So what do I take away from Dalian 2011?

By Sebastien Marot, Executive Director, Friends-International, Cambodia; Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Asia, 2009

The World Economic Forum Dalian 2011 is closing – so fast… and so much happened…
My main challenge?

Arriving unwell and having an encounter with a Chinese nurse who gave me some strange pills which made me feel worse and kept me in my hotel room for the first afternoon…

Luckily however, I recovered, and many other much more inspiring encounters awaited at the Forum

• The organized ones with various groups: my fellow social entrepreneurs coming as usual with so many new and refreshing ideas that inspire me to replicate them in the countries where I work (and this might actually happen with their collaboration): for example organizing small countryside shops to buy together, reduce cost and bring products and added services that are actually useful to the communities.
• Meeting the Global Shapers, a new group of young Chinese entrepreneurs: we should have had so much more time to exchange and now a lot is probably going to happen via email.
• Those unexpected or unanticipated encounters – in the bus, around a table, waiting for a session to start: in many ways like speed dating, but with everyone having a fascinating story to tell. What will come out of these… who knows?
• Encounters with inspirational speakers: I sought out quite a few after their presentations to ensure they will allow me to pick their brains some more in the future…

Talking about speakers, I too had to be on stage and tried to defend the margins: the marginalized youth, the marginalized countries (did anyone else talk about Laos?). I thought we had a very interesting panel with so many different perspectives and specialties: again we really did not have enough time to say everything: I could not even talk about the essential role of mothers to ensure the education of children, the importance of giving back the status they deserve to the teachers…

Meanwhile I was still waiting for my personal “WEF moment” and it came on the last day in an especially inspirational and thought provoking session on creativity: a topic that has been on my mind for a while now. As organizations grow they build structures and systems that allow them to become successful. As they continue to grow, so too does the pressure to standardize. How do we keep our own creativity, how do we ensure that the people we work with continue to be creative and how do we ensure that new ideas become a reality in our organizations? This is essential so that we remain what we are: entrepreneurs, otherwise we run the risk of becoming simply gray managers of dull organizations which may have their strengths but are rapidly blown away by new and more dynamic ones… and yet we do have so many more ideas and dreams within us and the drive to make this world a better place.

So I will certainly, in the words of one presenter “shake the frame” on a regular basis!