‘Innovation without borders’

“A virus knows no borders. Climate knows no borders. Solutions to these crises require a new type of collective action to innovate beyond borders and beyond barriers.” The words of Kate Wilson, executive director for Climate Change and Sustainability for the NSW Government and co-founder and chair of The Lens’ Board, spoken today at the launch of the Collective Action Project (CAP), which aims to ‘replace closed, proprietary innovation knowledge with open, reusable and shareable public knowledge’.

Universal access to these resources will more easily allow for an exponential growth in the development of new solutions that can tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges.

“In spite of the extraordinary progress of science, it cannot solve these problems alone. Science must be integrated and coordinated with diverse capabilities, including those of government, business, and civil society, in all countries and regions, to have a better chance at finding solutions,” said Richard Jefferson, Founder and CEO of The Lens, who lead the CAP project. “The world needs informed actors, aligned and coordinated capabilities; no one must be left out.”

This is an information revolution that will tap in to the hundreds of millions of global patents, genetic sequences, and research publication records available via The Lens, the world’s largest science and technology resource of open data. The World Trade Organization, UNEP, and WHO are among those who have contributed to the development of CAP.

“The mission of The Lens is to democratise science, to democratise knowledge and make it as easy as possible for academics, researchers and entrepreneurs in all parts of the world to have access to the tools that they need to make the innovations that are relevant and necessary for the areas they live in,” added the World Health Organization (WHO) Chief Scientist, Soumya Swaminathan.

Find out more about the Collective Action Project.