The challenge here is to design a system where market incentives, including profits and recognition, drive those principles to do more for the poor. I like to call this idea creative capitalism, an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities.

I've been studying how quickly we can get energy out to the poor countries - a lot of which are in Africa - and how little progress we've made there. There's no more electricity today in sub-Saharan Africa per person than there was 20 years ago.

Banking is necessary - banks are not.

In the next 15 years, we can halve childhood deaths. That's doable.

The government's ability to select scientists and pick things that are fairly strange, because politicians don't like failures. They're only in office a short term, and many of these things take a long time.

An important re-engineering principle is that companies should focus on their core competence and outsource everything else.

I am surprised that in various countries, whether it's the U.K. or the U.S., you see isolationist tendencies that would tend to work against the co-operation, whether it's climate change, immigration, innovation, helping the very poorest. Those are things where you want to think across country boundaries and see a win-win-type solution.