Individual choice in the market needs to be safeguarded. Secondly, markets provide competition. Competition in free markets plays a vital role in driving business towards the resource efficient provision of goods and services. More than this, competition in the market encourages experimentation and innovation, rewarding those ideas that best meet people's needs. We need experimentation since none of us has a crystal ball to tell us which solutions will contribute most to long term sustainability.
Innovation is vital for sustainable development.
Technological innovation can help us replace, or even leapfrog over existing infrastructures to help improve lives. Many parts of the world, for example, have been able to avoid the need to implement copper wire based communications systems, and have gone straight to mobile cellnet systems. We need innovation to keep up the battle against disease, to find ways to treat pathogens that are becoming immune to our existing drugs. We need innovation to address the everyday frustrations of life. We need technological innovation to provide the products that will improve lives in a resource efficient way in the future, but equally we need social and economic innovation in the way that we live and work together in society.