Matthias Catón http://www.caton.de/ Matthias Catón's blog posts en Matthias Catón http://www.caton.de/fileadmin/icons/rss-grafik.gif http://www.caton.de/ 88 31 Matthias Catón's blog posts TYPO3 - get.content.right http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Fri, 06 Jan 2012 23:17:00 +0100 Generating New Ideas for Global Governance: The World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative http://www.caton.de/en/news/archive/2012/01/article/generating-new-ideas-for-global-governance-the-world-economic-forums-global-redesign-initiative.html The Global Redesign Initiative (GRI) was an interdisciplinary, multistakeholder dialogue organized... Global Redesign Initiative (GRI) was an interdisciplinary, multistakeholder dialogue organized by the World Economic Forum to develop recommendations to reform and enhance international cooperation. I was part of the core team that ran the initiative. Over slightly more than two years we involved some 1,500 high-calibre experts who came up with 58 proposals. I've just published an article (see below) that describes what we did. The GRI serves a model for a new type of structured collaboration, using fairly large numbers of selected thought leaders and practitioners who work across silos of expertise.
]]> Allgemeines matthias@caton.de Fri, 06 Jan 2012 23:17:00 +0100 Goodbye Geneva, hello Frankfurt! http://www.caton.de/en/news/archive/2011/09/article/goodbye-geneva-hello-frankfurt.html After three years at the World Economic Forum in Geneva I've started a new position as Program... Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, one of Germany's leading business schools. I'm responsible for the Bachelor programs with about 700 students. The Frankfurt School also offers Master and Doctoral degrees, executive education and other non-degree programs. Dynamic and entrepreneurial with ambitious growth plans it's a great place to be. At the World Economic Forum I helped launch the Network of Global Agenda Councils, a group of more than 1.200 thought leaders, and I had a leading role in the Global Redesign Initiative, a large multistakeholder dialogue that generated creative new ideas for global cooperation. I was also part of the Global Leadership Fellows, an intensive leadership training program organized by the Forum with INSEAD, London Business School, Columbia University and The Wharton School.]]> Allgemeines matthias@caton.de Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:39:00 +0200 Commemorating the victims of 9/11 http://www.caton.de/en/news/archive/2011/09/article/commemorating-the-victims-of-911.html Today it's been ten years since September 11th, 2001, the day that many claim changed the world. I... You can find them on Flickr.]]> Allgemeines matthias@caton.de Sun, 11 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200 Have a question? Ask the box. http://www.caton.de/en/news/archive/2011/07/article/have-a-question-ask-the-box.html We often think that progress is achieved through more sophistication. That is true particularly in... Question Box is doing just that. The organization has developed a simple box that is set up in a village. The box has a button to connect people to an operator whom they can ask questions in their local language. The operator looks up the answer online and conveys the information back immediately. It's a simple concept, but it solves some important obstacles for many people in the developing world to access information online: language barriers, illiteracy and problems around the availabilitly of IT technology.]]> Allgemeines matthias@caton.de Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:06:00 +0200 Using design to generate business models http://www.caton.de/en/news/archive/2011/06/article/using-design-to-generate-business-models.html Seldomly is a book that's written for a business audience both entertaining and of immediate... Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur is such an exception. It lays out a complete framework for describing, changing and inventing business models. It uses a canvas with nine elements that every business and organization has to define for its products and services: (1) customer segments, (2) value proposition, (3) channels, (4) customer relationships, (5) revenue streams, (6) key resources, (7) key activities, (8) key partnerships and (9) cost structure. In addition, the book describes several processes for business model generation, based on techniques known from the world of design, such as prototyping, storytelling and visual thinking. Despite of what the name might suggest, the approach can be easily applied not only to business, but to any form of offering and is therefore also useful to non-profits, governments and virtually all sorts of projects. Being a book that advocates a design approach the book is itself beautifully laid out, which makes it nice to look at, but not always very practical to read. Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur 2010: Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.]]> Allgemeines matthias@caton.de Sat, 18 Jun 2011 22:00:00 +0200 Bringing business and development assistance closer together http://www.caton.de/en/news/archive/2011/06/article/bringing-business-and-development-assistance-closer-together.html Few people doubt nowadays that private enterprise can do wonders when it comes to developing... World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town (4-6 May). The session was part of the follow-up on the Forum's Global Redesign Initiative. Specifically, participants discussed three areas.

