2014 Global Action Report

2014 GLOBAL ACTION REPORT

Shared Value

Abundance

CONVENE

CHALLENGE

Innovation

CONNECT

COMMUNICATE

{ Yes, our world

needs your ideas and leadership.} nashville 2014 November 17 & 18, 2014 Music City Center, Nashville, Tennesse USA 2014 Summit Registration: www.globalactionplatform.org Invited guests are top senior level decision makers, leaders and innovators from the corporate, government, academic, media, investment, and NGO communities from around the world.

“The Global Action Platform represents a powerful coalition of cross-sector leaders dedicated to creating abundance through innovation in food, health, and prosperity.”

–

Dr. Fareed Zakaria, CNN

Foreign affairs program “Fareed Zakaria GPS”

and columnist for The Washington Post

The 3rd Annual Global Action Summit is a program of the Global Action Platform and the CumberlandCenter, a 501c3 non profit organization – Creating abundance through innovation in food, health and prosperity. © 2104 CumberlandCenter, Nashville, Tennessee, USA +1 (877) 300-5806

CHAIRMAN’S NOTE

WELCOME In November 2013 over four hundred leaders from four continents convened in Nashville at the newly opened Music City Center to discuss, interact and take action on some of the world’s most pressing grand challenges surrounding food, health, and prosperity.

Dr. Scott T. Massey Chairman and CEO

Among many notable accomplishments, the recipient of the 2013 $1 Million Global Action Challenge Award was announced to eradicate Lyme Disease. The award has subsequently grown to $1.5 million, and we have high expectations that the exceptionally competent winning team will be successful. We have now initiated an early stage fund, and recipients from both funds will be announced at this year’s Global Action Summit November 17-18, 2014, which will be held once again at the magnificent Music City Center.

Additionally SHOUTAmerica has now merged with the Global Action Platform.

This merger brings assets and a network of young leaders dedicated to transforming healthcare.

I am especially pleased to report that the internationally acclaimed CNN host and The Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria, who was last year’s keynote speaker, has now assumed an ongoing leadership role as moderator and keynote presenter for the upcoming, and subsequent Global Action Summits. There is no question that Dr. Zakaria brings extensive thought leadership and knowledge of global issues that will make a significant contribution to our work.

As I reflect on this past year, I stand amazed and truly energized by the leadership, the alliances, the ideas, and actions that have evolved so quickly. This social leadership movement that we call the Global Action Platform is firmly on the path to create abundance in food, health, and prosperity through the growth of regional innovation hubs.

With our focus on young leaders, we are harnessing the first global generation to create abundance for all. I invite you to join our five year road map.

Scott T. Massey, PhD Chairman and CEO CumberlandCenter Global Action Platform

JULY 2014

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THE WORLD IN 2050

MASTHEAD

Global Action Platform Steeering Committee

Diplomatic Courier A Global Affairs Magazine

Ted Abernathy, Jr. Economic Leadership LLC Cynthia H. Barbera e-Global Reader LLC Jack Bovender HCA (retired) Phil Bredesen Governor of Tennessee (2003-11) Steve Brophy Dollar General Corp Congressman Jim Cooper U.S. House of Representatives Ryan Doyle oneC1TY Kitty Moon Emery Global Action Platform Beth Fortune Vanderbilt University Darrell S. Freeman Zycron Computer Services Jim Frierson Compass Innovation William H. Frist U.S. Senate Maj. Leader (1995-07) Arlene Garrison Oak Ridge Assoc. Universities Jose Gonzalez Belmont University Cheryl Harrison Global Action Platform Carol Hudler Hudler Success Strategies John Ingram Ingram Industries Clay Jackson BB&R Insurance Conrad Kiechel Milken Institute Hank Adam Locklin TN Film, Ent., & Music Comm’n L. Randolph Lowry III Lipscomb University Scott T. Massey Global Action Platform Alex McCalla UC Davis Clayton McWhorter Clayton Associates John Morgan TN Board of Regents Jean-Claude Saada Cambridge Holdings, Inc. Howard-Yana Shapiro Mars Incorporated Mike Shmerling XMI Holdings Inc. Thomas J. Sherrard Sherrard & Roe, PLC Remy Szykier Aegis Health Security Steve Turner The Family Office Juergen Voegele The World Bank Group

Editor-in-chief

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GLOBAL ACTION REPORT

Ana C. Rold ACRold@diplomaticourier.org

Managing Editor Chrisella Sagers Herzog CSHerzog@diplomaticourier.org

Senior Editor Paul Nash

Creative Director Christian Gilliham

Editorial Assistants Rob Arcand Chiara Romano Bosch Alexcia Chambers Pauline Gebczak Chris Herman

Senior Photographer Sebastian Rich

Global Advisory Council Andrew M. Beato Sir Ian Forbes Lisa Gable Kirk L. Jowers Mary D. Kane Greg Lebedev Scott T. Massey Anita McBride Wayne Scholes

Sales/Business Maria San Jose MSJose@diplomaticourier.org

Publisher: Medauras Global PUBLISHING. The Global Action Report is a product of the Global Action Platform, published in collaboration with Diplomatic Courier magazine. The Diplomatic Courier magazine is produced by Medauras Global, an independent publishing firm based in Washington, DC. The magazine is printed six times a year and publishes a blog and online commentary weekly at www.diplomaticourier.com.

EDITORIAL. The articles in this report both in print and online represent the views of their authors and do not reflect those of the editors and the publishers. The authors are responsible for the facts and interpretations.

PERMISSIONS. Authors retain all copyrights to their articles.

None of the articles can be reproduced without their permission and that of the publishers. For permissions please email the editors at: editors@diplomaticourier.org with your request.

LEGAL. Copyright Š 2006-2014 Diplomatic Courier and Medauras Global. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced without written consent of the publishers. All trademarks that appear in this publication are the property of the respective owners. Any and all companies featured in this publication are contacted by Medauras Global and the Diplomatic Courier to provide advertising and/or services. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information in this publication, however, Medauras Global and the Diplomatic Courier magazine make no warranties, express or implied in regards to the information, and disclaim all liability for any loss, damages, errors, or omissions.

CONTACT. Mailing Address: Diplomatic Courier, 1660 L Street, NW, Suite 501, Washington, DC 20036, U.S. Fax: 202-659-5234. E-mail: info@diplomaticourier.org and editors@diplomaticourier.org.

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DIGITAL EDITION. A digital edition can be downloaded for free on the Diplomatic Courier App on the iStore and Google Play.

Technology Officer Kyle Herzog ITsupport@diplomaticourier.org A Global Affairs Magazine

Contributors Michele Acuto Michael Aiken Masatoshi Asaoka Akshan de Alwis Justin Goldman Stuart W. Holliday Oscar Montealegre Paul Nadeau Rebecca Park Richard Rousseau

2014 GLOBAL ACTION REPORT

Shared Value

Abundance

CONVENE

Editorial Interns Wynn Tidwell Mary Utermohlen

CHALLENGE

Innovation

CONNECT

COMMUNICATE

EDITOR’S NOTE

THE FUTURE OF PROSPERITY For the past four years, the editors and contributors at Diplomatic Courier have embarked on a long-term study of critical trends that will change—or revolutionize —the future. While we do not know yet what the future will look like for urbanization, resources, or jobs, we know that as communicators we need to shift from a tendency to cover scarcity and focus on optimism.

Ana C. Rold Editor-in-Chief

We found that optimism in the Global Action Platform and its annual convening of thought leaders at the Global Action Summit. In November, since the very first summit two years ago, we noticed a different atmosphere in the sessions we had come to cover: there was a general air of hope. The participants at the Global Action Summit are not naïve about the state of the world—they are the ones with the expertise to identify the issues in the first place. Yet, they have the resolve and the know-how to make change happen. Practitioners, scientists, innovators, and investors gather for two days in the Music City of Nashville to forge “uncommon collaborations” and help ensure there is a bright future for our world.

Therein lies the most attractive part of this convening. Not unlike other summits of its genre—the Clinton Global Initiative, the World Economic Forum, or the Aspen Ideas Festival—the Global Action Summit also boasts a high-level list of participants.

But unlike most of the global summits we have covered, in just two years we see the participants forge and continue collaborations well after the summit.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Scott Massey for sharing his vision of abundance and prosperity with me. It happened at a critical time for Diplomatic Courier and I am proud to say that we have served as the Summit’s media partner since day one.

Seeing it grow to new strength each year validates our decision to be so deeply involved.

We are a small part of a growing band of global partners. Our primary job is to be rapporteurs and capture the discussions and proposed solutions from each session during the gathering—a lofty goal, but one we have accepted with both passion and humility. We understand the issues and solutions are bigger than all of us and we are thrilled to play our part in communicating these ideas to a global audience.

We hope you will join us at the Global Action Summit - Nashville this November as well as the several leadership forums the Global Action Platform, Diplomatic Courier, and our partners will host throughout the year.

