The Milken-Motsepe Innovation Prize Program is a bold partnership between the Milken Institute and the Motsepe Foundation to advance technological innovations that address the world’s most pressing challenges. Through a series of multiyear, multimillion-dollar innovation awards and competitions, the program mobilizes global innovators to develop and deploy technology-driven solutions that drive meaningful, scalable change, with a focus on advancing opportunity and resilience across emerging markets.

Each prize targets a critical issue—from off-grid energy access to financial inclusion for small-to-medium enterprises—and offers $2 million in unrestricted funding, expert mentorship, and high-level networking and pitching opportunities with senior investors. 

The program’s investment in human capital has supported job creation and inclusive economic growth, benefiting more than 1 million individuals, businesses, and entire communities to date. By crowdsourcing novel solutions to specifically defined problems, Milken-Motsepe Prizes foster creativity across sectors and nurture an ever-growing ecosystem of entrepreneurs who are better equipped to scale and create a more resilient, equitable, and thriving world.

Navigate to the Program website.

Increasingly, donors see themselves as investors, looking   to ensure their capital and other resources at their disposal are delivering a positive, long-term impact. The Philanthropic Investors Forum is held in conjunction with the Milken Institute’s flagship events, bringing key philanthropic leaders together to learn from and with each other about how to make strategic investments that galvanize progress.

Benefits of the Philanthropic Investors Forum

• Peer-to-peer learning and exchange with principals and heads of institutional and corporate philanthropies 

• Candid conversations with changemakers and thought leaders 

• Roundtable discussions focused on emerging trends, innovation, and system change

Feeding Change elevates Food Is Medicine (FIM) interventions to treat and prevent food insecurity and diet-related chronic disease, with an equity lens.

Feeding Change mobilizes global partnerships to address food systems as a climate issue through sustainable agriculture, food resiliency, and climate financing.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been called the silent pandemic. FasterCures seeks to encourage the development of new antibiotics by promoting policies that could incentivize drug developers, investigate ways to bring more private capital into the space, and highlight emerging approaches to treating bacterial infections beyond antibiotics.

Despite unprecedented advances in medical science that enabled the development of novel COVID-19 vaccines and therapies at record speed, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed deep deficiencies in our ability to detect, prevent, and respond to global health threats. FasterCures has sought to bring together global health leaders and experts to advance a vision for a coordinated global early warning system to address a key gap in current global disease surveillance efforts.

Cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide. Recent technological advancements in the field of cancer, such as the emergence of multi-cancer early detection tests, have the potential to change not only cancer care but also the areas in which research is conducted in the future.

FasterCures seeks to amplify new approaches and developments affecting the field of oncology and address barriers to their innovation.

Cell and gene therapies are transforming how we can treat and potentially cure disease. In response to a rapidly growing pipeline and the hope these therapies offer, FasterCures convenes roundtables and discussions to bring to light the unique regulatory and access considerations posed by cell and gene therapies.

The underrepresentation of diverse groups in clinical research, mistrust in research, and the lack of diversity in the health workforce play significant roles in the persistence of health inequities. FasterCures aims to develop strategies and policies to increase diversity and inclusion in all stages of clinical research and to change the culture of systems within the biomedical research community to value diversity and representation in the development and execution of clinical trials.

The FasterCures LeadersLink Program is a capacity-building program to support the personal development of an emerging cadre of leaders of nonprofit organizations that fund or conduct biomedical research. LeadersLink focuses on building participants’ leadership skills and professional network and addressing their top priorities through mentorship, a capstone project, a series of convenings, virtual collaboration, and access to Milken Institute events and networks.