Nine Dots Prize Public Lecture - 'Questions for the Next Ten Years'
Why do we ask questions? How does questioning ourselves and the world around us help to find solutions to societal problems? Questions are useful tools. They can provide us with new information, they can start conversations with others, they can allow us to propose new ideas and help to understand the priorities of others.
First launched in 2016, the Nine Dots Prize is a book prize for a book that does not yet exist. The aim of the Prize is to promote, encourage and engage innovative thinking to address problems facing the modern world. We do this by asking questions – about technologies and politics, about migration and displacement, about intergenerational justice, about the rule of law and about the hold that data has over all our lives. Entrants are asked to respond to these questions in 3,000 words. The winner receives US$100,000, a book contract with Cambridge University Press and visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge to help write a short book expanding on their ideas.
As we reach our tenth birthday therefore, we want to look forward to the questions that we think will be of upmost relevance and importance over the next ten years. We have asked two of our Board members, Professor Roger Martin and Dr Linda Yueh CBE, and our most recent winner, Dr Grace Huckins, to speak about some of the key questions that might affect society over the next decade. But just as importantly, we will also ask them to talk about why collectively asking questions is vital as we seek to find innovative solutions to societal problems.
The event will be Chaired by Professor Joanna Page, Director of CRASSH.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
Speaker biographies:
Dr Grace Huckins is an AI Reporter at MIT Technology Review and a former lecturer at Stanford University. They hold a PhD in neuroscience and philosophy from Stanford and master’s degrees from the University of Oxford, which they earned with the support of a Rhodes Scholarship. Huckins is the recipient of National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications. Their work appears extensively in popular science outlets including WIRED and Scientific American. They are the 2024/25 winner of The Nine Dots Prize, and their book, The Prediction Revolution: AI and the Future of Science, will be published by Cambridge University Press in December 2026.
Professor Roger Martin is Professor Emeritus at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto where he served as Dean from 1998-2013, Academic Director of the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship from 2004-2019 and Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute from 2013-2019. In 2017, he was named the #1 Management Thinker in the world by Thinkers50, which biennially does the definitive global ranking of business thinkers. In 2013, he was named global Dean of the Year by the leading business school website, Poets & Quants. His newest book is When More is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020) He has published 12 other books, including Creating Great Choices with Jennifer Riel (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017), Getting Beyond Better with Sally Osberg (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015) and Playing to Win with A.G. Lafley (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), which won the award for Best Book of 2012-13 by the Thinkers50. He has written 34 Harvard Business Review articles. Roger is a trusted strategy advisor to the CEOs of companies worldwide including Procter & Gamble, Lego, Ford Motor Company and IDEO.
Dr Linda Yueh CBE is Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University and Adjunct Professor of Economics at London Business School. She is an Associate Fellow (U.S. and North America Programme) at Chatham House. She was awarded CBE for Services to Economics in the 2023 New Year Honours List.
She is a widely published author who has written/edited 11 books. Her latest book is The Great Crashes: Lessons from Global Meltdowns and How to Prevent Them (Penguin Business), which was selected by the Financial Times as The Best New Books in Economics and by i newspaper as The Best New Books in May 2023. Her previous book, The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today (Viking/ Penguin Random House), was selected as The Times’s Best Business Books of the Year. The U.S. edition, What Would the Great Economists Do? How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems (Picador/ Macmillan), was Newsweek‘s Best Books of the Year. She is the Editor of the Routledge Economic Growth and Development book series.
She is a TV and radio presenter, including for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, as well as having fronted BBC TV series, such as The New Middle Class, Next Billionaires, and Working Lives. She was Chief Business Correspondent for BBC News and presenter of Talking Business with Linda Yueh for BBC World TV and BBC News Channel. She had been Economics Editor and anchor at Bloomberg TV.
Professor Joanna Page is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge and Director of CRASSH, the University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. She has published widely on the relationships between art, culture and science in Latin America, with a particular emphasis on environmental themes. Her most recent book is Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art (2023). She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2025.