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Environmental progress is largely dependent on innovation. Addressing global warming, in particular, will require technological innovation on a massive scale to produce and deploy technologies that are cheaper, more efficient and better for the environment than our current technologies. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has reported that a 50% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions would require new investments of $45 trillion in energy, or 1.1 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, an investment more than three times the current size of the entire U.S. economy.
There are more than 1 billion malnourished people in the world today, representing the number one threat to health worldwide. Whereas good progress was made in reducing chronic hunger in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, hunger has been slowly but steadily rising for the past decade. Innovation can play an important role in growing and raising food, in addressing micronutrient deficiencies and creating distribution networks to ensure that nutritious food can be delivered around the world.
Innovation creates high-wage jobs by introducing new products and services, expanding businesses and even building entire new industries, opening up significant and improved opportunities for workers. The very demand for innovation creates employment opportunities. This demand creates new market opportunities for investors to shift capital into research and development, translating into desirable jobs for workers who will build solutions to global challenges. For example, millions of jobs have been created and will continue to be introduced to develop new, clean energy solutions.
More than 3 billion people – around half of the world – struggle to survive on less than $2.50 per day. Nearly 1 billion live on less than $1 per day. In New York in 2000, 189 heads of state signed the United Nations Millennium Declaration and committed, among other goals, to halve by the year 2015 the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day. Innovation plays an important role in development and in providing tools to lift people out of poverty.
From the development of new pharmaceuticals and vaccines to improvements in diagnostic technology to advancements in care facilities, innovation in health care saves and improves live around the world. Health challenges have no end, and today the world faces a shortage of more than 4 million health care workers, persistent pandemics such as HIV/AIDS and malaria and rising chronic conditions such as heart disease and cancer. Continued innovation in health care is critical to meeting the demands of a constantly evolving global health system. 
In an increasingly complex global economy, consumers rely heavily on brands as representations of authenticity. These brands represent specific sources of food, safety and efficacy of health care products and reliability of transportation, shelter and utility services. Consumers depend on the implied and expressed warranties associated with these brands to keep them safe and secure. Protecting brands, keeping false products off the market and assuring accountability for harmful products preserves that trust and enables consumers to continue to use and employ innovation.
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