Ana C. Rold Editor-in-Chief Diplomatic Courier

JULY 2014

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CONTENTS

SECTION ONE

PERSPECTIVES 10 /

African Solutions for New African Food Crops and Nutrition

by Howard-Yana Shapiro, PhD, Chief Agricultural Officer, Mars, Inc. Senior Fellow, Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis

12 /

Creating Abundance Through Innovation in Food, Health, and Prosperity

by Peter Diamandis, PhD, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, XPrize Foundation

14 /

Corporate Philanthropic Strategy

by Cheryl Carrier, Director, Ford Motor Company Fund; Cindy Rodgers, Executive Director, Alignment Nashville; National Ford Next Generation Learning team; and, Fred Carr, Operating Officer, Metro Nashville School District

16 /

Anytime, Anywhere Talent: The future of the Global Enterprise

by Balaji Ganapathy, Head of Workforce Effectiveness, North America, Tata Consultancy Services

21 /

The Urgency for Academic-Business Collaboration: Establishing a Global Food System Roadmap

by Roger N. Beachy, PhD, Executive Director,World Food Center, University of California Davis

23 /

The Urgency for Global Action on Food

by Juergen Voegele, PhD, Director, Agriculture and Environmental Services, The World Bank Sustainable Development Network,World Bank Group

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25 /

Saving Lives, Increasing Economic Growth, and Lifting Millions Out of Poverty: The Push for Universal Health Coverage

by Tim Evans, Senior Director of Health, Nutrition, and Population, World Bank Group

26 / The Urgency for an Innovation Roadmap to Transform Healthcare

by Jeff Balser, MD, PhD,Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs,Vanderbilt University’s Medical Center, Dean, School of Medicine,Vanderbilt University

29 /

Economic Development Goes Societal Needs: A Work in Progress

by Christian Ketels, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard University, President, TCI

30 /

Building an Abundant Ecosystem for Prosperity: The Competitiveness Agenda

by Emiliano Duch, Lead Specialist, Competitive Industries Global Practice, World Bank Group

“This social leadership movement that we call the Global Action Platform is firmly on the path to create abundance in food, health, and prosperity through the growth of regional innovation hubs.�

-Scott T. Massey, PhD, Chairman and CEO, Cumberland Center / Global Action Platform Steering Committee

SECTION TWO

FOOD SESSIONS

32 /

Building an Abundant Ecosystem for Food: Finding Consensus on What Is Good Food Panelists: Bill Shireman, CEO, Future 500 Harold Schmitz, PhD, Chief Science Officer, Mars, Inc. Jerry Steiner, Founder, Alta Group Consulting, formerly EVP Sustainability and Corporate Affairs, Monsanto Mike Jacobson, PhD, Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest Michael Dimock, President, Roots of Change

36 /

New Enterprise Models for Food: Security, Nutrition, and Logistics Panelists: Mark Cackler, Manager of the Agriculture and Rural Development Department,World Bank Group Harold Schmitz, PhD, Chief Science Officer, Mars, Inc. John Ruff, Immediate Past President, Institute of Food Technologists David Schmidt, CEO, International Food Information Council Nicholas Haan, PhD, Director, Global Grand Challenges, Singularity University

40 /

Sustainable Sourcing Models for the Food Chains: A New Material Sourcing Framework Panelists: Howard-Yana Shapiro, PhD, Chief Agricultural Officer, Mars, Inc. Tom Tomich, PhD, Founding Director, Agricultural Sustainability Institute, University of California, Davis Mark Dean, PhD, Professor of Engineering, University of Tennessee Jeff Pfitzer, Director, Gaining Ground, Benwood Foundation

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The Frontiers of Food Innovation: World Food Prize Laureates and Leaders Panelists: Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, President,World Food Prize Philip E. Nelson, PhD, 2007 World Food Prize Laureate, Professor Emeritus, Purdue University Jo Luck, 2010 World Food Prize Laureate; President, Heifer International Iftikar Mostafa, PhD, Senior Agriculture Economist,World Bank Group John Ruff, Immediate Past President, Institute of Food Technologists Kimberly Reed, Executive Director, International Food Information Council Foundation

48 /

Abundance Intelligence: A Systems Approach Panelists: Cynthia H. Barbera, Founding Leadership Committee, Global Action Summit Ray Rodriguez, PhD, Director, Global Healthshare Initiative, UC Davis Mark Dean, PhD, Professor of Engineering, University of Tennessee Eric Euwe, Managing Partner, QVS Consulting Greg Kandankulm, Program Manager, Real New Energy, GreenIntelli, Aegis and GoodSpheres

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CONTENTS

SECTION THREE

HEALTH SESSIONS

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Building an Abundant Ecosystem for Health Panelists: William H. Frist, MD, Former Senate Majority Leader Jean-Claude Saada, Chairman & CEO, Cambridge Holdings, Inc. Eric Bing, MD, PhD, Director of Global Health, George W. Bush Institute Claire Pomeroy, MD, MBA, President, Lasker Foundation Jeffrey R. Balser, MD, PhD, Dean School of Medicine,Vanderbilt University Bill Gracey, President & CEO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee

64 / 56 /

Frontiers for Health Innovation: Prevention to Slow Demand

Panelists: Ray Rodriguez, PhD, Director, Global Healthshare Initiative Sunil Kripalani, MD, Associate Professor,Vanderbilt University Martin Rash, Chairman, RegionalCare Jason Dinger, PhD, President and CEO, MissionPoint Health Partners Ernie Clevenger, President, CareHere, LLC

Panelists: Arlene Garrison, PhD,VP, Oakridge Associated Universities Mark Dean, PhD, Professor of Engineering, University of Tennessee Steve Bares, PhD, President and CEO, Memphis Bioworks Steve Currall, PhD, Dean, Graduate School of Management, UC Davis

New Enterprise Models For Health

68 / 60 /

New Enterprise Models For Health Wellbeing, Population, Health Behavior, and Society Panelists: Bruce Bloom, PhD, CSO, Cures Within Reach Sundeep Dugar, PhD, President and CEO, Sphaera Pharma Bruce German, PhD, Director, Foods for Health Institute Russell Rothman, MD, Director, Center for Health Services Research, Vanderbilt University

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Abundance Intelligence: A Systems Approach Panelists: Blackford Middleton, MD, CIO, Center for Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Trent Nichols, MD, PhD, Senior Research Staff, Oakridge National Laboratory Kristen Beck, Girls Who Code, Summit Fellow, Global Action Summit Claire Pomeroy, MD, MBA, President, Lasker Foundation Nitesh V. Chawla, PhD, Director, Data Interference Analytics and Learning Lab, University of Notre Dame

“How we prepare for a world of nine billion inhabitants will require collaboration across many sectors. The leaders gathering at the Global Action Summit understand the stakes and have already embarked on this journey with us.� -Ana C. Rold, Editor-in-Chief, Diplomatic Courier

SECTION FOUR

PROSPERITY SESSIONS

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Building an Abundant Ecosystem for Prosperity: The Competitiveness Agenda Panelists: Ted Abernathy Jr., Managing Partner, Economic Leadership LLP James Frierson, JD, Founder, Compass Innovation Advisors Christian Ketels, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard University, President, TCI Emiliano Duch, MPA, Lead Private Sector Development Specialist, World Bank Group Scott T. Massey, PhD, Chairman and CEO, Global Action Platform

76 /

Best Practices in Cluster Strategy: Sector Specific Initiatives Panelists: Christian Ketels, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School Tom Sommer, President, MassMEDIC Bob Breault, PhD, Founding Director and CEO, Arizona Optics Industry Association Rebecca Bagley, President and CEO, NorTech

80 /

Best Practices in Cluster Strategy: Clusters as an Instrument of Regional Competitiveness Efforts Panelists: Christian Ketels, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard University, President, TCI Benjamin Erulkar, JD, Senior Vice President, Economic Development, Detroit Regional Chamber Neil McLeane, Executive Director, New Carolina Lee Anne Nance, EVP, Research Triangle Regional Partnership Jennifer Zeller, Director of Research, Georgia Power

86 /

Experiences from Federally Funded Cluster Efforts Panelists: Mark Muro, Senior Fellow and Policy Director, Brookings Institution Phil Paradice, Atlanta Regional Director, U.S. Economic Development Administration Scott Henry, Senior Adviser, Office of Entrepreneurial Development, U.S. Small Business Administration Mark Turner, PhD, President and Principal Associate, Optimal Solutions Group Buzz Patrick, Director for Advanced Manufacturing, Tech 2020 Tiffany Wilson Karp, General Manager and COO, Global Center for Medical Innovation Percy Luney, Vice President, Education, Research and Development of Workforce, Space Florida

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Role of Federal Policies in Shaping Clusters Panelists: Christian Ketels, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School, Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard University, President, TCI Phil Paradice, Atlanta Regional Director, U.S. Economic Development Administration Erin Andrew, Director of Innovation Clusters and Skills Initiatives, U.S. Small Business Administration Ted Abernathy Jr., Managing Partner, Economic Leadership, LLP Dan Berglund, President and CEO, State Science and Technology Institute Scott Stern, PhD, Professor and Chair, Management and Technology, MIT Neil McLean, Executive Director, New Carolina

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SECTION ONE / PERSPECTIVES

African Solutions for New African Food Crops and Nutrition

STORY BY HOWARD-YANA SHAPIRO, PHD

T

here is an old African proverb that says, “You cannot turn a calf into a cow by slapping mud on its outside.” In other words, no matter how much the added clay takes on the shape of a muscular cow, there is still a scrawny calf inside.

For growth and development to make a difference, it must come from within.

That is the spirit of the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC), an uncommon collaboration that is bringing the benefits of high-tech plant breeding to the kitchen gardens that feed the 600 million people who live in rural Africa.

In those gardens grow crops little known in the North: marula, Ethiopian mustard, egusi, cocoyam, African eggplant, winter-thorn acacia, Bambara groundnut, moringa, and more. These plants are little studied by science, because they are not internationally traded commodities. Thus they are dubbed “orphan” crops.

While the AOCC involves collaborators from three continents, it is essentially an African venture, adopted by African heads of state at an African Union (AU) meeting

and is partly directed by the AU’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).

“Malnutrition is a direct product of food insecurity,” said the NEPAD CEO, Dr. Ibrahim Mayaki. “A large number of Africans suffer from deficiencies of micronutrients such as minerals, iron, and vitamin A with devastating effects on population, including high mortality and morbidity rates, blindness, mental retardation among children, agricultural labor reduction, and poor quality of life.”

AOCC opened a state-of-the-art African Plant Breeding Academy in Kenya late last year, where some 250 African scientists and technicians are being trained to re-sequence, assemble, and annotate the genomes of the orphan crop species. The ultimate goal is to map the genomes of 101 such food crops to guide the development of more robust produce with higher yields and nutritional content.

