now, we hand young people a mobile phone and tell them to get on with it.
We haven’t changed how we educate them and the neurology of the young mind hasn’t changed either and so when I look in this room at some of the organisations we work with I think about how you are changing how people are educated and how vital when a teacher sits down in front of a group of pupils, how that engagement has to change so deeply and some of you have those best ideas, those cutting edge ideas. We should and hopefully will be at the cutting edge of how we educate the future.
So as normal I’ve gone well over the top but really to say thank you for being here, thank you to all our partners, thank you to the remarkable beyond sport team that with that type of creativity and imagination I’m talking to, put together amazing days like this to inspire us and drive us on further. They are a remarkable team and I hugely appreciate the work that they do. But as of today, be present, get stuck in and I suppose switch the phones off unless using social media, then keep it on obviously. Have a fantastic day engage with as many people, be bold and brave when you go up to someone and just introduce yourself. Have a fantastic time and thank you for joining us.
Learn more about our 2019 Beyond Innovation Event here.