The LAB OF LABS is conceived as a global knowledge ecosystem of research labs, people, & places, designed to aggressively target the UN’s 17 Global Goals by 2030.
Why The World Needs This Now
There are 10 years to solve the 17 SDGs. Like the coordinated effort required to send a man to the moon, we need a series of SDG “moonshots” to solve the world’s biggest problems.
The Lab of Labs is conceived as a coordinated initiative across the world’s top academic research labs to build an interoperable Knowledge ecosystem between academia and industry to aggressively SOLVE the UN GLOBAL Goals BY 2030.
- Researchers currently working on breakthrough technologies that could form the basis of these moonshots lack interdisciplinary connections, programs and training facilities to accelerate their work to functional implementation and commercialization.
- University technology licensing offices face targets that are often misaligned with the goals of researchers and the pressing needs of humanity, with revenue generation demands resulting in engagement with entities that act to restrict usage through extractive IP practices (“patent trolls”).
- Funders urgently seeking to invest in projects with measurable impact lack data and insights on where to channel the $4-5 Trillion per year estimated as necessary to solve the 17 SDGs.
Go to laboflabs.io to register your interest as a researcher, technology licensing office, or funder.
As an ecosystemic approach to solving these challenges, the Lab of Labs seeks to bring breakthrough, lab-fresh technology to market faster, with business, legal and design models that nurture trust, collaboration, and greater returns for humanity.
As of 2021, the approaches, programming and concepts comprising the Lab of Labs are also being shared and adopted for use across a wide variety of entrepreneurial and impact-focussed communities and projects. Get in touch to plug into the latest developments.
Physical Lab of Labs Location Concepts
Locations to celebrate human achievement.
Museums to draw us in and play with, discover, and delight in the pinnacle of human knowledge and wonder in every field.
Documentary and filmmaking facilities, matching storytellers to researchers and SDG venture-builders through Advances, seeding the ecosystem of meta-narrative shapers, able to follow, interview, document and draw out from those change-makers, all around the world – what is it you’re passionate about? What special project are you working on? What future for humanity does it serve? Who do you need to work with?
A product showcase of tests and prototypes, a facility for the change-makers and innovators of the world to share and learn, to come see, touch, try, imagine and realize the Breakthrough Good they could enable with the objects, tools, technologies, and models of this future bazaar, with its demo units and open-architecture, modular, composable business and design plans.
A playground for systems thinkers, the techniques and design patterns that form the core of Lab of Labs facilitation: Enabling, when we zoom out, the perspective to see how each specific breakthrough might help solve some problem on another axis of collective human endeavor; condensing the essence at the intersection of multiple breakthroughs, the combinatorial prototypes, multi-knowledge implementations, configurations of talent and tech to solve each of the Global Goals.
The Future We Want: Enabling the collaborative, interdisciplinary flow states, density in space and time; facilitated sparks of co-creation; a temporal, physical, spiritual halo around all of human knowledge to draw that Future towards us.
Collaboration facilities that automatically film and record the Advances and meetups, raw footage for the distributed ecosystem of storytellers who can see the density of manifestation and follow the distributed threads of disciplinary endeavor.
Legal engineering, structural standards for ‘co-opetition’ – pre-competitive commons creation, consortia with a noble goal, under an umbrella of shared intent — mapping the models already deployed in solar, biotech, environmental management, and beyond.
Finding the existing networks of labs, the programmatic research hubs, poster sessions, research-think-do tanks.
Knowing the challenges — there are so many!
- Is there a simpler way to set up and dissolve them?
- How do we prevent the current issue of zombie consortia?
- How do we convene the communities of action, and support novel arrangements that serve a defined, time-bound, clear purpose; infused with the arrangements that preset an open-outcome, open-source as a baseline where SDG purposes are involved — supporting the common prototyping ecosystem so innovation gets out in the world, applied, re-used, shared and re-constituted for the radically local contexts and community-empowering applications of the future.