Other members of the consortium include Mars, Incorporated, the World Agroforestry Centre, which hosts the Academy, BGI, Life Technologies Corporation (providing equipment), the

World Wildlife Fund, the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), iPlant Collaborative, LGC, Google, and Biosciences eastern and central Africa International Livestock Research Institute (BecA - ILRI Hub).

BGI is a genomics institute in China that is doing much of the original sequencing, and has started with the baobab tree (Adansonia digitata), an iconic symbol of Africa whose dried fruit powder is used in many products. The fruit has 10 times the antioxidant level of oranges, twice the amount of calcium as spinach, three times the vitamin C of oranges, four times more potassium than banana, and it also has antiviral properties.

“BGI is dedicated to using genomics technology for the benefit of human beings,” said BGI President Professor Jian Wang. “Having contributed to the sequencing of many critical crops including rice, maize, soybean, potato, pigeonpea, and foxtail millet, we are confident that the combination of capabilities, experience, and resources within AOCC will yield great scientific breakthroughs in African crops research

“For growth and development to make a difference, it must come from within.”

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PERSPECTIVES

and bring advancement to develop improved crop varieties, thus to contribute to the wellbeing of local society.”

The AOCC work will encourage the creation of improved planting materials that will then be offered to smallholder farmers throughout Africa. The data derived from this collaborative effort will be made publicly available to all scientists with the endorsement of the African Union through a process managed by the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture and hosted by the iPlant Collaborative.

“For the continent that is the most malnourished, the poorest, the most rural, and the least forested, the AOCC gives

Africa a chance through new science and its application to address many of its perennial problems of development,” said Professor Tony Simons, director general of the World Agroforestry Centre, at the opening ceremony of the Academy in December 2013.

Children are the primary victims of malnutrition, which causes stunting in more than 35% of African children.

Stunted children do not reach their full potential – physically, mentally, or even financially. Adults who were malnourished as children earn at least 20% less on average than those who weren’t.

Improving food crop varieties can also help Africa manage climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in 2007 that by 2020, climate change will have halved the harvests of rainfed crops in many African countries, and some 96% of all African crops are rainfed, as opposed to irrigated.

Mars, Incorporated led a similar uncommon collaboration that sequenced, assembled, and annotated the cacao (cocoa) genome and made these data publicly available on the Internet to all researchers in 2010. The urgency is obviously higher, and the stakes greater, with African foodcrops. With these uncommon collaborations, Africa is taking a lead in meeting the challenge. ■

Howard-Yana Shapiro, PhD, is the Chief Agricultural Officer for Mars, Incorporated; Senior Fellow, Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis; and Distinguished Fellow at the World Agroforestry Centre.

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Creating Abundance Through Innovation in Food, Health and Prosperity KEYNOTE BY PETER H. DIAMANDIS, PHD

W

orking towards a future of abundance, a special focus on exponential technologies and crowd sourcing is essential. By seeking out fast-growing technologies and the world’s smartest people, we are now more equipped than ever to take on today’s most challenging issues. Although many people doubt this potential, the old way of thinking—in terms of using the hardware of our brains that evolved millions of years ago—is becoming obsolete. Global events continue to move quickly and linear thinking makes it difficult to react to them. Exponential technology has begun to put linear thinking companies such as Kodak out of business, and this trend will continue.

It is important that today’s leaders understand how these two forces— exponential technologies and crowd sourcing—come together to create a world of abundance. At Singularity University we study today’s most rapidly changing technologies: artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, synthetic biology, 3D printing, digital medicine, and network sensors. In this setting, top graduate students from around the world and top executives from Fortune 500 companies come together to discuss these emerging technologies and “Crowd and Community Tools.”

If a company is dependent on innovation inside the organization itself, it is already dead. Instead, using disruptive technology gives a company the power to

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move business at an exponential rate. The Four D’s of Exponential, as it is called, break down this process. When something is digitized, it enters exponential growth— as with digital cameras, and biology and medicine with the integration of Big Data.

Then, products become dematerialized, and any company building these products will go bankrupt. Demonetization saw iTunes reducing the record store to an app, as did Amazon with books, Skype with long distance, and Google with research libraries. Finally the democratization of these technologies provides entrepreneurs who develop a product with an automatic consumer base. For example, by 2016, there are going to be a billion handsets in Africa; any entrepreneur who comes up with a product or service all of a sudden has a billion potential customers in Africa. What all of this means is that in the next 20 years, when products and services become digitized, dematerialized, demonetized, and democratized, all of these capabilities will fit in our pocket.

Independent of what is going on around the world, we continue to build faster computers. In 2023, consumers will be able to buy a $1,000 computer that calculates at 10-16 cycles per second, the rate at which the visual and auditory cortex of our brain does pattern recognition. By 2038, $1,000 will buy a computer with the calculating ability of the entire human race. Calamity will not slow this growth pace. Creating a world of abundance is not a happy or

smooth process. It involves turbulence, and even chaos. Old-model businessmen will not be able to adapt quickly enough, and industries such as healthcare and education will be massively disrupted. But the process will continue.

Areas that are already making such strides include artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Last year, AI passed a major milestone of simultaneous, realtime translation of any language to any language. AI is able to write magazinequality articles and grade college essays as consistent or better than college faculty.

This kind of computational power will become your teacher, consultant, and physician all in one. A child in Mumbai on a cell phone and a billionaire in Manhattan both have access to the same knowledge base and the same consultative power. Similarly, robotics is revolutionizing industries such as medicine, elderly care, manufacturing, and more. A recent study said that within twenty years, 50% of all jobs will be replaced by AI and robotics.

With all of these technological developments, everything can be monitored. Google’s Autonomous Car takes images of everything around it as the car moves. In a world where every car on the American road is imagining all of its surroundings, you could go back and see everything. These technologies coupled with the launch of at least five privately owned orbital constellations at a half meter resolution in low orbit around the earth, more information will

PERSPECTIVES

be collected than ever before. Beyond monitoring through imaging, imagine a future where everything is wired; where head-to-toe measurements are constantly being taken, impacting your health insurance and healthcare.

Similarly, with equal cost and time to build as traditional methods, 3D Printing is changing industry. A technology of digital manufacturing, 3D Printing is saving companies such as GE and Rolls Royce billions of dollars per year by “printing” next generation injectors for jet engines. The applications for this technology are endless, encompassing building materials, prosthetic limbs, food, and even organs.

All of these developments should have companies asking how they can tap into the smartest people around the world to solve problems. Crowd sourcing is the answer. With an end goal in mind, cognitive geniuses around the world can be incentivized to help reach these goals.

Lindburg won a $25,000 prize as the first person to fly across the Atlantic—at the time considered impossible. In eight years, nine different teams had spent $400,000 trying to win this $25,000.

More recently, the X Prize Foundation used the same model with their Space Flight Initiative, offering $10 million to incentivize entrepreneurs. The winners developed a three-person spaceship that landed once and then again within two weeks. Twenty-six teams around the world spent a hundred million dollars going after this $10 million prize. Beyond

the technological advancements this competition brought, it also inspired a new industry.

Now, X Prize is asking where they can launch X Prizes where there are market failures, asking where something should be but isn’t yet? In January 2012, the QualComm Tricorder X Prize was announced, calling on geniuses to build Star Trek’s Tricorder—a handheld device you could talk to—that people could cough on to process the RNA Analysis of the pathogens in a person’s sputum. On the education front, X Prize is prioritizing a new goal: global literacy. There are 80 million children worldwide, a currently unrealistic number for which to provide schools and teachers. X Prize is working to give children without resources, such as a tablet with team software that engages students, making it fun for them to learn basic reading, writing, numeracy, and coding. In addition to education, X Prize is also looking to crowd sourcing to solve problems such as Alzheimer’s disease and urban farming. Crowd sourcing, with its many applications, is being used to catalyze social, medical, scientific, and artistic transformations globally.

Using technological advancements to our advantage is the key to addressing problems that are seemingly without solution. We currently have energy scarcity and energy resource constraints— we are living on a planet bathed in 500 times more energy than we can consume as a species from the sun. And with abundant energy, we also have abundant

water. We have water shortages on a planet that is two-thirds water. Kaemen Slingshot, a technology the size of a dorm room refrigerator with two hoses, can filter any kind of contaminated or salt water and produce the cleanest, medically-standard injectable water at two cents a liter and can make a thousand liters a day. With emerging technologies, we can better allocate our resources and combat the pessimism espoused by today’s media.

The last hundred years have been extraordinary—the per capita income has more than doubled, the capita income for every nation has more than tripled, the cost of food has dropped 13-fold, and we’re living in the most globally peaceful time in history.

Much of today’s learning systems were built for a world a hundred years ago.

The old standard of turning 18, spending four years of studying what you needed to know for the rest of your life, and staying in one place for 40 years until you retire at 65 is no longer valid today. The world is co-evolving with technology. How individuals use their limited memory is up to them, but the future is in digital learning and our readiness to adapt to dramatic change. ■

Peter H. Diamandis, PhD, is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of the XPrize Foundation.

The article is a summary from his keynote address at the Global Action Summit in Nashville, TN on November 12, 2013.

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Corporate Philanthropic Strategy SESSION CONTRIBUTORS: CHERYL CARRIER, Director, Ford Motor Company Fund

CINDY RODGERS, Executive Director, Alignment Nashville

FRED CARR, Operating Officer, Metro Nashville School District

E

ducation is a key focus of the Ford Motor Company Fund’s philanthropic outreach. Ford’s long history in promoting education is a testament to that. Henry Ford opened his first trade school in 1916 and, in his lifetime, helped establish two universities in Detroit and more than 70 schools around the world. A believer in learning by doing, Ford often argued that school systems lost students not because the students did not have potential, but because they did not learn in a traditional way. For this reason, the purpose of Ford’s involvement in education is to transform teaching and learning into a more engaging and exciting forum for students.

