The Future Investment Initiative Institute (FII-I), a new not-for-profit global foundation and the power behind the annual FII conference in Saudi Arabia, has launched its “Impact” report series, which curates the world’s brightest ideas that can impact humanity sustainably.
Impact’s inaugural issue — “Winning the Battle of Disease Together” — focuses on the most promising technologies to prevent and contain future health crises, including outbreak risk software companies such as BlueDot, which was able to detect the outbreak of COVID-19 months before the rest of the world did.
The report also looks at different elements of the COVID-19 crisis across various perspectives — from economic to social, political to academic, and cultural to scientific — as well as the crucial importance of collaboration — a core value of FII-I.
Richard Attias, CEO of FII-I, said: “The need to find sustainable, innovative solutions to the threat of pandemic disease has never been more urgent and the global pandemic has shown us that our strength lies in cooperation and shared knowledge.
“That’s why in our first Impact report we brought together some of the world’s brightest minds, including leading experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the WHO social science expert group, and Metabiota, which has curated data from over 2,500 epidemics to identify specific risks.”
Impact also offers concrete, actionable “call to impact” recommendations for governments, health care officials, investors and the general public, including:
• Leveraging the power of big data to better predict where infectious diseases could emerge in order to take swift action and prevent them from spreading;
• Investing in AI and machine learning to further accelerate the development of vaccines and speed up the discovery of new antibiotic compounds; and
• Ensuring national response strategies are thorough, guiding nations through their lockdown measures to relaxing restrictions and returning to a normal state.
The launch of the Impact report series is just one of many milestones on FII-I’s journey to its flagship annual conference in Riyadh on Oct. 28 and 29, 2020, and beyond. This year, the event will take place with a “Neo-Renaissance” theme. More than 6,000 leading CEOs, investors and policymakers from around the world attended FII 2019, making it the third largest business gathering of the year.
The institute is hosting “Don’t Forget Our Planet — Time for a Sustainable Reset,” the second event of its virtual series, on June 25, and a second Impact report focused on sustainability will be published in August.