Advocacy and information

Few people doubt that developing countries provide ample possibilities for entrepreneurs and investors, but providing information about specific opportunities and convincing investors is more difficult to achieve. How can these opportunities be better communicated through enhanced advocacy and transparency?

Synergies

Everybody talks about the need for holistic solutions, but silo mentality often prevails. What can be done to transform intentions into action and make sure that actors collaborate better across sectors and between business, governments and NGOs?

Changing patterns of financing

Traditionally, development cooperation relied heavily on Western countries as donors. Recently, however, other actors have entered the scene: emerging countries such as China and Brazil, privately-funded organizations such as the Gates Foundation and private (social) investors. How does this change development cooperation and what challenges and opportunities arise from it?

Read and download the session summary here.]]> Allgemeines matthias@caton.de Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200 Supporting high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging countries http://www.caton.de/en/news/archive/2011/05/article/supporting-high-impact-entrepreneurs-in-emerging-countries.html Recently I observed how Endeavor, a New-York based non-profit, selected its next round of... Endeavor, a New-York based non-profit, selected its next round of high-impact entrepreneurs from emerging countries. The process is highly competitive. Among the companies that were selected was a Turkish online flower shop, a Jordanian pharmaceutical company and a Lebanese furniture maker. All entrepreneurs who make it to the "International Selection Panel" have been vetted on different levels in their home countries. They then present their companies and themselves to panels consisting of seasoned entrepreneurs, senior executives and experienced investors. Once selected, entrepreneurs receive support through mentoring, networking opportunities and strategic advice. But even those who don't make it benefit tremendously from the feedback they receive. Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnists, has called Endeavor "the best anti-poverty program of all". I was really impressed by the drive and the dynamism of the entrepreneurs and, of course, by the passion of Endeavor's Founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg and her staff. If you want to know more about Endeavor, watch this short video on YouTube or have a look at a recent report on global entrepreneurship, co-produced with the World Economic Forum.]]> Allgemeines matthias@caton.de Sat, 28 May 2011 19:54:00 +0200 A Connected World: What the World’s Leaders Discussed in Davos http://www.caton.de/en/news/archive/2011/03/article/a-connected-world-what-the-worlds-leaders-discussed-in-davos.html The theme of the recent World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos was “Shared Norms for the New... World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos was “Shared Norms for the New Reality”. But if there had been an unofficial motto, it would have been “everything is connected”. Participants were connected to one another and to the world via electronic communication devices. More than ever before, people blogged, tweeted and filmed. This complemented the Forum’s own numerous social media activities and made the Meeting – once criticized by some for being a closed and secluded affair – a truly interactive global event. But the sense of connection went beyond the participants themselves and their gadgets. The general mood was that the world itself is more interdependent. Risks and opportunities, the East and the West, the business and public sector, the rich and the poor – they all suddenly seem to be connected like communicating vessels. This is the “new reality” referred to by the theme of the Meeting.

The biggest risks

There was a lot of talk about so-called fat tails, catastrophic events with an unusually high likelihood. These include terrorism and natural and man-made disasters, but also currency wars and cybercrime. Because of global interdependence, the repercussions of these potential events are much broader. Technology, particularly Internet communication, paradoxically both increases risks and helps mitigate them. It helps to mitigate them by offering fast and comprehensive ways to share information about threats and solutions. At the same time, the fact that everything is connected makes it easier to launch wide-spreading attacks. It also enables faster change, as could be seen in Tunisia and Egypt, where events were unfolding as participants gathered in Davos. Communication technology makes information sharing faster, but it also requires faster decision-making by governments and businesses if they do not want to risk being overtaken by events. The ease with which data can spread – including classified information such as that shared on the WikiLeaks platform – makes openness and transparency the only option for both the public and the private sector.

More government, please – and less

Part of the new reality is also that there are simultaneous demands for more government action and for a stronger role of business. One of the biggest fears voiced in Davos was that governments would be unable to achieve results on a number of macroeconomic challenges, most notably monetary imbalances that result in unsustainable flows of “hot money” into emerging countries and the threat of increased trade protectionism. Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini coined the term “G-Zero”, a world in which no country is willing or able to lead, which became a much-referred to buzzword in the conversations among participants. This demand for more government action contrasted with other areas, where an almost complete disillusion with public policy led to a strong preference for market solutions. This was most obvious in the area of sustainability. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon paraphrased this by saying that “we need a revolution. We need a revolutionary change, revolutionary action. We need a free market revolution for global sustainability.” For the world’s ability to stop climate change there seems to be a wide consensus that the private sector will have to play a key role and that the task of governments is primarily to set clear incentives and reliable rules for corporations. In a session on water, food and energy, for example, panellists emphasized that having a market price for water would encourage a more sustainable use of this finite resource and improve efficiency without relying on heavy regulation and controls.

