Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

The Davos scene is nonstop: it starts with breakfast meetings at 8 am and ends typically after midnight. You rush from session to session, often jumping a shuttle from one hotel to another or back to the Congress Center. In between the meetings, there’s the powerful force of serendipity. In the hallways, you’re as likely to run into the head of an international NGO, as CEO of a Fortune 100 company, as a renowned professor as the foreign minister of a major country. And, everybody is working on something and usually is interested in several issues. Every table conversation brings a new perspective and a new idea: whether it’s new knowledge, a great contact or a new extension to the idea under discussion. I spend time desperately trying to capture some of these insights myself, or give someone an action item (send me an email on that and I’ll do it). Each hour there’s something memorable. Today was an example of this. In the morning, I attended a session put on by the Young Glob...

I’m joining many other social entrepreneurs on our journey to Davos, home of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum. The journey itself is magical: you take a series of trains getting ever smaller, until the final hour meanders through the middle of mountain villages with a foot to spare on either side of the train, through tunnels and beneath spectacular mountains. Although this is my sixth time to Davos for the WEF, the train trip never fails to enchant me. And then we're in a small ski village in Switzerland! The Schwab Foundation arranges for the social entrepreneurs to stay in the Schatzalp mountain hotel. This is the hotel made famous in Thomas Mann’s book The Magic Mountain: it’s 600 feet up the mountain above Davos, and you ride a funicular railroad to get to it. The benefits of collocating the social entrepreneurs in one place has been proven in past years: a large amount of the value of attending the WEF is meeting with global social entrepreneur colleagues,...