On the Brink of Utopia Reinventing Innovation to Solve the World's Largest Problems

A new and coherent framework for fostering the breakthrough innovations that we urgently need to confront our collective future.

We live in less innovative times than we think. Despite having made major technological advancements in a few areas, we are still left with enormous unsolved challenges. A radical shift in the culture of innovation is needed. On the Brink of Utopia, by authors Thomas Ramge and Rafael Laguna de la Vera, and with a foreword written by Nobel Laureate Stefan Hell, offers just that—a new and coherent framework for fostering breakthrough innovations for human progress. In their “Innovation Leap Paradigm,” they present seven steps in seven chapters and answer three simple questions: What great challenges need to be tackled? Who makes tech leaps? And finally, what political, economic, and cultural environments foster radical innovation?   

The authors sketch out a future in which technology will solve real problems, anywhere from climate change and hunger to obesity and menstrual pain. They envision a future in which biotechnologists work from a platform that enables them to develop effective drugs within months for any emerging virus, where green energy will be too cheap to meter and aerial carbon can be transmuted into a valuable commodity at scale. Offering a new perspective on innovation that centers not just American readers but also readers from all over the world, On the Brink of Utopia is a hopeful and visionary book that reimagines the roles of innovators, citizens, governments, and financial markets to foster innovation leaps that maximize the well-being of the greatest number of people.

Thomas Ramge has published about twenty books on technology, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. His essays and long-reads have appeared in MIT Sloan Management Review, the Economist, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Affairs, among others. He is an associated member of the Einstein Center for Digital Future and Alumni Senior Research Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society.

Rafael Laguna de la Vera is the founding director of the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND). At sixteen, he founded his first start-up, Elephant Software. Laguna is a visiting professor at several universities and is a cofounding partner of CODE University of Applied Sciences.