Structured collaboration – how the Forum helps develop new ideas

Recently on the Forum:Blog, Adrian Monck, the Forum’s Head of Communications, reflected on what the World Economic Forum is and what it isn’t. Two keywords are “platform” and “multistakeholder”. Put simply, the Forum excels at bringing different (but usually high-level) people together and getting them to think about issues that require diverse perspectives to be tackled and solved.

Much of this happens at meetings, such as the Annual Meeting in Davos. Even with all the possibilities offered by modern information technology, people are still most creative when they meet in person. Rather than just organizing meetings, though, the Forum has evolved into a permanent platform for exchange. This is most evident by looking at the Global Agenda Councils, a network of experts that the Forum set up in 2008 to think continuously about global issues, using both meetings and online collaboration.

The Forum relies on this network and its other communities to develop new ideas for global cooperation. The Global Redesign Initiative ran from 2009 to 2011 and involved some 1,500 people in six events, 15 larger Forum gatherings and countless online sessions. The collective wisdom of the people involved produced 58 innovative proposals across nine thematic areas.

With this, the Forum not only contributed to the discussion on a much needed reform of global governance, it also developed a framework for what I call “structured collaboration” – a guided process of creative collaboration with a fairly large group of people.

A more in-depth description of what we did in the initiative and how the concept of structured collaboration is useful can be found in the article Generating new ideas for global governance: The World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative.