'Glimpse the future', then do your part in making it a reality: 4 key takeaways from #tech23 at Cicada Innovations

July 31, 2023

I’m still digesting my experience at #tech23 on Wednesday. It was a rare day of hearing so many important insights about the future of Australian innovation, that not only did I sit up and truly take notice, but I’m still parsing my way through those insights.

To paraphrase the wise Professor Genevieve Bell's guidance to us from her keynote regarding how to think about the future: “The future is already here...you can see it in glimpses.”

Through #tech23's thoughtful design and presentation, we got strong glimpses of the future and a call to action asking us to imagine our own roles in making that better future we were glimpsing into the actual future. The day was organised around 5 themes into which 'the #tech23 startups fit:

• Co-designing with nature

• Shifting the mindset in medicine

• Reimagining time

• The rebuilt environment

• Putting an end to waste

My key impressions:

1. The framing, thematics and facilitation of this gathering were incredibly thoughtful.

The team at Cicada Innovations did an excellent job setting the scene for big thinking around the role that deep tech (and the people who create it and bring it to the market) can and should play in our society. It’s the rare gathering focused on startups that disrupts the conventional 'pitch' format and asks you instead to imagine yourself as a contributor to a collective future. #tech23 did just that. The oft-repeated slogan “systems not silos” was apt and artfully woven through the day. We were invited to think about the places of the featured startups in the systems they’re aiming to impact (and in some cases, transform).

It was also incredibly refreshing to see the 23 founders presented as the domain experts they are and just as importantly, as whole human beings. They are first and foremost deeply accomplished people with incredible contributions to make to our collective human future. Whether or not they do so through their current businesses is, in my thinking, secondary. We seem to sometimes fetishise founders because they're possibly about to land a massive investment deal and maybe even strike it rich. As tech23 showed us, perhaps we should celebrate them instead for the overall contribution they will undoubtedly make to a better human future--even if their current business doesn't quite achieve liftoff.

2. The Co-Designing With Nature session hugely caught my attention.

Over the past decade I have focused most of my professional energies on food, agriculture and nutrition innovation. One of my major takeaways from that time is my ongoing puzzlement at the huge emphasis on creating ‘novel foods’ and food products. Nature has given us an abundance of healthy and wholesome food, yet, in a sign of how far away we are in some domains from actually 'co-designing with nature', we consume less than .01% of the edible plants on earth.

Both Uluu and Kelpy are developing seaweed-derived plastic alternatives. Both produce their product in ‘plastic’ pellet form, which means that existing plastics manufacturers can ‘drop in’ the product to current manufacturing systems without changing much. The concept of transforming systems by working with and through existing infrastructure is a really important one. In this case, a massive sustainability shift could be possible WITHOUT substantial reworking of manufacturing plants and production lines.

3. Explaining bleeding-edge innovation in plain English is powerful and important.

For those of us who work in the innovation space but don't pretend to be at the bleeding edge when it comes to tech (I’m not!), it was helpful and a relief to hear Quantum computing discussed in plain English. I found Professor Mark P. Waller, Founder of Pending AI and Dr Venkata Gutta, Founder of MILLIBEAM particularly helpful in that sense.

Several of their insights really cut through for me:

• To liberally paraphrase Professor Waller, he explained that one of the greatest challenges to fulfilling Quantum computing's promise is the current state of our data and data sets. “Data is massively biased." He explained that in the drug discovery world, conventional wisdom sees 85% of proteins as "un-druggable.” This influences both what drug discovery research is even attempted and the drugs that come out the other end of the process (and which new treatments for which diseases are developed). In other words, when biases/assumptions this strong govern what our data systems even look at, we have some real challenges to confront.

• (Dr Gutta) The two main, most important use cases for quantum computing are: 1) the generation of better data; 2) the completion of large sets of complex computations, much faster.

• (Dr Gutta) We’re really only using 5G to about 10% of its capacity/potential. Fuller use could entirely enable things like remote, robotic surgery.

Professor Genevieve Bell also passed on wise words of advice to founders who are developing and ultimately selling things that are deeply technical—and therefore sometimes difficult to explain. Professor Bell encouraged founders to figure out how to explain their offering’s importance and relevance simply—otherwise their technical innovation won't be in a position to do any good. The emphasis on good, clear and concise storytelling throughout the day echoed Professor Bell's statement: this is complicated stuff, but we don’t have to talk about it in complicated terms.

4. Bringing dialogue around 'systems change' into the mainstream is a hugely important step.

The grounding of dialogue in the need for systems change—and even in explicit recognition of the choke points or full brokenness of some systems—was hugely refreshing and helpful.

This was reflected especially in the ‘Shifting the mindset in medicine’ session, with a recognition that 1) we are still operating very much within a curative rather than preventative framework; 2) medicine applies many one-size-fits-all solutions (like radiation therapy for cancers) in spaces where good diagnostics and personalisation are badly needed. So, we truly need technical solutions like those showcased by the founders—but we also need to bring systems (and the people within them) along in order to create the future we all want.

Honest dialogue--in which we highlight the technical solutions we want, but equally recognise that significant system shifts will be needed to enable those technical solutions to fulfill their promise--is where we need to be. #tech23 did more than its part in showing us the way.