Better global cooperation

Not surprisingly for a meeting that brings together business, governments, experts and society, there was a widespread belief that most problems can only be solved by having different players work together. This is also true for international cooperation. Last year, the World Economic Forum presented the proposals of its Global Redesign Initiative, a broad collaborative endeavour that produced ideas on how to enhance global cooperation and global governance. Many of the topics were again hotly discussed in various sessions. Whereas almost everybody seemed to agree on the need to involve, for example, non-governmental organizations to solve global challenges, participants struggled to find clear answers to which organization should have a say on which issue. The beauty of governments and international organizations such as the UN is that they have legitimacy, although not always the solutions.

The difference between macro and micro

Despite all the connectedness, there was an interesting divergence between a general concern for how things are going and a very positive outlook as far as personal perspectives are concerned. As the Forum’s Chairman Klaus Schwab put it in his opening address, the world is seeing macro-level pessimism combined with micro-level optimism. A lot of people, for example, express concern over future conflict between an increasingly more assertive China and the West over natural resources, while at the same time stressing the great business opportunities they see for their companies in China and other emerging markets. Part of this may be due to different time horizons people apply: longer when talking about broad trends, shorter when referring to personal opportunities.

The new reality

One might get the impression that the world is more confusing than ever. Most issues are interconnected, while people at the same time come to oddly different conclusions depending on whether they talk about specific opportunities for their companies or general developments. Yet, this is only the new reality we live in: a world that is more complex, more fluid and more interdependent than ever before – a world in which stability is not a value in itself anymore and those who try to maintain it at all costs may end up with more instability instead. This makes things messy, but also produces completely new opportunities to solve some longstanding global challenges. It is the new reality – now we just have to agree on shared norms.

This article was published in the March 2011 issue of The Edge, a business magazine serving Qatar and the Gulf region.]]> Allgemeines matthias@caton.de Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:29:00 +0100 A Look at 2011 http://www.caton.de/en/news/archive/2011/01/article/a-look-at-2011.html The world is entering 2011 facing new challenges as well as a significant number of unresolved... World Economic Forum, the Annual Meeting is about listening to people, identifying new topics and making sure that the items on the agenda match the needs of the world and the interests of the leaders. For 2011 this is important to make the Meeting as successful as the previous ones. Although it all started with the Meeting in Davos forty years ago and the Annual Meeting is still the World Economic Forum's most important event, the Forum today is about much more than meetings. It is a platform where high-level people interact and is a catalyst of ideas. Our motto, "committed to improving the state of the world", drives the activities.

The Challenges Ahead

The Forum recently asked the members of its Global Agenda Councils, a network of more than 1,200 international experts across 72 different topics, what the biggest challenges were for 2011. The five most important ones are global power shifts, population growth, uncertain economic recovery, income inequality and shortage of resources. I would call these trends, as they reflect patterns of change in the world that will accompany us in the foreseeable future. Underneath these broad trends are specific issues that will be important items on the political agenda in 2011. Global power shifts will have a geopolitical and an economic component. Rising tensions in Asia, for example between Japan and China and between North and South Korea, indicate a shifting focus. Economically, the world still faces a conflict between the United States and China about the supposedly undervalued Chinese currency and the global threat of a relapse to trade protectionism. Population growth is also a long-term trend. The world's population, currently at almost seven billion, is forecast to peak at around nine billion in 2050. However, the growth rate is falling and underneath the umbrella of population growth there are very different challenges. Whereas population grows quickly in some regions, others – including Japan and Europe – face ageing and declining populations; China will also face this as a consequence of its one-child policy. This calls for creative solutions in terms of migration and talent mobility but many questions are not addressed, not least because they are hugely unpopular in countries that need increased immigration. Economic recovery is still uncertain and above all unequal. Even within relatively homogeneous Europe, there is an increasing gap between highly competitive countries such as Germany and the Nordic countries and the South – Greece, Portugal and Spain – which not only suffer from a debt crisis (in both the public and the private sector) but more importantly these countries are seriously uncompetitive and need to undertake painful structural reforms. In the US, the unemployment rate is still close to 10 per cent, only slightly below its all-time high. Although the situation in emerging countries looks better, high levels of liquidity mean that a lot of capital flows into these countries, with the associated risk of creating asset bubbles. Income inequality seems to be rising. Here, it is necessary to distinguish between inequalities within and between countries. Huge inequalities within countries can destabilize societies. Traditionally, the most unequal region was Latin America, but by some estimates China has now reached similar levels. Destabilization can have wider security implications, but it should be noted that neither Latin America nor China is a source of international terrorism and, therefore, the equation that is sometimes made between the two seems far-fetched. Inequality between countries will stimulate migration and lead to challenges very similar to those which were mentioned above related to population growth. Finally, as China and other emerging countries continue to grow, the demand for natural resources will increase. This will lead to competition with the West over access to these resources, as can be seen in the critical stance of many Western countries on China's engagement in Africa. For exporters of natural resources – often developing countries – this can be an opportunity, as there are now more potential buyers. However, whether this can be used well depends on local governance structures more than anything else. In the mid-term the question will be how growth can be made less resource-intensive.

