RCA collaborates with Imperial College Business School to launch Wicked Acceleration Labs

The world has urgent challenges. Global responses to humanity’s complex problems – the ongoing pandemic, global health challenges, retreating biodiversity, CO2 emissions, climate change, and plastic pollution – have been slow and ineffective, proving that governments can’t do it alone and neither can private entities.

Wicked Acceleration Labs has been established with the objective of:

• envisioning desirable futures through collective imagination
• orchestrating resources, capabilities and ecosystems
• accelerating moonshots and deep tech to address grand challenges.

Through a number of toolkits (tools, methods and systems) the partners aim to manage complex multi-stakeholder ecosystems to help industry, academia, government, civil society and new ventures to better address today's urgent systemic challenges in areas like climate and economic renewal.

Wicked Acceleration Labs brings together some of the best minds, institutions and global partners to set about tackling wicked problems. The consortium will focus on:

1. Ecosystem strategy sprints where action plans can be developed to tackle complex ecosystem challenges.
2. Deep Tech Acceleration sprints for designing a direction and planning a route to accelerate technologies.
3. Corporate Moonshot deployment where Wicked Acceleration Labs can help partners create and sustain a roadmap to allocate resources for distant yet critical strategic bets.

Wicked Acceleration Labs is welcoming further partners across all industries, actively focused on enabling and realising the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to help contribute to and benefit from Wicked Acceleration Lab’s ecosystem, research and practical tools and methods to address grand challenges such as: 

• Affordable and clean energy
• Sustainable cities and communities
• Mobility, automotive and logistics
• Good health and wellbeing
• Responsible consumption and distribution
• Sustainable industrialisation and innovation
• Digital transformation for social inclusion
• Responsible hospitality and tourism
• Food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture.

Wicked Acceleration Labs will launch with a webinar on 8 June 2021, 4–5.30pm. Find out more and register to attend here.