The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's issue.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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| AI got top billing this week at DLD 2024, an annual conference in Munich that gathers technology leaders, academics, philosophers, artists, and musicians to talk about what’s next. Many sessions focused on why 2024 will be an important year for AI, when real-world applications will start impacting almost every business in the world directly or indirectly. Read on to get some of the conference highlights. |
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| Stay on top of the latest business innovations and support quality journalism. Subscribe to get unlimited access to all of The Innovator's independently reported articles. |
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| It’s no accident that the theme of the 54th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum is “Rebuilding Trust”. This year, more than ever, trust among business leaders, education figures, and government officials is vital for fostering resilience and making unified progress, says Former Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers in an exclusive column for The Innovator. " If decision-makers can rise above a “what’s in it for me?” mentality without worrying about who will get the credit, there is nothing that can’t be done together," he says. Paying subscribers can read the full column.
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Who: Kay Firth-Butterfield, one of the world’s foremost experts on AI governance, is the founder and CEO of Good Tech Advisory. Until recently she was Head of Artificial Intelligence and a member of the Executive Committee at the World Economic Forum. She is a barrister, former judge and professor, technologist and entrepreneur and vice-Chair of The IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems.
Topic: The role AI played in her own recent successful battle with cancer.
Quote: "I wanted to know how AI might improve my chances of making a full recovery and work out for myself where the governance problems might lie in using this new tech option." |
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| Seevix Material Sciences has developed a new kind of biopolymer material called SVXthat is inspired by spider silk. When integrated into various materials SVX enhances their physical properties, enabling the development of sustainable, lighter, thinner, and tougher composites which can be used as building blocks for high-performance products.
The Israeli start-up, which was launched in 2014 and has raised around $18 million, emerged from research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem conducted by Israeli scientist Dr. Shmulik Ittah, who together with Dr. Shlomzion Shen, co-founded Seevix. The resulting biopolymer is a unique material that self-assembles and is endowed with the superior natural properties of spider silk, says Shen, the company’s CEO.
It is a crowded field. More than a dozen other biotech companies are also trying to emulate spider silk, which is up to five times stronger than steel and extremely elastic.
Shen says Seevix’s SVX is unique, due to its green self-assembly process, which mimics nature and does not seek to force component proteins to bind together with attendant weak links in the chain.“Whereas other companies inspired by spider silk produce a single protein and use that to make a long fiber, our biological process has a different level of sophistication,” she says. “We cause 470,000 proteins to assemble spontaneously. This is our final product. It reduces time, cost, and the amount of energy needed to produce new materials with extraordinary strength, elasticity, and chemical and temperature resilience.”
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Amount of money economies could save if a set of business actions aimed at reducing the intensity of energy demand are taken by the end of this decade, boosting growth, saving companies cash and delivering competitive advantage while also reducing emissions, according to a new World Economic Forum’report launched in collaboration with PwC. The report is supported by over 120 global CEOs who are members of the International Business Council, a group representing 3% of global energy use. The report, part of the Forum's Transforming Energy Demand initiative, highlights practical actions that businesses can take today to act on energy demand. Examples include energy-saving measures such as using artificial intelligence to optimize factory line design, energy efficiency, value chain collaboration, industrial clustering to share clean energy initiatives, retrofitting buildings and electrification of transport. Countries need to cut their energy intensity at least twice as fast between 2023 and 2030 as they did in previous years, which calls for substantial changes from the private sector.
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