Over the last 20 years, this education initiative has evolved into a growing investment in career and technical development.

In an attempt to increase sustainable engagement in high schools, Ford developed a manufacturing curriculum that taught students about manufacturing processes from concept to consumer. The Ford Academy of Manufacturing Science (FAMS) was very well regarded and received wide acclaim, but its prescriptive nature made it difficult to implement and difficult for teachers to modify. To make it scalable and adaptable, Ford took FAMS to a larger stage by moving from the classroom to an entire school with the Henry Ford Academies. These demonstration high schools were attached to public spaces such as the Henry Ford 14

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Museum and became very successful.

But by 2000 the Fund realized that it was either time to update the FAMS curriculum or to create a new curriculum all together.

Working with a group called Education Development Center in Boston, the Fund created a new curriculum designed to accomplish four things. First, to excite all students by engaging them in inquiry and project-based curriculum. Second, to help students improve their social capital by providing coordinated learning experiences through the curriculum that connected them with local employers and post-secondary partners. Third, to develop students’ 21st century skills through the use of teen-based projects—because employees are often technically and academically prepared, but struggle with working in teams or problems solving and critical thinking. Last, to provide students with opportunities to explore careers they may not ever be exposed to in a traditional high school setting.

Initially, many school districts were asking why Ford was even involved with educational curricula. Ford Pass was very different from what the districts had seen in the past. Teachers were no longer on the center-stage; instead they were facilitators of learning. Classrooms were noisy, business and post-secondary partners were in and out of the classroom, and students were learning outside of the classroom. Teacher teams were formed to support the inner disciplinary nature of

the curriculum, and, in the districts eyes, it was chaos. There were early adopters, however, such as the Metro Nashville School District.

As a result of the Ford Pass in the Metro Nashville School District, third party evaluation confirmed that students were more engaged, there were less disciplinary issues in schools, test scores were higher, and graduation rates increased, moving from 58% to over 80%.

Students even formed a clearer picture of their future, evaluating what they did and did not want to do.

In spite of the metrics of success in transforming teaching and learning, some began to wonder if it was enough to impact education as a whole. It became clear that all parts of the educational equation—students, teachers, administrations, and communities—needed to be invested in transformational change.

The best solution to the Fund’s problem was the academy. Academies offered small, career oriented learning communities that aligned well with workforce and economic needs. In this setting, teachers and guidance counselors are able to work very closely with the 200-400 students and parents. This environment also allows for more handson work, encouraging students to work on real-world projects. In communities that are able to develop these academies in their high schools, the programs are both scalable and sustainable.

Today, the idea of transformational

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change has taken over Ford’s agenda, leaving incremental change in the rearview mirror. This transformational change is accomplished through Next Generation Learning (NGL), which improves educational outcomes as well as workforce and economic development by mobilizing educators, employers, and community leaders. Currently running in 16 communities across the country, Ford is giving participants a roadmap of essential practice tools, and they are making it their own. They are increasing cross collaboration and making connections across issues areas.

Reinforcing NGL, Alignment has developed a prescriptive model, providing the scaffolding for the community and for others. To do this, it is essential that organizations create common visions, resources are identified and allocated well, and collaboration is made a priority.

Once resources in a community start to shift to the things that we are working on collaboratively, we can begin to see that we are at systemic change.

Ford has created a system that models new ways of working. The Alignment “toolset” has four facets. Principles are meant to encourage consensus and do away with private agendas. Structure effectively and efficiently implements a plan and allocates resources. This is both top down and bottom up. Process ensures that alignment principles are carried out and measurable plans are developed and implemented. Technology supports the integration of community-

wide collaboration project management, facilitation, data collection and searches, and knowledge harvesting.

The “Chocolate Milk Moms” is realworld example of how the Alignment process took a group from advocacy to transformational change in the real world.

About four years ago, a group of moms in a suburban Nashville school formed an advocacy group to address childhood obesity. Eventually meeting with school nutrient staff and leadership and the Metro Nashville School District’s Chief Operating Officer, the “Moms” presented a plan to rid schools of chocolate milk and would not consider alternatives After prolonged disagreement between the parties, Alignment was brought in.

A new committee was formed—the School Nutrition Committee— and the district received a $55,000 grant from Health Ways Corp. This provided training for cafeteria managers about cooking, improved current practices, and included high school academies, culinary academies, and culinary art teachers. It also developed partnerships between the culinary arts program and the school cafeterias, which had been independent in the past. Through the structure of Alignment, all parties were able to focus on the bigger transformational picture instead of the smaller advocacy issues that some of the parents wanted. Meetings became more productive, funds were more easily acquired, and students received direct benefits. ■

About the authors: Cheryl Carrier is Director of Ford Motor Company Fund; Cindy Rodgers is Executive Director of Alignment Nashville and on the National Ford Next Generation Learning Team; and, Fred Carr is Operating Officer at the Metro Nashville School District.

The article is a summary from their session titled Corporate Philanthropic Strategy at the Global Action Summit in Nashville, TN on November 12, 2013.

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ANYTIME, ANYWHERE TALENT: The future of the Global Enterprise STORY BY BALAJI GANAPATHY

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cross the globe, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the way by which talent is sourced, trained, utilized, groomed, nurtured and retained. This paradigm shift has been a long time coming, influenced to a large extent by the disruptive innovations of the 21st century. Some key catalysts that have accelerated this shift in the past few years are the globalization of markets across developed and emerging economies, a real-time connected and competitive world thanks to the advent of digital technologies, demographic shifts and skilled talent availability in fast growing economies (such as China and India), and intense competition to evolve and meet ever-changing customer needs.

Over the past century, we have seen economic revolutions powered by innovations in process, automation and technology. While the skills and capabilities of the talent pool have been an important contributor to these revolutions, it is at the front and center of the digital revolution.

Never before have we had the opportunity to utilize ‘Anytime, Anywhere Talent’ in a seamless manner across the globe, to collaborate, crowd source, innovate and create new products, concepts, goods and services. The incredible power of this new paradigm has already shown its initial impact in the IT services industry, where talent-led and technology-enabled innovations are transforming the business landscape across industry verticals.

With talent having such a huge impact on the success and sustainability of businesses, it is critical to examine the structural and demographic shifts in demand and supply of talent globally. The current population mix in the emerging economies are a pointer in the shift of sources for global talent.  With their combined population base of 2.5 billion, and a constantly evolving education system, China and India are poised to become the leading providers of global talent. The population pyramids of these two countries reveal over 440 million people in the age group of 15-24 years, and 573 million people in the age group of 0-14 years. This represents a potential talent pool of over 1 billion people, and also an opportunity to dominate the talent marketplace for the next four to five decades. There are many

social, economic, and political factors that are at play; but two factors that could potentially neutralize any obstacles are the continued liberalization of these two economies, and the willingness of the people to be highly mobile.

Another key factor to note here is the changing age profile of the talent pool in developed economies against the emerging markets. With the baby boomer generation nearing retirement in U.S., and the ageing of workforce in Japan and some EU countries; the center of gravity of the future talent is swiftly shifting towards Gen Y and the millennial generation. Here again, there is an inherent need to understand the values, virtues, and characteristics of these demographic profiles; in order to create a suitable talent strategy. The people in these new generations have grown up using mobiles, tablets, smartphones, Facebook, Instagram, Skype, etc.; and cannot imagine a world without these tools and technologies. The age-old processes of recruiting, developing and retaining talent are quickly losing relevance, and need to evolve to the needs of this new generation.

As the world’s 2nd most valued IT Services company (Forbes), with operations in 44 countries, an employee pool of over 285,000 professionals from 118 nationalities around the globe, and $11.6 billion in FY13 revenues, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is at the front and center of the digital revolution. The global nature of our operations and workforce enable us to provide innovative solutions to our customers, presenting us with a unique set of growth opportunities, which also comes with a set of unique challenges. By March 2014, TCS would have about 300,000 employees; 70% of whom will be under the age of 30.

“From our point of view we believe the core strength of the company is people. And people with high intellect and who can be relevant individually. Each one of them can be relevant in the context of the problems that we’re trying to help solve for our customers.”

TCS CEO & MD, Natarajan Chandrasekaran (Business Today)

The need to understand and manage these new generations is critical to the sustainability of talent, and in turn the global enterprise. In 2013, TCS conducted a survey on India’s millennial & postmillennial generations, covering nearly

17,500 high school students across 14 Indian cities. This first such survey of an exclusive Post-Millennial audience– reveals that smart devices and unprecedented levels of online access are making this generation the most connected yet. This is changing the way they communicate with each other and transforming both their academic and social lives.

For example, the shift in behavior is evident from some of the key findings: 1 of 4 from this Post-millennial audience are online for 60 minutes, 1 in 4 use smartphones to connect online, and 41% prefer intra-messaging tools like Whatsapp and BBM. The enterprise of the future should prepare itself to use social collaboration tools similar to those that these new generations of talent are exposed to at such an early stage.

“At TCS, we have seen first-hand the value that embracing Generation Y attitudes and behaviors can bring. This approach began in India but it has proved so successful that it has been rolled out across our global organization. The future belongs to Generation Y and we believe these workers will bring a new wave of fresh ideas, energy and innovation into the industry. The most successful organizations in the next decade and beyond will therefore be those that can best adapt themselves to make the most of the ambition and enthusiasm that this new generation offers.” TCS EVP & Head, Global Human Resources, Ajoyendra Mukherjee In 2012, TCS launched Knome, an internal social network inspired by Facebook and Twitter, because younger workers wanted it. This unique platform incorporates the concepts of gamification, badging, text mining and crowdsourcing to provide cross-functional access, help employees participate meaningfully and engage in shared initiatives. This has facilitated collaboration on everything from designing valuable new software to volunteering in the community. TCS also developed several apps that employees can use, including enterprise apps, productivity apps and fitness apps.

