The Innovation Exchange
Share, discover and reuse solutions
to humanity’s greatest challenges
“Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere.
The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up.”
— President Bill Clinton
Why?
Across the globe, hundreds of millions of people power tens of millions of organisations mobilising more than a trillion dollars a year to address challenges facing their local and global communities. And yet these projects, and the innovations that drive them, are recorded in inconsistent ways across thousands of unconnected databases and networks, resulting in unconscionable replication of effort, wasted resources, and avoidable human suffering.
Long on story and short on recipe, the social change industry is incapable of meeting the greatest challenges of the 21st century at the speed and scale necessary to avert catastrophe.
We believe there simply has to be a better way.
What?
The Innovation Exchange is designed to serve the needs of entrepreneurs, non-profit and community leaders, force-multipliers such as conferences, competitions and challenges, as well as funders across the entirety of the impact finance spectrum.
Much more than a static database, the Innovation Exchange makes existing projects discoverable, in order that they can be adopted, adapted, and reused in part or in whole. This is how we create the innovation liquidity necessary to accelerate the pace of world-positive change.
About
We believe that the sharing, discovery and reuse of existing innovations represents the single greatest opportunity for achieving massive change.
Informed by our experience designing, prototyping and launching a number of social impact technology companies over the past two decades, and incorporating discussions with thousands of change makers in dozens of countries, The Innovation Exchange is founded on the premise that contemporary technologies hold the key to connecting entrepreneurs, intermediaries, and funders in a more equitable, effective, and efficient manner.
The Innovation Exchange’s predecessor, Sphaera, was launched with support and funding from The Rockefeller Foundation, Mercy Corps, Oxfam America and Ecotrust. In 2020, Sphaera merged with Uncompromise, a strategic systems-design consultancy, to launch Armillaria, the team behind the Innovation Exchange.
Armillaria is a mutualistic enterprise dedicated to developing critical digital infrastructure that supports addressing our various social, environmental and economic challenges at the speed and scale necessary to ensure a thriving human civilisation.
To find out more about Armillaria, and explore our work on innovation liquidity, impact finance, and participatory culture and governance, visit our website.
