Over the past decade, we have gotten genuinely good at something difficult: finding remarkable entrepreneurs who use technology for good. We’ve built the prizes, the pipelines, the accelerators. What we haven’t cracked is harder: making their solutions truly stick.
I’ve met hundreds of innovators tackling some of the world’s hardest problems. They’ve built new technologies, created new business models, and found new ways to deliver essential services to people the markets overlooked.
The difference between good solutions and the great ones is that the latter change how systems work. They become part of how the world functions. That requires getting them into the institutions, markets, policies, and infrastructures that determine and shape people’s lives.
That’s the question we’ve been living with at MIT Solve. Our original bet a decade ago was simple: The best solutions to global challenges are out there, and it’s our job to find them, fund them, and help them scale.
This past spring, we posed an open call to the world’s innovators: How do we solve urgent problems and build solutions that scale responsibly over the next decade? Over 1,000 applicants from six global regions answered the call. We narrowed them to 25 finalists, and in September we’ll announce the final 10 winners, that we call Solvers.
Together, they sketch a blueprint for building differently in the decade ahead. Three patterns stand out.
1. TECHNOLOGY THAT KNOWS ITS PLACE
More than a third of this year’s finalists build with AI, but AI is not the product.
They start with a stubborn problem, and use technology to remove friction, sharpen a decision, or make something possible that wasn’t before. One gives math teachers a real-time signal of exactly which students need them most. Another coaches teachers through project-based STEM lessons in classrooms with no internet connection. A third helps a national blood-safety network track supply and logistics across an entire state. A fourth opens up fair-pay digital work, designed to upskill, to millions excluded from the labor market.
In every case, the technology is invisible by design. AI runs the engine: the paperwork, the triage, the translation. Humans stay at the wheel.
2. PROXIMITY AS AN ADVANTAGE
For too long, we have rewarded proximity to capital and power. The next decade should reward proximity to the problem.Â
The strongest solutions are often led by, or built in direct partnership with, the communities they serve. People closest to a problem see what outsiders miss: why a service isn’t trusted, why a policy fails in practice, where money leaks out of a system, what would change behavior. That asymmetric information produces better design, deeper trust, and often stronger economics.
An Indigenous-led ecosystem is building solar-powered river transport across the Amazon, governed by the communities that use it. A companion platform pays landowners directly for stewarding land, routing funds to households instead of through intermediaries. A network of local health workers, trained and fairly paid, is driving down maternal and child deaths across three countries by delivering care where trust already exists.
3. REBUILD THE SYSTEMS UNDERNEATH
The hardest problems rarely have a single point of failure. They persist because the systems around them aren’t working: the supply chain stalls, the referral system ends at the clinic door, the money never reaches the person doing the work. The most interesting innovators are repairing those connections.
Safer, lower-carbon paper batteries are already in production, replacing toxic lithium cells whose waste harms the communities where it’s dumped. Invasive seaweed is being upcycled into low-carbon products that restore coastlines and support local livelihoods. A rural mental healthcare model links screening directly to same-day care in schools, instead of sending a child home with a referral that goes nowhere.
None of this is glamorous. This is scaffolding—painstakingly time-consuming, and often invisible. Adoption requires infrastructure, and infrastructure is what turns a great product into a lasting one.
WHAT COMES NEXT
The last decade rewarded whoever could invent the best solution. The next one will belong to whoever can build the conditions for good solutions to survive, spread, and rewire the systems around them.
That is the world we want to build. We look forward to celebrating the 10 winning teams.
Hala Hanna is executive director of MIT Solve.
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