Shared Norms for the New Reality

This year's theme for the Annual Meeting in Davos emphasizes that the world we are living in is different. Different not just because of the financial crisis that shook the world two years ago and whose consequences can still be felt, but different because the trends outlined above fundamentally change the way we see the world and how we act in it, as individuals, as companies and as nations. To discuss these issues, the Annual Meeting's sessions are organized in four clusters. The first deals with the new reality and the ways to respond to it. The second is about the economy and more inclusive growth. This cluster also deals with unresolved lessons from the financial crisis. The third cluster is about the G20 agenda. Although the G20 is no cure-all, it is one of the most important new structures in global cooperation. The World Economic Forum would like to stimulate the discussion around the G20 agenda and bring non-governmental actors to the table to support it. Finally, the fourth cluster concerns risk. In today's interconnected world even local natural disasters can have global impact. Instabilities from systemic risks, including financial ones, can spread quickly and spin out of control. The World Economic Forum wants to facilitate ways to understand and react to global risks in a more comprehensive, proactive way. To this end, the Forum will launch at the Annual Meeting its Risk Response Network, which is a new process to continuously monitor and assess risks that affect the business community and the world.

More than just Davos

Although the Annual Meeting in Davos is the most visible of our activities, the Forum today is much more than just Davos. In 2010, we organized ten Summits in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. In addition, public-private partnerships bring together our business community with governments and non-profit organizations around issues as diverse as water, education and the fight against corruption. Through the Network of Global Agenda Councils---established in 2008---the Forum has built a strong intellectual resource with more than 1,200 experts to harness collaborative insights from the world's brightest minds, breaking down barriers and silo-thinking. The most visible outcome of this network so far was its work on our Global Redesign Initiative. The Councils and other Forum communities worked over the past two years on proposals to reform the systems, institutions and mechanisms of global cooperation to make it easier for the world to get together and solve joint challenges. Many of the fifty-eight proposals that are part of the initiative address the challenges outlined above. For the World Economic Forum, this marked a milestone in its development towards becoming a true catalyst of ideas, not just at our meetings, but continuously throughout the year.

Not just governments

At the start of 2011 the world faces many challenges. Many of them are leftovers which we couldn't solve in 2010. That's the bad news. The good news is that we have the tools and the possibilities to make real progress. Modern technologies make worldwide communication easy. In emerging countries, new middle classes grow who can and should take interest in the world's problems and play a vital role to solve them. The financial crisis of the past two years has made it clear that neither business nor governments alone can deal with these issues. We need the public and the private sector to work together with non-profit organizations to make it happen. The World Economic Forum, with its experience and its unique ability to bring together these diverse groups, is ideally positioned to facilitate this process. Being more relevant than ever is one of the reasons why the interest in our events and our activities keeps growing as we enter our 41st year of existence. A slightly edited version of this article was published under the title "The Road to Davos: A Look at 2011" in the January 2011 issue of The Edge, a business magazine serving Qatar and the Gulf region.]]> Allgemeines matthias@caton.de Tue, 11 Jan 2011 12:39:00 +0100 Solving Global Challenges by Focusing on People and Thinking beyond the State http://www.caton.de/en/news/archive/2010/12/article/solving-global-challenges-by-focusing-on-people-and-thinking-beyond-the-state.html Many of the world’s challenges such as climate change, trade liberalization and development seem... An inadequate framework of institutions A great part of this inability is due to inadequate institutional arrangements. This is most obvious with the United Nations. The Security Council with its five permanent members, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russia and China, reflects the geopolitical reality after World War II, not that of the 21st century. Similarly, voting rights in the Board of Governors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) give Western countries weight at the expense of emerging countries, despite a recent agreement for partial reform. Yet, the problem is not just about outdated institutional arrangements. The G20 was created as a new informal body to precisely overcome shortcomings of other institutions that were either too exclusive, such as the G8 group of leading economies, or too unwieldy, such as the UN General Assembly. The idea was that leading developed and emerging countries from different parts of the world would meet to find solutions to the most pressing issues. With the exception of a few agreements in 2009 in the middle of the financial crisis, the group did not make concrete progress on any issue, except for some fairly vague declarations of intent.

