Lift off! The launch of Mission Beyond

We've launched Mission Beyond - a social initiative to bring together business leaders and other actors with brilliant minds and a sense of purpose to contribute to society and the planet.

The launch was a great success with inspiring speakers, great attendees, valuable insights, conversations and quick turnaround actions to make things better.

You can watch the recording here or jump right to the key takeaways below.

First things first: What is Mission Beyond?

Mission Beyond is inspired by economist Dr Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission-Based approach. Mariana describes ‘grand challenges’ as difficult but important, systemic and society-wide problems with no “silver bullet” solution. The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs for short, act as global grand challenges and start with ending poverty everywhere. Impacting a grand challenge might sound extremely lofty, and in practice, hard to achieve – this is where the mission-based approach comes in.

By their very nature, grand challenges are big, bold, difficult and complex. They have to be broken down into more manageable chunks, which are termed missions. Within a mission area you will define a mission project, starting with innovation activity to generate ideas, and then using experimentation to validate and iteratively improve ideas that at first looked risky or uncertain. This approach makes change happen early and quickly.

Kicking off Mission Beyond

Our CEO, Cain Ullah, kicked off the launch by introducing the overarching goal for Mission Beyond: to inspire, prove, and collaborate to have an impact on the world's grand challenges.

• Inspire to provide thought leadership
• Prove to demonstrate a proof of concept around the topic of the event
• Collaborate to invite the community to work together to have an impact at scale

Inspire

Prove

Moving on to the Prove section of the event. To prove the impact of mission thinking, Product Director, Harri Adams, showcased ShareThyme, a social initiative platform to connect older people who love to cook with younger people who want to learn new recipes.

The aim of the platform was to foster human connection and address loneliness, aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goal #3. - Good Health and Wellbeing.

A major health concern for modern society, loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, worse for you than being obese, makes you more likely to suffer from dementia, heart disease and depression, and increases your risk of death by 29%.

By applying a data-driven innovation process to the mission area, we created over 150 ideas and landed on the idea of an intergenerational cooking platform.

After testing the idea with the general public and receiving an overwhelming response, we built and launched the ShareThyme proof of concept in 8 days, and began running cooking sessions between pairs of younger and older people. 

Collaborate 

With Red Badger’s expertise in rapid digital product innovation and the collective mind and diverse thinking of the coalitions, we believe we can really create social impact at scale. 

Launching is just the start. We need you to help make change happen. If this sounds like something you’d like to get involved in, feel free to get in touch.