The Druid Collective is an initiative of the World Economic Forum’s

Young Global Leaders (YGL) and Technology Pioneers

dedicated to helping startups around the world

to bring breakthrough science- and R&D from labs to real world impact

For more than two hundred years, science and engineering have been generating great inventions that have changed the face of humanity and made the world a much better, safer, and comfortable place to live in. As we are standing on the brink of the fourth industrial revolution, there has never been a greater promise of new and truly transformational technologies. This promise is further amplified by the fact that great science and engineering are no longer restricted to a few dozen countries.

Yet, many if not most of the great new inventions will probably never make it all the way to the final consumer. The journey from a great scientific output to full commercialization is extremely long, risky, and expensive. It can easily cost tens of millions of euros and take even ten or more years. Moreover, building science- and engineering-based companies – "deep tech" start ups – requires a lot of deep industry expertise and experience. Unless they are based in a handful of locations, such as Silicon Valley or Cambridge, entrepreneurs building deep tech companies are extremely unlikely to get access to the right people and capital – and are therefore almost doomed to fail.

The Druid Collective has set out to break this spell and ensure that potentially world-changing deep tech innovations achieve a great success no matter what part of the world they originally come from.