Global Forum 2009 - Business as an Agent of Change June 1, 2009

Indeed, the changes rippling across the fields of design, sustainability, and business citizenship are nothing short of revolutionary. However it is increasingly clear that we’re no longer lacking in isolated product exemplars or surprising business-driven sustainability solutions. Today’s greater challenge lies in system-wide design. This is the task of discovering ways of overcoming the systemic challenges of collaborative innovation and applied human creativity in not only large multinational corporations, but across multi-stakeholder supply chains, whole bio-regions, entire industries and professions, and across economies and geographies where billions are locked in debilitating poverty.

Ours is a moment where the magnitude of change has amplified in globally critical ways—where everything reverberates, acts on and interacts with, everything else. An era of massive change is, therefore, an opportunity for magnified innovation. It is a call for a stepped-up human creativity on a scale that represents a new order of magnitude. To value innovation in systemic-design terms is to value one of the most abundant, renewable resources we can draw upon. In theory, with today’s connective technologies, there are no limits to human imagination and cooperation, and yet, especially in management practice, one overarching question looms large: what do we really know about entrepreneurship and innovation at the increasingly larger and larger scales of the whole?

It is in this context that the Second Global Forum for Business as an Agent of World Benefit has chosen its theme for the 2009 summit: "Management as Designing in an Era of Massive Innovation."

Official Website: http://worldbenefit.case.edu/global-forum/default.cfm