Ten Talking Points for Davos

Wikinomics author Don Tapscott outlines 10 issues, many centered around the potential of Web 2.0, that he'll discuss at the World Economic Forum

by Don Tapscott

The theme of this year's annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos (Jan. 22-27) is "Collaborative Innovation." Important developments in information technology, demographics, business, and society are enabling new paradigms in collaboration in the global economy and leading to profound changes in every institution.

Companies, governments, educational institutions, and others can now orchestrate capability, innovate, and create value for their stakeholders in new ways. Collaborative innovation may hold the solution to many of the vexing problems facing our shrinking planet.

As a Davos fellow, I'm looking forward to discussing a number of issues at this year's events. Below are some of the big issues I'm anxious to explore:

1. Collaborative Democracy

Democracy is in trouble in many countries. Most citizens are passive observers of government, becoming engaged only at time of elections. Is the current model inappropriate for the global "Net Generation" that has grown up collaborating and interacting and participating in social communities? What new models are emerging to engage citizens?

2. The Wikiversity—Collaboration, Learning, Pedagogy, and the Schools

The current model of educational pedagogy hasn't changed for centuries. Based on the lecture, it is one-way, one-size-fits-all, teacher-focused and isolated. The student is a recipient, not a creator of knowledge. For a new generation of young people who have grown up interacting online rather than watching TV (as their parents did), this model is no longer appropriate. A new model is emerging—one that is interactive, customized, student-focused, and collaborative. Schools, colleges, and corporate learning programs that can change along these lines will experience breakthroughs in learning.

3. Collaborative Marketing—Consumers of the World Unite

Collaborative buying communities, predictive markets, new exchanges, and market-extending technologies are shifting power to consumers, with enormous implications. What are leading companies doing in response? Every business school graduate and marketing manager has learned the four P's of marketing—product, price, place, and promotion. The paradigm was one of control—simple and in one direction: Companies marketed to customers. Businesses created products, defined their features and benefits, and set prices. Companies selected places to sell products and services and promoted aggressively through advertising, public relations, direct mail, and other in-your-face programs. They controlled the message. Is marketing changing fundamentally?

4. Changing the Weather—Mass Collaboration and Climate Change

Mark Twain famously said about the weather "Everyone's talking about it but no one's doing anything about it." That's changing. We're in the early days of something unprecedented. Thanks to Web 2.0, the entire world is beginning to collaborate—for the first time ever—around a single idea: changing the weather. For the first time, we have one affordable, global, multimedia, many-to-many communications system, and one issue on which there is growing consensus. Climate change is quickly becoming a nonpartisan issue and citizens, businesses, and governments each have a stake in the outcome. Indeed, the global consensus emerging on climate change is that solving the crisis will require leadership from every country and every sector in society. The killer application for mass collaboration may be saving planet earth—literally.

5. Collaborative Science—When Great Minds Collide

Just as the Enlightenment ushered in a new organizational model of knowledge creation, the technological and demographic forces turning the Web into a massive collaborative workspace are helping transform the realm of science into an increasingly open and collaborative endeavor. In just about every discipline, plummeting computing and collaboration costs are encouraging the formation of large-scale research networks.