If you search for the biggest problems in the world that can be solved with inventions in Google, all you get is a bunch of articles that mention inventions that deal with tiny problems that only people who have nothing else to worry about would even consider serious problems. Obviously there are dozens of simple inventions that made millions by solving trivial problems in most cases, but we are interested in serious problems affecting billions of people in the world and are looking for inventions and companies that could solve these problems. Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA), Pfizer Inc (NYSE:PFE), and Monsanto Company (NYSE:MON) are among the leading companies in the world who could play a vital role in solving some of these problems through innovation.
It isn’t easy to rank among the “biggest problems in the world”, because different regions of the world have different problems and priorities. Poor parts of the world will have different problems than the more advanced parts of the world. If we ask 10 people for their rankings, we will probably get 10 different rankings. That’s why we decided to use two very credible sources to create our own composite rankings. The first source is the World Economic Forum, which is a nonprofit foundation that brings together business and political leaders to solve the world’s problems. The second source is a report by the United Nations. These two sources have vastly different rankings, which is why we believe combining both rankings will give us more accurate “consensus” rankings.
There are definitely some differences between these two sources. The United Nations’ report doesn’t mention universal financial access and internet access at all, whereas the WEF believes these are among the biggest problems in the world. On the other hand, the WEF doesn’t count clean water and affordable energy among the top 10 biggest problems, which will likely be shocking to some.
When we consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we see that physiological needs are at the bottom of the pyramid, meaning they are the most important issues for human beings. Above that we see safety and security. Both the United Nations and the WEF placed physiological needs at the top of their rankings, but they didn’t consider safety or crime as one of the biggest problems in the world. This kind of makes sense, because crime is usually a function of poverty, education, and unemployment and it should decline if those other problems are solved.
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One may also argue that religion or religious fanatics should be considered among the biggest problems because people kill people or terrorize innocent people in the name of religion. None of our two sources counted religion or religious fanatics among the biggest problems in the world.
Corruption is a problem in certain parts of the world (especially in Africa, India, etc.) but it isn’t really a widespread problem in developed countries. None of our sources mentioned corruption among the biggest problems either.
In this article about biggest problems in the world that can be solved with inventions we are going to write about big growth opportunities for companies. If investors are able to identify innovative companies that can help with the solutions to these problems, they can reap big gains over the next few decades. Here are our rankings and the potential inventions that can solve the world’s biggest problems:
10. Education
UN Ranking: #4
WEF Ranking: Not mentioned
Average Score: 14.5
The United Nations’ report ranks education at #4 whereas the WEF didn’t consider it to be one of the biggest problems. Our list of biggest problems in the world that can be solved with inventions ranks it at #10. We believe education is one of the easiest problems to tackle. Actually there are several websites that provide free resources (courses, tests, discussion forums) that can be used to educate yourself, even though you may be thousands of miles away from the world’s best universities and schools. As internet access becomes more widespread and the cost of computers keeps declining (Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Chromebook is a fantastic computer that can be used for this purpose), kids in poor countries will have better access to education. Virtual Reality headsets currently developed by Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) and a few other companies will also open the door to huge opportunities in the realm of distant learning.
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9. Poverty
UN Ranking: 1
WEF Ranking: 25
Average Score: 13
Interestingly, the World Economic Forum didn’t list poverty as one of the biggest problems in the world that can be solved with inventions, though they included unemployment and income inequality as problems. The solution to poverty is productivity growth and improvements in income distribution. Most people take the economic growth that we have been experiencing in the last couple of centuries as “normal”. Actually, labor productivity has been pretty stagnant for thousands of years and most of the economic growth has come from population growth during most of human history. Worldwide poverty rates declined significantly over the last 200 years and as technological innovation keeps steaming ahead, poverty rates will continue to decline.
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8. Strong Institutions To Resolve Problems in Global Trade and Investment
UN Ranking: 16
WEF Ranking: 8
Average Score: 12
Trade disputes and protectionism often lead to conflicts that are detrimental to the well being of the human race. Free trade and investments in underdeveloped countries pulled more than a billion people out of poverty over the last few decades. For example, global corporations that were looking to cut their costs by shifting their production to China over the last couple of decades and free trade that allowed the exchange of goods and services that are produced in China contributed to high growth rates in that country. Now we are starting to see the same process repeating in poorer countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
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7. Long-term Infrastructure Investments
UN Ranking: 9
WEF Ranking: 9
Average Score: 9
The UN’s report summarizes the effects of infrastructure investments on growth and income equality as follows:
“Infrastructure provides the basic physical facilities essential to business and society; industrialization drives economic growth and job creation, thereby reducing income inequality; and innovation expands the technological capabilities of industrial sectors and leads to the development of new skills.”
We can’t agree more. If a poor country doesn’t have a reliable energy system, roads, ports, or telecommunication infrastructure, corporations won’t come, no matter how cheap their labor is. Innovations in the telecommunication space brought down the costs of providing internet services and allowed countries like India to join certain global markets without making significant investments in its roads, ports, and energy infrastructure. Some of our writers are from India because they can contribute to our site’s success thanks to their reliable internet connection.
