Social innovators are working to address some of the most pressing challenges facing society --economic mobility, environmental resilience, community health, food insecurity, intergenerational poverty, and racial, social, and economic inequality. Rather than looking at each of these challenges in isolation, could a single innovative concept create a cascade of impact improving conditions across a multitude of vexing societal issues?

Not every company needs to build a digital platform for their industry, but doing so can generate enormous value for your firm and your customers. These five lessons will help you achieve an optimal IIoT platform strategy.

The world’s most pressing challenges are testing the limits of existing approaches to problem exploration, innovation, and design. Be it equitable provision of clean water (OECD 2012), creation of single-dose vaccines (Varmus et al. 2003), clean-energy agriculture (Ferguson 2014), or restored and improved urban infrastructure (NAE 2008), complex systems-level problems that broadly affect society are driven largely by the extraordinary growth in the human population and its demand for essential resources such as water, food, and energy, as well as the compounding implications that manifest as longer human lifespans increase encounters with formidable medical conditions.

The competencies and outcomes of entrepreneurial activities spark the interest of many stakeholders across innovation ecosystems – governments, companies, entrepreneurs, and educational institutions alike.

The pursuit of major innovations is often seen as a risky endeavor. However, there is a lower-risk way to commercialize certain types of high-impact innovations — by "viewing initial applications as “lily pads” that a company can reach before leaping to the next market."

There is an urgent need for policies to close the existing financing gap for civil infrastructure. However, identification of the desired scenarios for the closure of the financing gap is complex because there are many factors that affect investment in infrastructure.

In a world of smart, connected objects, we offer five strategies for manufacturers still on the fence about how to approach this multi-trillion dollar opportunity.