Top 10 Themes from 2010 Davos

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I participated with CEOs of most of the important social networks in a session called The Power of Social Networks. A few minutes into it, we solicited questions from Facebook. In the first two minutes, 6,000 questions appeared.

New business models are emerging in every industry and throughout society. I've argued that social networking is becoming social production and that a new mode of production is emerging—changing not only how we make software or encyclopedias but physical goods like motorcycles, too.

I was also a panelist at a private session asking the provocative question: "Will social networks replace the nation state?" Of course the answer is no, but it's significant that we can ask the question. If Facebook were a country, it would be more populous than Russia. Nation states have based their authority on control of individual identity, association, and currency within territorial boundaries. Now social networks operating across geographical frontiers have the potential to offer all these things. They also offer the potential for power divorced from traditional political systems. What are the prerequisites for the emergence of the first digital nation-state?

8. Girls, women, and gender: A sea change is underway.

There was lots of buzz about women's emerging purchasing power, known as the Power of the Purse. The expected worldwide increase of women's income by 2013 is $5.1 trillion, which is greater than China's expected growth of $3 trillion for the same period.

Deep interest was evident in the so-called girl effect—that investing in girls offers the biggest ROI in the developing world. In African countries female illiteracy is almost a third higher than that of men. Every year of schooling increases a girl's future earnings by 20%. By earning more and influencing how money is spent, women acquire a stronger voice in all aspects of their lives.

Although women are becoming stronger financially, they are still very weak politically. Countries should be more aggressive at finding female candidates for public office and should seek them outside the regular channels. Increased financial and political power will bring responsibilities. Women could be key in refocusing our political and economic efforts away from consumerism.

9. We need new measures of progress.

There is growing agreement that gross domestic product and gross national product are flawed tools for measuring the health of a country, and that we should instead emphasize the idea of gross national well-being or something similar. Just as some companies have moved to "triple-bottom line" reporting to assess their impact on society, many economists argue that GDP and GNP measure activities that are detrimental to society while ignoring activities that are beneficial.

A pandemic, for instance, increases drug sales and visits to doctors, thereby driving up GNP. Volunteer work or work in the home is not recognized as contributing to GNP. Some governments and academics have developed a wide array of yardsticks to more accurately capture how well and healthfully a country is growing. The key now is to have these new tools recognized as legitimate and to encourage their widespread adoption by governments, the private sector, and the media. Forum attendees realized they could play a real role by promoting the use of more accurate indexes in their home countries.

10. A new big idea: The Global Commons.

As with village parks, we need new global parks in the global village. Some of the global commons areas are well-recognized, such as our atmosphere, oceans, and space, but there are less obvious areas that exist, or should be created, such as know-how concerning sustainability.

Conventional wisdom says you should control and protect proprietary resources and innovations—especially intellectual property—through patents, copyrights, and trademarks. That's often the wrong approach. Contributing to "the commons" is not altruism; it's the best way to build vibrant business ecosystems that harness a shared foundation of technology and knowledge to accelerate growth and innovation.

A good private sector example came when more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies abandoned proprietary research and development projects to support open collaborations such as the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) Consortium and the Alliance for Cellular Signaling. Both projects aggregate genetic information culled from biomedical research in publicly accessible databases. They also use their shared infrastructures to harness resources and insights from the for-profit and not-for-profit research worlds. These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology—innovations that move us toward an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders.

Nobody gives up potential patent rights over new end products. By sharing some basic intellectual property, companies bring products to market more quickly.

One overarching theme at the conference is the confidence that young people hold great potential. We face a lot of work if we don't want to pass on a damaged planet to our children. At the final session at Davos, we watched six inspiring young people present on stage their hopes and ambitions. There were more than a few tears in the audience.

Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World, is the founder and chairman of nGenera Insight. Other books he has authored or co-authored include Wikinomics, Paradigm Shift, The Digital Economy, and Growing Up Digital.

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