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6. Climate Change
UN Ranking: 13
WEF Ranking: 4
Average Score: 8.5
At number 6 on our list of biggest problems in the world that can be solved with inventions is climate change. This probelm isn’t considered to be an extremely important problem by the United Nations, probably because most poor countries in the world don’t contribute to pollution or global warming as much as large industrialized countries. Well, major technological breakthroughs have been happening in the clean energy space and solar energy is on its way to becoming cheaper than carbon-based energy sources. Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) is at the forefront of the struggle to propagate the use of solar energy and solar-based transportation. In the future we will be generating our own electricity from rooftop solar panels/tiles, store the excess energy in batteries, and drive Tesla’s electric vehicles.
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5. Access to Good Healthcare
UN Ranking: 3
WEF Ranking: 10
Average Score: 6.5
A simple thing like healthcare that many of us take for granted in Western countries continues to be a major challenge for the rest of the world. The UN ranked this as the third-most serious problem in the world, while it also made the top-10 of the WEF’s list. Among the biggest problems in the world that can be solved with inventions are how to further reduce infant mortality rates and the spread of communicable diseases. While both of these have fallen sharply over the past two decades, there is a lot more work yet to do. Cancer also remains a serious threat to human life, but companies like Pfizer Inc (NYSE:PFE) are working tirelessly to develop treatments that could eviscerate cancer completely, with the success of their breast cancer drug Ibrance showing how quickly advancements can be made in healthcare. The drug is on the verge of achieving blockbuster status, and several competitors are also readying their own variations of the treatment, which could possibly improve upon it even further.
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4. Gender Equality
UN Ranking: 5
WEF Ranking: 7
Average Score: 6
The Gender Equality seems to be one of the biggest problems in the world that can be solved with inventions. The late Christopher Hitchens was an outspoken proponent of empowering women, claiming it was the one surefire way to improve a country’s standard of living. Many economists agree, stating that a thriving economic model requires the full participation of both sexes, which is only possible as the gender equality gap shrinks. However, it’s not shrinking fast enough globally. In fact, the Global Gender Gap Report’s figures show that not a lot of progress has been made globally in the past decade, with the average female’s annual earnings being only a little over half of what men’s was in 2015, nearly identical to 2006. A combination of raising awareness and improving women’s access to education and healthcare will help, as will greater religious freedom, a lack of which plagues many Middle Eastern countries and keeps women there subjugated and subservient.
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3. Income Inequality
UN Ranking: 10
WEF Ranking: 2
Average Score: 6
It’s quite clear that despite 7 billion of us now calling this planet home, there is still more than enough wealth to go around and provide all of us with a good standard of living. The problem (which the WEF ranked as the second-biggest facing the planet) is that a huge percentage of that wealth is held by a small fraction of the global population, while the majority make do with the scraps left over. One of the initiatives that could help people struggling to get by is greater access to credit and financial accounts, which 2 billion people and 200 million small-to-medium-sized businesses are lacking according to the Global Findex 2014, IMF Financial Access Survey. If institutions like Visa Inc (NYSE:V) and Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) or local lending firms can bring their services to more people, it could help spur economic growth in the poorest areas. A good solution of one of the biggest problems in the world that can be solved with inventions, right?
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2. Unemployment
UN Ranking: 8
WEF Ranking: 3
Average Score: 5.5
Without jobs, people not only are a drag on their society, but they can’t contribute to its growth and build on the services cycle, which is why tackling unemployment is so important, as it tends to be a snowball effect as it heads in either direction. While fears are that innovation will actually lead to less jobs, as robots and drones take over jobs that could’ve been handled by people, those robots and drones also require labor to build them (unless it’s robots building robots, in which case we’re toast). While a universal income has been posited as a possible solution to tackle unemployment and poverty as more and more robots create “free” taxable wealth, in which case the robots would essentially be working for all of us, it’s more likely that other services will continue to pop up to replace departing ones, in one way or another. A good example is the rapid growth in app development upon the success of a completely separate product, the smartphone. The number of app publishers on Google’s Android platform surged from a few thousand to nearly 400,000 in the span of just 4 years, from 2010 to 2014, creating millions of new jobs during that time.
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1. Food Security
UN Ranking: 2
WEF Ranking: 1
Average Score: 1.5
Food security easily ranked as the biggest problem facing our planet and its people according to the two lists, which ranked it first and second respectively. The UN has previously suggested that greater farming of insects as a food source could help put protein-rich foods on the plates of people around the world at a fraction of the cost of traditional meat sources. Promoting sustainable agriculture and improved farming productivity are also seen as vital components to ensuring the world has enough to eat. While it is often vilified, Monsanto Company (NYSE:MON) is a company that has helped farmers achieve just that, and will continue to do so, crafting seeds that are more resistant to pests and more bountiful to boot. Continued innovation in that area should lead to a surplus of food, which will in turn bring down food prices.
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Do you foresee any innovations that could address some of these 10 biggest problems in the world that can be solved with inventions? Do you believe we will conquer these challenges and thrive as a race, or will we be unable to overcome them? Let us know in the comments.
Disclosure: None
