Climate change, global health and food security won't be solved by scientists alone, or economists alone, or policymakers alone. They'll be solved when people work together. Philanthropy is uniquely placed to make that happen.
It's the role of philanthropy to provide the structured opportunities and high-risk capital necessary to support cross-disciplinary work and collaborative innovation. The trouble is, most funding isn't built for it. Grants are often organised by discipline, with separate pots, panels and measures of success.
That system has produced a number of notable successful innovations and breakthroughs. But it leaves a gap. Ideas that sit between fields often struggle to find a home because they don't fit neatly into any one box.
That gap matters because the biggest challenges we face have interconnected causes. For instance, climate change is a scientific problem, but it's also an economic, political and social one. The idea of one discipline solving it in isolation is extremely unlikely.
At the Turner Kirk Trust, we believe breakthroughs will come at the seams between fields. That means giving cross-disciplinary experts a shared budget and a shared definition of success, so they're working towards the same scalable solution rather than simply alongside each other.
Work like this is risky because it has no established playbook. Governments and research councils, which are responsible for public money, are understandably cautious about it. Investors need a return. But philanthropy doesn't. It is the only money that never has to pay itself back, which means it can afford to take the risks that others can't, and we think it should.
The Darwin College Business Plan project at the University of Cambridge is one leading example of this thinking. It brings postgraduate students from the sciences, humanities and law together and gives them the mentoring and funding to develop ideas together about the world's most complex collective issues.
When a project succeeds, we support it to move from proof of concept to scale through institutional and government backers.
Many of the best ideas to come out of the project could only have come from this multidisciplinary approach. Notable examples include: a home-testing kit for female fertility, a tool to cut down legal admin, and an app that helps people track their carbon footprint – all alongside policy papers, prototypes and community projects.
Without this kind of support, many of these ideas would never leave the university and transform into impactful ventures. Students often have the insight, but lack the money, experience or space to take risks. In fact, the total number of UK spinouts, startups and patent grants fell in the 2024-25 academic year compared with 2023-24.
We attribute the success of the Business Plan not only to its cross-disciplinary format but also to the fact that it gives its participants permission to fail. Bringing different disciplines together means challenging established ways of thinking, and that rarely works the first time. By taking away the penalty for failure, it allows students the freedom to experiment and test bold ideas.
At the Turner Kirk Trust, we believe this permission to fail is essential to the success of cross-disciplinary projects. When an idea does succeed, our job is to help it grow beyond us. This is where philanthropy plays a particularly important role. We support promising projects to move from proof of concept to the institutional and government funders who can take them to scale.
The hardest problems won't be solved inside any one field. Philanthropy is best placed to fund the spaces in between, and to accept that some of what it backs there won't work. That's how the ideas that do succeed get their chance, resulting in meaningful change.
Philanthropic capital is the only money in the room that never has to earn a return. That gives it a unique obligation to back the fragile, uncategorisable ideas that others can’t.
