Reaching 1 billion people in 10 weeks

We all want to find solutions that work, are scalable, and can really affect people's lives.

What if our benchmark was reaching 15% of the people in the world?

Singularity University is out to find the next generation of leaders, get them in a room, and give them 10 weeks to design a product or service to positively impact at least 1 billion people.

The approach

"You really get the creative ideas when you constrain the problem"

SU piloted their first program last year with a superstar lineup of fundors, advisors and speakers from Silicon Valley's brightest stars.

It resembles WBI's approach to training in some ways - after a competitive applicaiton process an international group is brought to the Palo Alto NASA campus where they spend 10 weeks hearing from 'faculty' (the VPs and CEOs of the top organizaitons), going on site visits, and working on a group project. They end up with new business ideas, research projects, and a network to tap in to.

A few things set them apart:

- The interdisciplinary teams they convene, who they estimate are the "best collective set of people in the world who know where these rapidly advancing technologies are going."

- And the angle they're taking - examining all technologies that are considered to be exponentially growing - figuring out how to you spot them, put in management systems, finance them, and pply them.

Together, the idea is that they can answer the big question: How can we leverage these technologies to solve global challenges?

They asked us to bring back a message to WBI: They are open to hearing our project ideas for next summer...