Focusing on people

What is attempted to be achieved by solving global challenges is to improve the conditions of life for billions of people and to ensure the future of humanity. It’s about people, but most of the discussion is about states. This is where the concept of human security comes into play. Human security focuses on the human being and aims at protecting humans from various sorts of threats. It was defined in the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report as “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want”. The report defined seven dimensions of human security: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security. Critics have argued that this is far too broad a definition to be useful and that human security should deal with protecting populations from direct physical violence only, such as genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. This is the narrower idea behind the “Responsibility to Protect”, an international norm that was triggered by the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. It stipulates that states have a responsibility to protect its citizens from violence and that the international community is obliged to assist countries in doing so and ultimately intervene if a country fails to provide protection. Canada, for example, is an advocate of this narrower concept, whereas Japan – which is traditionally much more reluctant to talk about military intervention – sees the broader concept of human security as a pillar of its foreign policy. Ultimately, though, the usefulness of a concept is determined by the question whether it contributes to the solution of a problem. The problem is an increasing number of global challenges – problems that no single country can solve on its own – against the backdrop of inadequate institutions and mechanisms of international cooperation.

The Global Redesign Initiative

Over the past 18 months, the World Economic Forum has embarked on an ambitious undertaking, the Global Redesign Initiative. The Forum contacted global leaders from business, governments, international organizations, academia and civil society and asked them how they would reform the global cooperation system to help solve the challenges outlined above and others. Some 1,500 experts participated in this endeavour, resulting in 58 concrete proposals across nine thematic areas, from economic issues to security, development and the environment. The proposals address issues as diverse as how to protect the world’s oceans and how to give incentives to private enterprise for investing in clean-energy products. What many of them have in common is that they go beyond traditional international relations. It is no longer just the sovereign state that is a legitimate actor – business and non-governmental organizations have a crucial role to play as well.

Multidimensional Global Cooperation

Richard Samans, Klaus Schwab and Mark Malloch-Brown from the World Economic Forum have identified four building blocks for a reformed, extended system of truly multidimensional international cooperation: (1) high-level political commitments and objectives, such as the UN Millennium Development Goals; (2) multilateral legal frameworks and institutions, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; (3) plurilateral coalitions involving different groups of stakeholders, both public and private; and (4) information metrics to assist with prioritization and decision-making. An example for the latter is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of international experts set up by the UN to provide independent, reliable information about climate change. The IPCC’s role was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. While international cooperation needs to be improved in all four dimensions, plurilateral coalitions are the least developed. This is where most progress can be made. Having smaller groups of countries move ahead on a specific issue with the help and active involvement of other actors, such as business and non-governmental organizations, can help unblock stalled processes. The Global Redesign Initiative has a number of proposals that would enhance human well-being and human security through this kind of arrangements.

For example, Sustainable Energy Free Trade Areas (SEFTAs) would create special free-trade areas for clean energy products and thereby give incentives to business to invest by offering a larger, easy to reach market. The New Humanitarian Business Model would bring business, governments and community organizations together to provide assistance to countries in emergency situations. The Global Civilian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Partnership would be a global public-private partnership to manage the civilian nuclear fuel cycle as a means of reducing the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. There is a good possibility to solve the key global challenges that confront the world today. But to do so, there is a need to move away from the traditional, state-centred concept of international cooperation. A focus on human beings through the lens of human security and a new perspective through multidimensional international cooperation, which includes non-state actors in the equation, will help break the deadlock that the world is currently facing. A slightly edited version of this article was published under the title "Solving Global Challenges in the 21st Century" in the December 2010 issue of The Edge, a business magazine serving Qatar and the Gulf region.]]> Allgemeines matthias@caton.de Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0100