IMAGINE A WORLD where a wristband alerts industrial workers whenever someone is less than two metres away from them; where a pay-as-you-go app for small medical providers in sub-Saharan Africa identifies patients who are susceptible to serious COVID-19 complications; and where modular off-grid facilities can be rapidly deployed for housing, health and educational purposes anywhere in the world.
You don’t have to imagine such a world, thanks to the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL).
“Novel crises require novel responses, and novel responses require innovation — often predicated on insights from science.” That according to CDL founder Ajay Agrawal, who is the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Rotman School of Management and whose team has been on the front lines of developing solutions to help the world recover from COVID-19.
CDL’s stated mission — pre-pandemic — was “to accelerate the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind.” And it was well on its way when COVID-19 shut down most of the world last March. “In the early days of the pandemic, it occurred to us that honouring our mission would mean redeploying our resources to focus on this global crisis by applying the CDL model and community to rapidly translate science into solutions,” he says.
What CDL does well — arguably better than anyone else — is accelerate the commercialization of new ideas. And with the first global pandemic in a century on the horizon, the world sorely needed them. “With COVID-19, we had a novel crisis on our hands that nobody had faced before,” says Agrawal. “Experts in Public Health had seen pandemics before, but not with such a broad economic impact. Suddenly, we were faced with a problem that nobody knew how to solve.”
CDL had been designed to take ideas — many of which emerge from university labs
