WEF Davos 2008 - Collaborative Innovation
On January 23rd, 2008, the World Economic Forum opens for its Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. This year, it seems, not only are media omnipresent at the forum, but also is the WEF omnipresent on the web. The forum has gone a step further and stepped into the world of Social Collaboration.
Newspapers and international news agencies have always sent their people to the small town in the Swiss Alps. Over the last few years, I have frequently watched sessions live on TV and the news. The Open Forum had at least as much media attention, since it allowed the public to join seperate discussions in Davos. John Q. Public was left outside from those halls, where Bill Gates and Bono had discussions with Tony Blair and Wen Jia Bao. Nowadays, the WEF has opened up - not in Davos, but online. The organisation around Charles Schwab appealed the public to join the discussion and announced a cooperation with the video plattform YouTube, on which people around the world had the chance to join the forum (see Google’s blogpost). More than a million answers were given to the so-called “Davos Question“: “What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”
Partnerships 2.0
Besides the fact that WELCOM, a new social collaboration plattform for the world-elite, has been created, everyone can join the WEF Group on Facebook. I was impressed how much the organisation is using Web 2.0 to open up the channels to the public. Twitter broadcasts news live from Davos, Technorati is powering the forum’s blog, Flickr delivers the pictures, and if you cannot be physically in Davos, just sign on at SecondLife and fly there with your avatar. This year’s focus “The Power of Collaborative Innovation” has definitely been taken serious by the organisation to change its communication. One session was solely commited to Social Collaboration on the web:
“Add a friend: Accept or Decline. Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and other social networking sites have seen exponential growth in 2007, which is expected to continue in 2008. How can these community sites be used beyond socializing as a tool for content creation, testing new concepts, and relationship and brand building?”
The young Web 2.0 managers are surely present at Davos 2008. The German newspaper FAZ.net announced Mark Zuckerbergs visit in Davos with the title “Generation Facebook attacks Davos” and described that the rise of Web-Youngsters as non-exceptional. The Google guys have been taken into the circle some time ago. Even earlier a young guy called Bill Gates.
“The Power of Collaborative Innovation”
On Thursday, Jan 23rd, the World Economic Forum opened with calls to use the power of collaborative innovation. Surely, its main focus is not on the economic advantages of collaboration, but also to meet the top challenges of economic instability, climate change and equitable growth. “I think collaborative innovation is important to all industries and businesses,” said Co-Chair Wang Jianzhou, Chairman and Chief Executive, China Mobile Communications Corporation, People’s Republic of China and added: “Companies and countries need to take social responsibility and pay attention to climate change and other global challenges.”
There were three sessions, that caught my attention. First of all, the Panel “My Idea, My Design, but Whose Property?” discussed that the source of innovation is changing. “[...] Studies reveal that employees, customers and business partners (in that order) are the major sources of innovation.” This seems to be true indeed (see graph). Accoding to IBM Global Innovation Study, 2006, managers had three choices for major idea generators within their companies. 40% of all managers accredited their employees as bringing up most of ideas, followed by partners and customers, both of which were mentioned by more than 30% of all managers.
The panel was discussing basically Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and came to the following conclusion:
“Sharing of user-generated content will ultimately be a dominant – and positive – theme. But it touches on the definition of creativity. YouTube, Facebook and Myspace will drive business models. The traffic at these spaces supports this view. Content businesses will ultimately cater to these companies and permit limited use of content by P2P users. Indeed, there appears to be no IPR problem here (within limits) as users mix their own content with available clips. IPR is more about creating the future than protecting the past. And everyone is a potential contributor.”
The second discussion that appeared to be very interesting was called “The Power of Collaborative Innovation”:
Finally, Benjamin Zander combined music and leadership in a wonderful speech at the end of the forum on Jan 27th. He tried to draw the audiences attention to the core of the energy that keeps him going: “However difficult the task, how overwhelming the odds, how impossibile to situation possibility is always one sentence away.” Earlier in his speech, he describes possibility with several examples: “My picture appears on the front of the CD, but the conductor [of an orchestra] doesn’t make a sound. He depends to his power on his ability to make other people powerful. [...] I realised that my job was to awaken possibility in other people. [...] If their eyes are shining, you are doing it. [...] It’s one characteristic of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity the people he is leading to realized whatever he is dreaming.” He points out that a person who thinks people are coming to see him, gets taken away. “This is not about a person. This is about a power that is available to every single human being at every moment at every day. It’s called possibility. [...] I have a dream that you life your life in posibility.”
