As director of SPRIND, Germany’s Agency for Disruptive Innovation, Rafael Laguna de la Vera is tasked with turbo-charging progress and shaping a positive future. In his engaging DLD25 talk, he makes the case that “pessimism is a waste of time” because “there is no good alternative to being optimistic”.
While it’s important to acknowledge challenges, fear dominates too much of the discourse, the SPRIND director says. “We’re letting our narrative be controlled by very few people that for some reason think that their lives should be spent making us afraid of the future.”
Laguna de la Vera emphasizes the power of envisioning a better tomorrow, especially in the face of technological advancements like AI. Given a “humanistic foundation”, artificial intelligence could become a force for good and “make our lives better”, he argues, contrasting this with dystopian possibilities like drone swarms used for destruction.
As head of SPRIND, Laguna de la Vera has transformed from a software entrepreneur to a government innovator, tasked with funding breakthrough technologies.
“We’re scouting projects, we run challenges whenever we find a topic that needs to be solved”, he explains, citing initiatives like fusion energy and antiviral solutions. By now, SPRIND has funded 160 teams across nine challenges, with a budget that has grown to 220 million euros since the agency’s inception in 2020.
Laguna de la Vera envisions SPRIND as a model for Europe, saying, “Hopefully we’ll see a lot more SPRINDs popping up in other countries, because it’s not a German thing.” He concludes with a call to action: “This year will be super important for creating the future we want and not slipping into where the doomsayers want us to slip into.”
