Competition is no longer strictly a zero-sum game. Opening to external ideas and innovating with partners are now keys to achieving collective success in business. Collaboration is also driving a revolution in education, and generating creative new solutions to some of our most difficult social problems. An array of related buzzwords – collaboration platforms, crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding, co-creation, complementors, coopetition – represent powerful trends towards greater openness. And these trends are reshaping the meanings of competition and cooperation, and reinvesting the bounds of creativity.
Yet these trends are complex. Open innovation can boost our creativity, but also undermines our systems of intellectual property rights. Co-creation benefits from the same social media that fuel the new social and political activism. Cooperation pervades the natural resources extraction sector, but competition rules the political governance of the same resources. And the open revolution has yet to make a dent on some social issues, like trafficking in children and women’s rights, that would seem to lend themselves to the wisdom of crowds.
The 2013 Women’s Forum Global Meeting asks how we can better marshal competition, cooperation and creativity to our mutual benefit. We showcase champions of open innovation in business, science, and society and probe what they mean for Big Data, intellectual property and privacy. We debate the future of Europe, a laboratory for modern geopolitical cooperation, and examine Russia’s efforts to jumpstart innovation, a laboratory in cross-sectoral collaboration. Expanding the optic, we look at how women compete with one other, and what they can do to support others as they rise in their careers. We highlight essential cooperation for the rights of children and women, and examine the new age of activism.
Discussions of creativity are threaded through the conference program, as it looks at business innovation, social entrepreneurship, and the ways personal creativity shifts as people age and as digital forms of expression expand. And creativity is also celebrated this year in The Discovery, our “off program,” with a complementary program that asks What does creativity mean to you?
The 9th Edition of the Women’s Forum Global Meeting will be held 16-17-18 October 2013 in Deauville, France with the theme “The open world: Compete, cooperate, create”. The Discovery Program will focus on “What does creativity mean to you” and the 2012 Regional Focus will be on The Russian Federation.
© Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society
Read more: http://www.womens-forum.com/meetings/detail/global-meeting-2013