Future Planet Awards 2019

The Future Planet Awards returned to the Westminster stage of GUV: Fusion at the end of last month with five nominees up for the 2019 prize in partnership with Global University Venturing.
The award aims to bolster the profile of first-class technological concepts with the potential to solve global challenges in one of five categories: climate change, education, health, security and sustainable growth.
Digital course textbook catalogue Bibliotech secured first prize, seeing off impressive pitches from fusion energy technology developer First Light Fusion, neurological stimulation device manufacturer Neurovalens Health, locational addressing protocol creator What3Words and genetically-engineered tropical crop breeding platform Tropic Biosciences.
Future Planet Awards is anchored by innovation platform and investment firm Future Planet Capital. Founded in 2015, it has invested more than $100m to date, profiting from partnerships with the most reputed academic innovation clusters, including the likes of Harvard University, University of Oxford and University of California, Berkeley.
Each year, the awards scrutinise candidates through a quick-fire pitching contest, on this occasion judged by a panel made up of Patrick Chung, founding partner of Harvard-focused investment firm Xfund; Amanda Feldman, co-founder of impact consultancy Heliotropy; Ling Ge, internet company Tencent’s senior representative in Europe; Richard Dilworth of Norman Foster Foundation, and Douglas Hansen-Luke, chairman of Future Planet Capital.
Bibliotech, represented by its chief executive, ex-Rhodes Scholar and University of Oxford alumnus David Sherwood, runs a digital textbook library that gives students on-demand access to academic textbooks on their reading list in exchange for a monthly fee.

David Sherwood pitching his company, Bibliotech

The crux of Bibliotech’s proposition lies in the scale of the academic study market, Sherwood said. He claimed Bibliotech was able to quickly source relevant content for students, which would appear particularly advantageous at the business-end of the curriculum, when time had become a scarce commodity.
Unlike film and music, academic textbooks were still to be comprehensively digitised, said Sherwood, who himself related to the problem through long days attempting to source texts for his course at Oxford.
Book prices had climbed as more students turned to the rental market, and Bibliotech had an early-mover advantage in that it licensed the content through the institution, rather than selling digitally to students under a business-to-consumer model.
First Light Fusion’s pitch was presented by its chief technical officer and CEO, Nicholas Hawker,  a former lecturer and post-doctoral researcher at University of Oxford.
The company hopes to deliver a method for inducing fusion power, the process of generating electricity from the heat of nuclear fusion reactions.
Nuclear fusion is regarded as an effective solution to the challenge of producing clean energy, and First Light hopes to overcome technical bottlenecks to its commercialisation.
First Light’s concept depended on a new means of prompting inertial fusion, whereby a compact projectile fired at a plastic container breaks open the object’s gas-filled cavities to release a confined plasma providing pulsed fusion energy, Hawker explained.
Hawker’s pitch was followed by that of Jason McKeown, the chief executive of Neurovalens, who also holds appointments as a visiting scholar and postgraduate researcher at University of California, San Diego and Queen’s University Belfast respectively. Neurovalens previously won the UC pitch competition at the GCVI Summit in January 2019.
Neurovalens is developing wearable neurotechnologies that act as a minimally-invasive alternative to neurological implants by interacting with a nerve in the back of the head to stimulate the brain. The company’s first product, a device called Modius intended to help people lose weight, is expected to receive regulatory approval later in 2019.
What3Words believes it has devised a more effective protocol for pinning down specific locations that might be badly served by conventional addresses – for example in remote areas and communities in developing countries.
The approach combines GPS technology with a matrix containing many trillions of address strings, each formed of three randomised dictionary words. What3Words converts the GPS coordinates for a given location into an appropriate three-word string, facilitating navigation for purposes such as emergency operations and travel in foreign-language countries.
Meanwhile, Tropic Biosciences is using Crispr gene editing technology to breed new variants of tropical crops including bananas resilient against disease and coffee beans stripped of their caffeine content.
Tropic Biosciences, which last raised $10m in a series A round in June 2018, aims to conduct field trials with its crops in locations including the Philippines in coming years. Ultimately, the company will attempt to galvanise agricultural production methods suited to rapid demographic changes in the tropics, where more than half of the world is expected to reside by 2030.
Global University Venturing will feature an in-depth profile of Bibliotech in its upcoming July issue.