These initiatives have increased employee engagement and are reflected in TCS’s attrition rate, one of the lowest in the industry at 10.9%.

Why is such a paradigm shift in treatment of talent and transformation of the enterprise important from a future ➥ JULY 2014

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➥

economic outlook? Firstly, TCS’ mapping analysis of STEMconnector®’s ‘100 CEO Leaders in STEM’ publication revealed that the Top 5 Focus Areas for CEOs are Technology, Innovation, Women and Diversity, Economy, and Competitiveness. Essentially these CEOs, representing companies across 17 industry sectors with combined revenues of $3.27 trillion, employing over 7.59 million people globally, are focused on technology-led innovation as a source of economic competitive advantage.

Secondly, the TCS Innovation Forum 2013 (Emerging Technology Trends) revealed top emerging technology trends as Cloud technologies, “Consumerizaton” of IT in Enterprises, Mobile Strategy, Enterprise Transformations, and Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC). TCS holds this premier, by-invite-only event annually in UK, USA and Asia. It is held in the hub of innovation in each of these geographies and attracts thought leaders who are working along key innovation themes that challenge industry and society. Now layer this on top of our initial insights on the potential talent pool of 1 billion people with a younger age profile (1-24 years) in emerging markets like China and India, and the penetration of digital technologies amongst millennial and post-millennial generations in these markets. A clear picture emerges on how well positioned these markets are from a talent perspective to develop skills and capabilities to meet the needs of the future (social, political, economic and cultural challenges aside).

In their 2012 publication Global Talent

Source: CIA World Factbook

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“The need to understand and manage these new generations is critical to the sustainability of talent, and in turn the global enterprise.”

2021, Oxford Economics takes a close look at the demand-supply matches and mismatches around the world for a 10 year period from 2011 to 2021. This talent heat map below is a great summary and indicator of how the economic engines of nations around the world will keep in pace with the rate of their local talent availability. The report goes on to say “There is no ironclad rule mandating that areas like the Silicon Valley in the US will be the only home of future innovation and job creation, as nations like China and India invest in industries ranging from life sciences to renewable energy and space exploration. In fact, eight of the top 10 countries likely to boast the largest talent surpluses a decade from now will be in the developing world, led by India, Indonesia, Colombia and South Africa.

Even though these countries are expected to experience robust economic growth, more skilled workers will be produced than job opportunities will appear.”

What emerges from the talent map and an analysis of the demand-supply ecosystem is a picture of skills gap, especially for us in the United States.

Let us look at the state of talent in the nation, especially in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

Almost all of the 30 fastest-growing occupations in the next decade will require at least some background in STEM. The median salary for STEM jobs are on an average double of nonSTEM jobs. STEM jobs are projected to grow 17% by 2018, and 71% of the new STEM jobs will be in computing. These computing jobs demand new skills: Cloud computing, Big Data, Cyber Security and App development. However only 35.1% of students enrolled in STEM related fields are attaining degrees. Student enrollment and student achievement have been on the decline in the US; with a mere 17% of 12th graders both proficient in and interested in STEM careers.

Computer Science is one of the highest paid college degrees, and computer programing jobs are growing twice the national average. From 2001-2011, Computer Science & Information Technology (IT) related jobs grew 92 percent faster than any other sector. By 2020, we will have at least 1,000,000 more jobs than students in Computer Science.

For women and girls, the wage gap is much lower at 92 cents per dollar, versus 77cents per dollar for all careers. Yet, lesser than 2.4% of college students graduate with a degree in Computer Science (fewer than 10 years ago).

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Nine of 10 schools in the U.S. don’t even offer programming classes; in 36 of 50 states, Computer Science doesn’t count towards high school graduation requirements in math or science.

In order to prepare our future generations of talent pool in the U.S. to make use of the job opportunities of the future, there is a need for cross-sector collaboration to drive policies at a stale and federal level, transforming current education outcomes, and embedding corporate engagement in preparing our children and youth for careers. The business sector should proactively engage with educational institutions and agencies to inspire, attract, train, prepare, hire, groom, nurture and retain its future talent.

Efforts like STEMconnector®’s STEM Innovation Task Force (SIFT), US Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Education and Workforce Program (education.uschamber.com), and the Chamber’s Education, Employment and Training Committee (EETC), and are illustrative examples of industry-led cross-sector collaboration efforts with a singular focus on the future of human capital. Being a core member of these forums has given me a first-hand opportunity to see the passion of our industry, nonprofit and government leaders to shape the future of education, workforce and human capital of the nation.

So what are we doing about this as a key stakeholder in this ecosystem? TCS North America recognizes that its company’s future—and that the nation’s increasingly knowledge-driven economy— depends upon more Americans with STEM skills entering the workforce each year. By working with national partners and strategically engaging with community organizations that can multiply programmatic impact, TCS is working to improve employability of future STEM workers, creating new talent for the country, as a corporate community partner.

“The role of technology and innovation as a prime driver of U.S. growth in STEM was a powerful insight, verifying our prior outlook,” said Surya Kant, President, North America, UK & Europe, Tata Consultancy Services. “The commitment of the 100 CEOs and the cross-sector consensus shows how deeply they feel about the issue of educating our youth, and inclusion of women and minorities in

STEM. We need several corporate leaders to answer the call-to-action, identify existing best practices for in-school and out-of-school programs, and make the commitment to use their core competencies and resources to bridge the U.S. STEM gap.”

TCS is putting thought leadership to address the national STEM challenge, by bringing together 30 organizations across sectors to collaborate through an executive round table on the ‘Future of Computer Science in US’, a white paper titled ‘The STEM Imperative for US’ presenting insights from STEMconnector®’s ‘100 CEO Leaders in STEM’ publication. As the Founding Leadership Partner for US2020 (us2020. org) & STEMconnector®’s Million Women Mentors, we commit the use of corporate volunteers for STEM mentoring as a means to attract, prepare, groom and retain young talent to flourish in STEM careers. By leading the development of the online platforms for both these national initiatives, we are using our technology capabilities to support the engagement of over two million corporate volunteers as mentors over the next decade. As a National Corporate Underwriter for NPower (npower.org), we use the skill-based volunteerism of our employees to provide pro-bono IT services to non-profits across the country, and support skill development of at-risk youth & veterans for careers in Information Technology.

Through our goIT student technology program, we are working with local organizations to teach Computer Science in high schools across America. Starting from two schools in 2009, this grassroots level effort—led by our employee volunteers—has expanded to over 35

school districts & covered over 7,000 students.

The future of talent and the global enterprise are inextricably interwoven.

Mobility and adaptability will be key virtues for talent of the future, as enterprises continue to move away from a headquarter-based approach to creating more global hubs across multiple markets and countries. These global enterprises will have employees working and moving seamlessly across countries and cultures to create solutions that address both local and global business challenges.

Enterprises will increasingly use analytics, big data, and internal networks to optimize their processes, deal with generational differences, and engage their employees in creating incredible outcomes for their customers. Powering these careers of the future will be critical capability platforms such as digital fluency, innovation excellence, social intelligence, cross cultural sensitivity, virtual collaboration, and managing a diverse workforce; that would be developed from a young age through a symbiotic effort between the education system and industry engagement. It is this pool of ‘Anytime, Anywhere Talent’ that the global enterprise of the future will draw upon to fuel its innovation and growth. ■

Balaji Ganapathy, is Head of Workforce Effectiveness, North America for Tata Consultancy Services. The article was written and originally published in Diplomatic Courier’s January edition after a special session focused on Global Talent Mobility at the Global Action Summit in Nashville, TN on November 12, 2013.

Source: Oxford Economics, Global Talent 2021 http://www.oxfordeconomics.com

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perspectives on

FOOD

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The Urgency for Academic-Business Collaboration: Establishing a Global Food System Roadmap STORY BY ROBERT N. BEACHY, PHD

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any voices have called for the global community to ensure adequate food and nutrition for a growing world population, a goal that must take into account changing climates, both physical and political. The call to feed the planet comes from influential individuals, NGOs, universities, national and international governing bodies, and the private sector.

There is a growing recognition that challenges for security in food and nutrition are more than can be addressed by single actions: real solutions include more than simply increasing food production per se; more than simply increasing availability of clean; more than better transportation infrastructure; more than increasing supplies of affordable energy; more than improving training and access to communications; more than providing food calories; more than increasing markets; more than access to credit and safety nets for farmers; more than favorable policies from central and regional governments. The complex, integrated system that comprises ‘food and agriculture’ is both broad and deep.

All members of the food system must be knowledgeable of the breadth of challenges while taking responsibility for creating a sustainable system that meets global needs. While the scale of the challenges for the global community is significant, it is possible to make changes in the immediate term that can

increase the chances of long-term success to achieve food and nutrition security.

Universities, colleges, technical schools and research laboratories have vital roles to play in improving the ‘food and agriculture system’. However, it is not reasonable to expect that any single institution will have all the necessary expertise and resources required to meet these emerging challenges. Rather, each academic/research institution must recognize its role and responsibility in the complex system if they are to contribute to creating innovative solutions for global food and nutrition security. For example, universities that focus on research, education and outreach related to food production likely also have strengths in agriculture economics, and agriculture policy programs; but they may be less strong in food safety and nutrition, or in public health. Other research institutions have strengths in fundamental sciences in plant, animal, human biology, medicine, and social sciences but have little expertise in agriculture, agroecology and sustainability, or water management, and so forth. As a consequence of the nature of how colleges and universities have historically developed and survived financially, very few faculty, and fewer students, have the capacity or incentives to engage across the full spectrum of the food and agriculture system. Moving forward, academic collaborations and larger system understanding are both essential. ➥

“All members of the food system must be knowledgeable of the breadth of challenges while taking responsibility for creating a sustainable system that meets global needs.”

