To help tackle these most immediate issues of our time, Global Corporate Venturing is working with Innova360 to prepare an open innovations challenges section for the GCV Digital Forum on 3-4 June.
The challenges are now open after corporate venturing and other feedback over the past week and portfolio companies and entrepreneurs can apply to meet their and society’s needs across eight main issues: healthcare – details below, financial technology, energy, mobility, hiring talent for CVCs and future of work, supply chain resilience and deep tech.
For example, for the healthcare challenge, Innovate UK said it was making grant funding available to entrepreneurs along with equity coinvestment meeting a healthy ageing challenge in these core areas: sustaining physical activity, maintaining health at work, design for age-friendly homes, creating healthy active places, supporting social connections, living well with cognitive impairment, managing common complaints of ageing.
Future Planet Capital on behalf of Barclays International Private Bank is looking for innovation in technology and the life-sciences to counter the risks of infectious diseases with prophylactics and diagnostics, tracing and treatments through entrepreneurs. Its core targets are:
- Prevention: Vaccines, Prophylactics, novel-Antimicrobials and digital tools for Social Distancing, Risk Reduction and reducing spread within Hospitals, Telemedicine etc.
- Detection, Discovery and Research: Genomic Sequencing and Diagnostics, Contact Tracing (IoT, Geolocation), Biotechnology, Big Data Analytics, Medical Imaging etc.
- Treatment & Therapeutics: Novel Antibiotics and Antivirals, CRISPR-Cas9, Biopharmaceuticals, Bacteriophages etc.
Blue Cross Blue Shield is interested in solutions modelling the operating impacts of pandemic for payers and portfolio companies, and long-term implications for virtual care and patient experience, shift in site of care.
With more than 20,000 corporate-backed portfolio companies around the world, the answers to almost all our needs are often in connecting them to the issues and bringing in the cutting-edge university and government research, spin-outs and startups so we are delighted to be working with entrepreneurs more broadly thanks to the US’s National Science Foundation, Silicon Valley Bank, University of Oxford, SetSquared and European Innovation Council, among others but my especial thanks to Laura Chicurel and her team at Innova360 for developing the challenges section.
There is a gaming section so investors can signal their likes for startups across the challenges and we can invite the leading ones to the GCV Digital Forum so good luck and (virtually) see you there.
