We are living in a time of disruption. Across government, business, academia, and civil society, forces of change are upending assumptions about how societal problem-solving advances. Amid the upheaval, leaders often want to test, shape, share, and implement big ideas that seize an opportunity to guide change in a shifting status quo.

In 2024, the 17 Rooms flagship decided to adapt its approach to problem-solving for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, we decided to re-orient our platform away from advancing next step SDG actions over 12- to 18-month horizons toward implementing big ideas that could make a big difference in driving better SDG outcomes by 2030. We want to support potential actions that are audacious enough to inspire but practical enough to meaningfully improve hundreds of millions of lives—or a commensurate share of the planet—by 2030.

To test the new approach, we invited ideas from a wide array of constituencies, knowing it might only lead to a handful of Room-style working groups in the first year that meet a bar for big ideas. We refined our convening techniques to support leaders in identifying and shaping their ideas. In parallel, we sought to elevate Room insights through published op-eds, which now serve as an opportunity to complement the typically longer-form Room memos that can still be published on the Brookings and The Rockefeller Foundation webpages.

In a similar spirit of renewal, we took a fresh approach to convening 17 Rooms community members on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in September in New York. The annual gathering at The Rockefeller Foundation’s New York headquarters brought community members together around themes of inspiration, collegiality, and opportunity (see Box 1). The informal connections and “DIY” problem-solving energy fostered many new connections and seeds for future potential big ideas.

By the end of 2024, the upshot was an impressive series of Rooms committed to ideas that combine evidence-based feasibility with innovative risk-taking. Proposals ranged from time-bound cash transfers as a medical prescription to fight infant poverty to deploying artificial intelligence to infer the priorities of non-human species and allocate funding accordingly. A short summary of each Room’s idea is presented below.

Read the full article about implementing big ideas by John W. McArthur, Zia Khan, and Jacob Taylor at Brookings.