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➥ In other words, to build the

comprehensive system that the world needs, and to have greater impact, we need to actively expand our research and education collaborations among academic institutions and the private sector. As a result, those that we educate, train and employ will be better suited to compete successfully, to innovate, to contribute and to work towards improved solutions for our food and nutrition challenges Developing research and education missions with greater impact in this ‘space’ requires significant changes in institutional, national and international policies and processes. Some changes to be considered in the immediate and near term include:

1. For policy and planning institutions a. C ommit to making changes that lead to achievable national goals for local and global security in food and nutrition b. E stablish roadmaps with clear steps to achieve goals for food and nutrition security; engage the natural and social/ policy sciences, and stakeholders spanning all implicit parts of the ‘system’ from the lab/clinic to the consumer’s fork 2. For universities and research institutions a. E nsure commitment of administration, faculty and students to the common mission b. E ngage with private sector, funders and other partners to establish common interests and pathways to success c. Commit incentives and seed funds that create interdisciplinary research/teaching activities leading to productive collaborations across and among essential disciplines in the food and agriculture system. d. C reate changes in the review and reward system to value more innovative research collaborations, goal oriented activities, teaching, communications among faculty and staff with incentives to participate in joint, long term projects 3. For agencies and organizations that fund and facilitate programs a. D evelop well-formed programs that lead to goals set forth in the roadmap which can be financially supported by multiple or single sources b. E stablish mechanisms to create team-based projects that require trans-disciplinary research and education, while achieving specific goals and with metrics; create disincentives for lack of performance 22

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c. Establish mechanisms for sponsoring program activities and for sharing benefits/outcomes d. M easure outcomes against the roadmap, adjust, and move to continue, expand, extend or abandon 3. For corporations and the private sector a. Actively participate as a stakeholder in developing suitable roadmaps that prioritize short and mid-term goals in food and nutrition security, including strategies for developing economies b. P romote collaboration with other companies and agencies to co-fund pre-competitive research that builds knowledge and targets roadmap goals c. Develop collaborative goal oriented research and education programs with universities and institutes that lead to increased global impacts in food and nutrition security and nutrition There are those that would consider some of these steps to be inappropriate for universities and academic institutions.

Fair enough. On the other hand, it can be argued that unless there is such collaborative engagement, the chances of achieving global security in food and nutrition are lessened: grand challenges require input from as many ‘brains and hands’ as can be mustered.

The challenges facing our food system require a global food system roadmap with proactive collaboration among the world’s academies as well as broader collaboration with governments and the private sector. ■

Roger N. Beachy PhD, is Executive Director of the World Food Center at the University of California, Davis. He is also Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis.

In June 2014, he was named by President Obama to serve on the National Science Board. In 2013 he was Founding Executive Director and CEO of the Global Institute for Food Security at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Beachy was appointed by President Obama to serve as Director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, from October, 2009 through May, 2011; and was Chief scientist of the USDA in 2010.

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The Urgency for Global Action on Food

STORY BY JUERGEN VOEGELE, VOEGELE PHD

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he world is changing at an increasingly faster rate.

Income growth, shifts in consumption patterns, climate change, and natural resource depletion are all occurring faster now than at any time over the last century and the responsiveness of our food system needs to change too if we want to ensure a sustainable and prosperous future. We need a food system that can feed every person, every day, in every country; that can raise incomes of the poorest people; that can provide adequate nutrition; and that can better steward the world’s natural resources. Urgently, we need a food system that shifts from being a major contributor to climate change to being part of the solution.

The amount of food the world consumes continues to increase with more people to feed, more calorie intensive diets, and more use of food crops for biofuels. Added to this is the high food loss and waste between farmers’ fields and dinner plates. World food prices have increased as grain stocks have declined. Farmers are responding to higher prices to produce more, but they are faced with rising water scarcity, degrading land, and increasingly extreme weather events. We need an agriculture and food system that can adequately respond to the world’s food needs.

Global diets are changing rapidly. While a billion people go to bed hungry every night, a similar number of people in developing countries are obese. Calorie consumption of the most undernourished needs to increase,

and the changing nutrient content of foods and diets shaping poor nutrition and health outcomes need more attention. We still live in a world where seven million children die before their fifth birthday every year, and almost half of these deaths are associated with undernutrition.

Current food production and processing practices make agriculture the largest user of water, one of the largest polluters of the atmosphere through greenhouse gas emissions, and one of the largest user of mined elements (due to inorganic fertilizers) – all of which are finite. While other sectors are innovating to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture is lagging. The world needs to shift from denial to action to rapidly catch up.

Water and fertilizer efficient agricultural practices must be more widely adopted, and emissions must be lowered and even removed wherever possible.

Production systems can and need to manage resources in a more integrated way, balancing trade-offs. We cannot produce the food we eat without preserving the ecosystem services provided from other sources such as forests, we cannot sustain forests without thinking how we will feed a growing population, and both require consideration of how we manage our watersheds and rural landscapes.

Even with urban migration, 4 of every 5 people in extreme poverty live in rural areas and most rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. We are within reach of ending extreme poverty globally within a generation. In order for us to achieve

this remarkable milestone, incomes from agriculture in the poorest countries will need to increase substantially.

Global and local action, at scale, is needed to address this agenda – private sector innovation, effective government policy, partnering with civil society, universities, and global institutions. More open trade can facilitate a more responsive food system to shocks, better science can help adapt to climate change and lower emissions, better education can help inform diet choice, and more finance to support farming systems in poor countries can help raise farmer incomes.

These are some of the ingredients needed.

The world’s food system has made life and prosperity possible, let’s ensure that going forward we better shape a system that can provide the world with needed food, incomes, nutrition, and sustainable management of natural resources. ■

Juergen Voegele, PhD, joined the World Bank in 1991 after working with the University of Hohenheim, the GTZ, and the BMZ Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation in Germany, including a three-year field assignment in Western Samoa. His initial assignments in the World Bank’s Washington headquarters included working in agriculture and natural resources divisions in the Europe and Central Asia Region and in the East Asia and Pacific Region. He held various assignments for the East Asia and Pacific Region and in 1998, he transferred to the World Bank’s Beijing, China Office to lead the Agriculture Unit.

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Saving Lives, Increasing Economic Growth and Lifting Millions out of Poverty: The Push for Universal Health Coverage STORY BY TIM EVANS

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ith just more than a year remaining until the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals, countries are pushing to achieve and exceed all of the goals. Yet, despite our best efforts, our work will not be done when 2015 ends.

Too many people will be dying from preventable causes because they lack access to essential, quality care, or because they cannot afford to pay for the care they need. The development and global health landscapes will continue to change, with half of today’s low-income countries transitioning to become middle-income countries, and chronic conditions–such as heart disease and diabetes–rapidly becoming an even greater threat.

Yet, we know what we need to do to end preventable maternal and child deaths. And we know how we can sharply reduce deaths and disability from chronic illnesses.

The most equitable and sustainable way to achieve the health outcomes we all want by 2030 is through universal health coverage, which means that everyone can access quality, essential health services without struggling to pay for them. Worldwide, one billion people lack access to health care, and about 100 million people face poverty every year as a result of out-of-pocket health care costs.

If we want to end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost shared prosperity, we must reach universal health coverage.

Countries like Japan, Thailand, and Turkey have shown the promise of universal health coverage for their people, and more and more countries–like Myanmar, Nigeria, Peru, Senegal, Kenya, South Africa, and the Philippines–are prioritizing universal health coverage.

These countries and others will chart their progress, both in scaling up equitable access to essential health services, and in preventing poverty due to out-of-pocket payments for health, using new time-bound targets for universal health coverage. These targets, which the World Bank Group and the World Health Organization developed, can be applied to all countries, rich and poor, as envisioned in the post-2015 framework.

These targets will drive policy and program choices that will lead to better heath–such as investing in strong, front-line primary care that is accessible to the poorest and most marginalized communities. Good primary care delivers essential services like antenatal care, skilled birth attendants, child vaccines, blood pressure and diabetes monitoring, and other interventions that prevent health crises and keep health care costs from escalating.

Investing in health also will continue to drive great economic returns. The Lancet Commission on Investing in Health found that nearly a quarter of the growth in full income in low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2011 was due to better health outcomes. Universal health coverage is the progressive pathway

that will save lives, increase economic growth and help millions of people lift themselves out of poverty.

Achieving universal health coverage by 2030 is possible. Unwavering political commitment, clear progressive goals and measureable targets will drive the change. Investing in health–and achieving universal health coverage– will help us achieve the development goals to end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost shared prosperity. This is an unprecedented opportunity to achieve these goals and change millions of lives for the better. ■

Timothy Evans is Senior Director of Health, Nutrition and Population at the World Bank Group. From 2010 to 2013, Tim was Dean of the James P. Grant School of Public Health at BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Senior Advisor to the BRAC Health Program. From 2003 to 2010, he was Assistant Director General at the World Health Organization. Prior to this, he served as Director of the Health Equity Theme at the Rockefeller Foundation. Earlier in his career he was an attending physician of internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and was Assistant Professor in International Health Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health.

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The Urgency for an Innovation Roadmap to Transform Health Care

STORY BY JEFF BALSER, MD, PHD

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he U.S. health care system is in crisis. In America, the health of our citizens not only compares unfavorably to many other nations; annual health care costs account for 18 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and drive a large portion of our growing annual budget deficit.

There is no other country on the planet where the cost of health care is so disproportionate to the results achieved.

Just as in the United States, around the globe health care is being called upon to be not only more cost-effective, but simply better. We are far beyond the point where small fixes and iterative change will achieve meaningful improvement in the time frame demanded by a too long avoided, and now urgent economic predicament. Riding the same bicycle harder and faster will not get us to the finish line. We need an entirely new kind of vehicle to carry us forward – a new kind of thinking.

