Nestlé, a key player in the global Food & Beverage Industry recently created an accelerator program that aims to bring students, startup enterprises, and the company’s scientists together to develop innovative products and systems.

The first research team has already been selected, and the unit is expected to be fully operational by the end of this year.

Nestlé promised all selected teams (whether external, internal or mixed) will have full access to the company’s R&D expertise and infrastructure, including equipment, kitchens and shared labs.

“We have taken a number of steps to accelerate innovation, including out enhanced prototyping capabilities and the funding of fast track projects. With the Nestlé R&D Accelerator and its proximity to our R&D and business teams, we will bring open innovation to a new level,” said Stefan Palzer, Nestlé’s Chief Technology Officer.

“Combining our internal expertise and the deep knowledge of our academic and industrial partners with the external entrepreneurial creativity is a unique approach and will create an innovation powerhouse. It will accelerate the translation of innovative ideas and concepts into tangible prototypes and products.”

Announced at the beginning of 2019, the R&D accelerator is part of Nestlé’s global R&D network and will be based in Lausanne, Switzerland, the same location as Nestlé’s R&D focused research center.

In fact, the company claims to have the largest private Food and Nutrition R&D organisation involving 23 sites and more than 4,200 individuals around the world.

According to Nestlé, Core to the accelerator teams’ work is user research, design thinking, prototyping and digital acceleration. This will help those who come up with concepts to refine their ideas before pitching them to executives for seed funding.

Part of the program’s contributing partners includes academic institutions like the Swiss Hospitality Management School in Lausanne and Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Zurich and Lausanne.

The American engine of prosperity and progress has been in serious trouble over the last couple of years. Job creation has slowed down, causing a slow hollowing out of the middle class. In the meantime, economic and wealth opportunities are concentrated in a handful of coastal megacities, making people from the rest of the nation feel excluded.

How did our nation get here? And is there anything we can do to turn this tide?

In a new book (Jump-Starting America) and article posted on The Boston Globe, Simon Johnson and Jonathan Gruber provide answers to both questions. The book, in particular, presents an ambitious strategy that will boost public funding in Scientific Research and Development (R&D) in most societies around the nation.

Johnson with PIIE & MIT and Gruber with MIT argued that the U.S. can create more good jobs, grow faster, and sincerely spread equal opportunities than it has in the past if the administration is willing to change how and how much it invests in R&D.

The two MIT Economists further pointed out that the nation should place those investments equally and strategically across the U.S. and come up with an innovation dividend that will pay cash to Americans each year based on their success to invest the funds in the tech sector.

Johnson and Gruber claim doing so will result in a tech boom (similar to the one witnessed in the United States after World War II) and its benefits will be shared more broadly across the country.

“The United States needs once again to boost its leadership role in science. To do so we should recognize a fact that may be uncomfortable or some: More government spending on R&D will not fly politically if it all goes to the existing technological hubs of today,” wrote the two in the Boston Globe article. “The best technology jobs that we have today are concentrated disproportionately in a small number of superstar cities primarily on the West and East coasts: Boston, New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.”

Energy Research and Development (R&D) is at the heart of combating climate change.

And in order to reverse the snowballing, adverse effects of climate change, our nation needs to, at the very least, move toward a zero carbon emission economy as soon as possible. This is the resounding agreement throughout the scientific realm.

The good news is Congressional Republicans have been increasingly agreeing with their Democratic counterparts that action needs to be taken to alleviate climate change. During the parties’ house hearings, Energy R&D policy emerged as a focal point for bipartisan collaboration.

Better yet, on Friday, March 9, 2019, two centric senators called for the United States to pursue Pragmatic Energy R&D policies that can fight climate change instead of concentrating on drastic, yet unattainable measures.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D – W.Va) wrote a Washington Post article on March 8 stating that the U.S boasts the opportunity to lead the entire world on the improvement of new innovations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They even pledged they’ll support these efforts in the Senate.

“If the United States is going to lead by example, we must continue to lead the world in the development of new and improved technologies,” they wrote. “On the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, we agree it is time to act. And that is why we will work to find responsible solutions worthy of West Virginians, Alaskans, and all Americans.”

Even though they did not name specific Energy R&D policies they intend to pursue, Manchin and Murkowski wrote that they’ll back “pragmatic” energy policies that can attract strong, lasting support from lawmakers and voters alike.

Last month, Murkowski’s committee heard a testimony that was in favor of more than doubling United States’ energy R&D spending.

“If we are serious about creating and leading in a new industrial revolution and competing with China, the E.U. and other parts of the world, Congress should seriously consider ARPA-E’s budget authority to be $1 billion at the very least,” Arun Majumdar, founding director of ARPA-E between 2009-2012 and the co-director of Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy, testified during the Congressional hearing.