“Ideate. Renovate. Validate. Kill.” These were the four rapid-fire imperatives imparted by Privahini Bradoo, CEO and Co-Founder of BioMine, at last month’s GreenBiz Innovation Forum in San Francisco. The first three received nods from the audience as straight-forward principles of innovation, but the fourth caused the audience to stir. Kill – not just weeding out bad ideas but rather killing good ones – is a principle Bradoo attributed to Steve Jobs, who said that good ideas were the greatest roadblocks to coming up with great ones.

This has stuck with me as I’ve continued to follow the disruption now playing out in the food sector. Some of the most iconic food companies…

On the heels of the launch of Appetite for Change, our team has spotted a number of developments and received interest in working together to transform our food system. And the overall theme of access to good food remains in the limelight, most recently with…

With the backing of First Lady Michelle Obama and her campaign to end childhood obesity, Walmart announced a plan to open up to 300 new stores over the next five years in U.S. “food deserts”, wisely aligning its company’s growth plans with the high-profile, publicly-backed initiative. The company, which has reported falling same store sales in each of the past eight quarters, sees urban markets as a critical growth opportunity, and its push into food deserts is an important arrow in its quiver against recalcitrant community members that see only negatives in Walmart’s entry.

The Lancet recently published a major international study revealing that 347 million adults worldwide suffered from diabetes in 2008 – a number that has doubled since 1980 and exceeds that shown in previous studies. As it was a scientific study, it doesn’t address the staggering economic implications of this number in terms of lost productivity and exorbitant healthcare costs for treatment and support. However, a study also published in June in Value in Health contends that nearly one in five people with diabetes are regularly unable to attend a full day at work due to disruption caused by episodes of dangerously low blood sugar. And one in every ten healthcare dollars in the US is spent on diabetes and its complications.

I don’t know about you, but the closest I ever got to a Rubik’s Cube, shortly after it was first launched in 1974, was to handle one in a toy store. For me, it seemed insoluble – and many assumed it was, until persistent cubers discovered not just one way to crack the puzzle, but many. And the cube came to mind as I thought recently about the astonishingly complex global security challenge we now face…

In just the last few weeks, one of the worst E. coli outbreaks in history has killed 37 people and made more than 2,600 ill, academics concluded that climate change will have more negative consequences for agriculture than expected, and the UN’s Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization released a guide warning “world farming needs a ‘major shift’ to more sustainable practices as intensive crop production since the 1960s has degraded soils, depleted ground water and caused pest outbreaks.”

Industry and food system experts interviewed for SustainAbility’s latest report, Appetite for Change, read trends such as these and conclude that the food industry is failing…

400 scientists from 34 countries worked for two years on the Global Food and Farming Futures report commissioned from the UK government’s think tank Foresight, and gathered an impressive amount of evidence on the state of our food system and the challenges that need to be tackled in the years ahead. Conclusion: to ensure food security in a sustainable way, nothing less than a redesign of the whole food system is required, and the change is needed now.

Although I have a hard time calling this a bold statement in a world that is currently failing the nutritional needs of roughly one third of its population

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