That new kind of thinking is surely a commitment to innovation. Innovation begins with creativity, but also requires those participating in the ecosystem to alter perceptions and behaviors in a manner that allows innovation to soar. Turning ideas into products and services at a rapid pace requires a willingness to consider and test new ideas, even those that might prove to be failures. In such an atmosphere, the best ideas can succeed, allowing that nation’s health to leap forward.

While sweeping change in a health care industry as large and complex as ours creates excitement and opportunity, it is also anxiety provoking. At times, it feels like we are attempting to fix an airplane while in mid-flight. Many people working at the front lines of health care, as well as patients experiencing gaps in service delivery, wonder whether we are headed to a better place or simply toward chaos.

Success requires both our optimism and courage. We find ourselves at a point of convergence, where the urgency for

innovation is matched by decades of discovery and development in broad areas of computer science and information technology, to fundamental advances in biology and genetics, to the social and process-oriented sciences that consider the means of health care service delivery to patients.

If we are going to leverage these gains, how do we do so to effect change? A first step will almost certainly be humility–a recognition that what we are doing today, while seemingly “good” in a local sphere, does not scale to improve the health of all people and is economically unsustainable.

Innovation is born in such an atmosphere, where both procedural and cultural norms can be openly questioned and challenged.

For example, the model where the physician is the sole or even primary point of service, a cornerstone of our health care model in the U.S. for more than a century–whether in an office setting or in an emergency room – no longer scales to the continuous and growing health

“Just as in the United States, around the globe healthcare is being called upon to be not only more cost-effective, but simply better. We are far beyond the point where small fixes and iterative change will achieve meaningful improvement in the time frame demanded by a too long avoided, and now urgent economic predicament.”

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PERSPECTIVES

needs of our aging population. MyHealth Team, a project initiated at Vanderbilt and funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Healthcare Innovation Awards Program, is implementing a regional, team-based innovation model for ambulatory health management, to find a better and more cost-effective way to manage some of the most costly and debilitating chronic diseases in our society: diabetes, hypertension, and congestive heart failure. In collaboration with other regional hospitals in the Vanderbilt Health

Affiliated Network, using enhanced health information technology (HIT) and evidence-based decision support integrated into the clinical workflow, an inter-professional staff including physicians, nurses, and medical assistants are working to improve communication, care planning, and monitoring. The goal is to communicate with patients continuously in a manner that results in improved care with reduced hospital admissions and emergency room visits.

The proverb “necessity is the mother

of invention,” ascribed to Plato, was never more real in health care as we witness the development and testing of innovative solutions like MyHealth Team at centers across the country. For sustainable change, measures of cost and quality in these experiments must show clear improvement over the status quo.

But even so, transformative gains will not be realized unless we–as providers and patients–can imagine a “new normal” for how people can remain healthy and prosper in a new delivery system. ■

Jeff Balser, MD, PhD, is Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs (CEO) for Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, American Society of Clinical Investigation and Association of American Physicians, and is past chair of the NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards Committee.

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perspectives on

PROSPERITY

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PERSPECTIVES

Economic Development Goes Societal Needs: A Work in Progress STORY BY CHRISTIAN KETELS, PHD

W

ith the global economy slowly grinding its way out of the financial and economic crisis, the reality of a ‘new normal’ with lower growth rates in many parts of the world is starting to sink in. But it is not only the outlook of lower growth and the fear of a secular reduction in the speed of innovation seen by some (but disputed by others) that worries many. It is also that headline GDP growth seems to translate less clearly into standard of livingimprovements. Is the economy no longer serving the needs of society, as Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ was supposed to ensure?

This concern is highly visible in the United States, where median prosperity has fallen behind GDP growth and income mobility has shown to be no higher than in Europe. There is widespread unease about the future of the American Dream, whether it materializes in ‘Occupy Wall Street’ or the enthusiastic reception of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. In Europe, other societal needs, especially environmental sustainability, are right there next to the concerns about the social repercussions of fiscal consolidation in the name of future economic growth.

Emerging countries like China and Korea, too, experience growing demands for more than headline GDP growth.

What has been the reaction to these societal needs, whether they are shared

prosperity, environmental sustainability, or other dimensions of social progress?

For companies, the pressure from NGOs and other stakeholders has significantly increased efforts to show corporate social responsibility. There has also been growing interest in social entrepreneurship, i.e. applying the techniques of business with a mission to address specific societal needs. While on both tracks there have been many interesting developments, a key challenge turns out to be scalability: as long as what a firm does to address societal needs is not generating a profit, these efforts are not self-sustaining and remain a cost burden on their traditional business activities.

For governments, social, environmental, and economic policies have historically been organized in different ‘silos’. The European Union’s approach of making a number of so-called ‘grand (societal) challenges’ the key focus of regional and innovation policies points into a new direction: using existing policy tools but adjusting the objective function from economic growth to a broader bundle of societal needs. It remains to be seen whether policy approaches that have seen their effectiveness being questioned already for more narrow economic goals will fare better under this new orientation.

And while redirecting funds into addressing environmental issues and other societal needs will have some effect, the experience in many countries has been mixed as to the efficiency of this spending.

“Across societies, there is a growing consensus that economic development needs to fully embrace societal needs.”

Here, too, scalability is an issue: there are many competing demands on limited government funds.

Across societies, there is a growing consensus that economic development needs to fully embrace societal needs. But what is important to act more effectively in this spirit?

First, transparent data on a broader measure of progress is critical. A lot has been happening in this area over the last few years, from the research on beyond GDP measures and happiness to the Better Life index to the recently launched Social Progress Index. In these areas as in others we need to know where we are to inform what we are going to do.

Second, collaboration, often among public and private actors, is needed to create the innovations and make the systemic changes to implement them that are required to address the societal challenges we are facing. This will only happen if we create the right kind of institutional architecture and ‘social capital’ to facilitate this type of collective action. ➥ JULY 2014

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➼

Third, within the context of collaboration, it is important to have firms and governments focus on what they can do best. For firms, this is striving for profitability by serving market needs and continuously exploring new markets and new ways to serve them. Here the work on Corporate Shared Value has shown that there is a lot of room for raising profitability in ways that also address societal needs by taking a new look at unserved markets, at collaborating with partners in the supply chain, and at the internal processes. For governments, this means providing public goods that individual firms do not deliver.

Importantly, this includes organizing markets in which these firms get the economic signals that serving societal

needs is profitable. When such market signals are in place, traditional policies like the provision of financial support, for example research on sustainable energy sources, will trigger a much stronger response by firms.

The new frontier for economic development, then, is to simultaneously solve the equations for shared prosperity, social progress, and environmental sustainability. This will require new tools and approaches, not only the acknowledgment of a broader objective function. And it will involve making sure that Adam Smith’s old dictum is perceived to hold again and the market rewards the most those that serve the needs of all individuals in society the best. â–

Christian Ketels, PhD, is a member of the Harvard Business School faculty at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness.

Dr. Ketels has worked with a many international organizations, government agencies, and firms and is President of TCI, a global professional network on clusterbased economic development. He has published widely on economic policy issues and is co-editor of the Competitiveness Review

Building an Abundant Ecosystem for Prosperity: The Competitiveness Agenda STORY BY EMILIANO DUCH

T

he World Bank Group has set up two ambitious goals, to end extreme poverty within a generation, something which has always been in our mission, but now setting a concrete target of reducing Extreme Poverty to less than 3% by year 2030. We now have added a new goal, increasing shared prosperity, by fostering income growth of the bottom 40% of the population. These two goals address the stigma of poverty and inequality that our society cannot tolerate, focusing on enriching livelihoods through economic growth, inclusion, and sustainability In the past decades great advances have been made in tools and policies to fight

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poverty, from the advances in health to microfinance, using a combination of social economic growth policies.

But when we set the ambitious goal of increasing the prosperity of almost half the population of our countries, we will need to rely on achieving the goal by increasing jobs and the productivity of those jobs so they can generate higher returns to the ones that perform them.

That is only possible in the long term by having competitive industries.

Competitiveness is a requisite for creating prosperity and inclusion for sharing it, a challenge that all countries in the world are facing, including the United States.

One of the roles of the World Bank is to facilitate the dialogue and action

on ongoing and emerging development challenges, bringing the perspective of developing countries to global issues.

We support our client countries in delivering customized development solutions by packaging finance, knowledge, and convening services. It is of utmost importance to us helping advance the knowledge about what works and what does not work to promote competitiveness, and thus our interest to exchange experiences with the policy makers and practitioners participating in the Global Action Summit.

Even if our focus is in emerging and developing economies, we observe carefully the examples in advanced economies like the Unites States as

PERSPECTIVES

well, especially to understand the role of the Public Private Dialogue in developing a competitive economy. We all know that the Private Sector is the one that will create the jobs, but also an uncompetitive Private Sector is the one that will lose the jobs. How do we establish that positive competitiveness building dialogue and not end in rent seeking behavior by the incumbent players? One of the examples here in the United States–that we can learn from–is the rise of the Tucson Optics cluster. Starting from literally nothing in the Arizona dessert less than 50 years ago, to the “disastrous fallout” (as the Harvard researcher Dina Gederman called it) of the Rochester Optics cluster, where iconic companies like Kodak, Xerox, Bausch, and Lomb were based, and led the dialogue.

What is really at the center of this example is the confrontation of two Private Sector Development policy models: an old model of incumbent driven dialogue and a new model of dialogue driven by new market needs and companies willing to pursue them by changing their business models. A better competitive position does not come only from improving efficiency in the existing businesses by working together, but by identifying business in new strategic segments that respond to new consumer demands, environmental, health and socially responsible; addressing our societal challenges while making sound business. The Tucson Optics cluster developed new light based tissue diagnostics techniques that dramatically reduce the cost and time of each analysis, resulting in a large investment by Swiss company Roche, which moved its knowledge base there. But we also have many examples of this change in strategic segment in developing countries, moving from basic commodity coffee to specialty in Colombia, or from low cost garment manufacturing (maquila) to fast fashion in Mexico.

