Changemakers: Bo Zhu

Space exploration. That’s where the smart money of the future will be.” So says Bo Zhu MBA2012, who has spent his entire professional life at the frontier of tech innovation.

As Vice President of Eight Roads, the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International, it’s his job to be on the lookout for the “next big thing” in deep tech. Building the capabilities to find our next planetary home, he says, is set to become a cynosure for engineers and investors alike within the next couple of decades.

“There’s a kind of consensus in the human imagination – in our fiction, our novels and our movies – that if we have the capability, it’s our destiny to find new worlds for our species. That’s where we are going to see future traction in innovation and investment in space exploration and visiting new planets. This is where we’re going to see more capital being invested. It’s the next big thing in the medium to longer term.”

Meanwhile, there are plenty of pressing issues on our home planet to be addressed – and Zhu is confident that technology has the potential to find answers to many of them: “Technology is fascinating because it drives the advancement of the human race. You have the first industrial revolution, where machines revolutionised human existence, taking over many of our mundane but essential requirements to provide food, shelter and so on, and freeing us as a species to do and explore other things. And part of that freedom is about finding answers to problems.”

With the internet revolution putting the world’s information at our fingertips, he argues, we are now in a position to do things and to find solutions that were not only impossible previously, but unimaginable.