The need of a dynamic and innovative private sector ready to move to more attractive strategic segments is particularly important for many of our client countries, where some of the incumbent players have built their position based on protectionism or favoritism. It is very difficult to engage in the positive Public Private Dialogue to develop competitive industries with a Private Sector anchored in the old model, which is why we are very interested to know more

about your experiences.

But, as Christian Ketels has mentioned, we cannot say anymore that this is “new”, when we have been working in developing the tools to move cluster of companies up to more attractive and competitive positions already for more than twenty years. One of the roles that we need to play, as a development institution, is to enhance and diffuse these lessons, collaborating with other academic, government, and multilateral institutions.

This is the objective of the Competitive Industries and Innovation Program, a joint initiative of the World Bank, with the support of the European Union, and the governments of Austria and Switzerland, that will help us work better towards our two goals, and more especially on our new challenge of increasing shared prosperity through more competitive and inclusive growth. ■

Emiliano Duch is the Lead Specialist at the Competitive Industries Global Practice at the World Bank. The Practice was created to help achieve the bank’s goals of elimination of poverty and shared prosperity, by helping countries to develop competitive private sectors, that create sustainable shared value. Before joining the Bank in June 2013, Emiliano was the founder of Competitiveness, the first consulting firm specialized in supporting governments in their economic development strategies based on clusters.

More recently Emiliano has led the European Cluster Excellence Initiative, a European Commission program to set the standards of excellence for competitiveness focused cluster work.

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Building an abundant Ecosystem for Food: Finding Consensus on What Is Good Food SESSION PANELISTS: BILL SHIREMAN, CEO, Future 500

HAROLD SCHMITZ, PhD, Chief Science Officer, Mars, Inc.

JERRY STEINER, Founder, Alta Grow Consulting, formerly, EVP Sustainability and Global Corporate Affairs, Monsanto

MIKE JACOBSON, PhD, Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest

MICHAEL DIMOCK, President, Roots of Change

SITUATION

KEY QUESTIONS

If we are serious about creating a healthy future for our children and for the planet, then we have to move in a new direction in thinking about the future of food, and to better understand agriculture and its role in the ecosystem.

Although the U.S. is moving in the right direction in improving processed and restaurant foods, which is saving thousands of lives every year, more needs to be done.

There are two broad movements in the food arena. One concerns the reform of the food system to improve nutrient content and delivery. The other concerns systematic issues of the agricultural system, and whether large-scale industrial agriculture should be replaced by a more locally based system or be integrated with it.

There has to be a genuine call to action for leaders of strategic research programs at the federal level, as well as in industry and academia. Industry has to shed the biases it has developed from the business models it has relied on – models that have worked quite well for a long time. To do this, there will have to be a reevaluation of the science and technology driving our understanding of human nutrition and health, as well as a deeper understanding of what goes on biologically in a field, and what we are doing to ensure the resilience and health of that field in the long run.

1. W hat is good food? Is it healthy food, low in sugar, fat and salt?

Or is it cheap and abundant food that can be produced in sufficient quantities to sustain nine billion people by 2050? Or is it something more broadly defined by these and other cultural considerations?

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2. I s there a fundamental incompatibility between fast food and slow food? How can a vast industrial system move to a slow and complex system? re there other definitions of 3. A good food besides slow food?

4. How do we achieve a balanced diet with food diversity? hat role do different approaches 5. W to agricultural resilience play in a world where the climate is changing?

CHALLENGES A major challenge to building a consensus on good food is to be able to undertake a genuinely objective and scientific assessment.

The voice of science has become diminished in our culture. We need to get to a place where we can let science decide what is best. Scientific literacy has

declined, however, and science has been politicized to the extent that people no longer really know what to believe.

The world has an extremely resilient ecosystem that thrives on its diversity, but we are oversimplifying that system to produce ever more crops. Being able to feed nine billion people by 2050 requires food simplicity for the industrial system to function efficiency, but that simplicity comes at the expense of biological diversity in food, which is nutritionally important.

In seeking to differentiate the food it produces from mere commodities, industry often reduces nutritional value by adding unhealthy ingredients to enhance flavor. Industry has to be voluntarily involved in making food healthy – reducing things like trans-fat and salt – but all too frequently it takes lawsuits, years of bad publicity, and FDA labeling to bring about change.

The slow food movement values good and clean food. But it tends to ignore the complexity in the system. How do we understand genomics for plants and animals when scientific details are not released by food companies?

People want to be fully informed. How do you reconcile the potential for science to improve nutrition by altering food genetics with concerns about centralized institutions that make decision about how food is altered?

As deeply as we are thinking about biology, soil biology, and animal genetics, these are still all challenged by water. ➥

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UN Photo by Tortoli

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Building an abundant Ecosystem for Food: Finding Consensus on What Is Good Food

“Much of what we do is aimed at improving the safety and nutritional quality of the foods available to the American public because harmful substances in the food supply contribute to several hundred thousand premature deaths each year from diet-related conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and cancers.”

Michael Dimock, President, Roots of Change

“If you genuinely want your company to be thriving 50 to 100 hundred years from now, you have to face unambiguous scientific evidence about things like climate change, loss of biodiversity, and various public health issues – and you need to figure out what you are going to do, as an enterprise, to help address these.”

Harold Schmitz, PhD, Chief Science Officer, Mars, Inc.

➥ And we’re not talking enough about the role that temperature and climate change play in agricultural yields and pollination.

OPPORTUNITIES The private industry can encourage people to eat healthier diets and government programs can encourage this through subsidies or different rules.

Reforms in child nutrition are especially important: getting more fruits and vegetables on the plates of school kids and getting kids accustomed to eating whole grains through school food programs.

Enormous changes exist in improving the diets of poor people and increasing access to healthy foods. This will involve addressing the underlying problems of poverty. Hunger is an indicator of poverty, and poverty is an indicator of something wrong in the economic system.

We really need to understand at a deep biological, chemical, and physical level what is going on in our bodies nutritionally. We have a half a million to five million years of genetic conditioning.

Are people making a free choice when they choose a particular food or are they preconditioned to like it? And to what extent should we control their options?

A lot more progress could be made if we had disinterested people developing a Farm Bill, rather than interested people dedicated to supporting big farmers.

The more that we demand from a farmer at a lower price, the less a farmer is able or willing to reduce potentially harmful impacts on the planet, people, or animals.

On the other hand, we need to accept that genomics has been able to expand the genetic diversity of crops, improve their yields, and produce plants that are more robust.

We are fundamentally aiming to breed much more resilience into crops

“Our primary goal is to change the way people think about the food system from an industrial to a biological paradigm.

Industrialization seeks to minimize or reduce diversity to enhance productivity. But nature at its core is about diversity, and by eliminating diversity we’re undermining the health of human beings and ecosystems.”

Mike Jacobson, PhD, Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest

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than we have ever done before, and biotechnology is allowing us to provide, on top of that, an additional layer of protection. Genetically modified organisms can make our crops more resilient in more diverse ecological conditions, including those brought about by climate change.

After 40 years of the processed food industry failing to lower sodium voluntarily, the FDA should set limits for sodium in different categories of foods.

There is an opportunity today, with the data and capabilities we have built over the past 20 years, to stop trying to maximize the old business

model and improve the system by engaging academics, government researchers, and NGOs to help reinvent preventive health concepts of food and nutrition.

Over the past two decades we have pursued a research program that explores causality and nutrition, which can now be enhanced using new tools, such as big data aggregation and better chemistry and biology. Food is complex in both the agricultural and nutritional sense. We need to embrace innovation in science and technology and marry these to the business model.

Science and technology have

progressed to the point that you can effectively use big data to study genomics and metabolic chemistry.

We can start to answer questions in food and nutrition in an unambiguous, unemotional and scientific way, as opposed to the highly emotionalized arena that we are in right now.

Farmers learn from their own experiences and those of others.

We now have the opportunity to learn much more rapidly by connecting many farms, which in turn can allow each farmer to better select the most appropriate seeds, cropping system, and fertilizer program. ■

“We view our job as putting science to work helping farmers to be more productive and efficient in supporting a growing population, and doing it with respect for the safety of people, animals and the environment.”

Jerry Steiner, Founder, Alta Grow Consulting Formerly, EVP Sustainability and Global Corporate Affairs, Monsanto

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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New Enterprise Models for Food: Security, Nutrition, and Logistics SESSION PANELISTS: HAROLD SCHMITZ, PhD, Chief Science Officer, Mars, Inc.

JOHN RUFF, Immediate Past President, Institute of Food Technologists

DAVID SCHMIDT, CEO, International Food Information Council

NICHOLAS HAAN, PhD, Director, Global Grand Challenges, Singularity University

MARK CACKLER, Manager of the Agriculture and Rural Development Department, World Bank Group

SITUATION Preparing to feed the world over the next 50 years, as the population grows exponentially to nine billion people and while the climate changes, is the largest challenge of our time. It is imperative that we start building new models for food protection, distribution and consumption.

The world needs new, adaptable enterprise models for food, models that embrace science and minimize the influence of the emotions that arise in the political context. Moreover, the definition of good food has to fit with what works for a sustainable food and agricultural sector.

All of these will require new ways of thinking about food science and consumption.

A recent survey of U.S. consumers revealed the influences on their food purchases: Taste 89% Price 71% Healthfulness 67% Sustainability 30% The survey also gauged people’s perceptions of unprocessed foods in purchase decisions: Fresh 84% Healthy 80% Safe 54%

When asked if there is any information that is not currently on food labels, survey participants responded: Cannot think of anything 48% No response 11% More specific ingredient info 6% Americans are more likely to be concerned about imported foods.

Who do Americans trust for information about food safety?

Doctors, nurses, dieticians 93% Friends and family 76% Government 64% Food manufacturers 44% Which niche food products do Americans buy on a regular basis?

Labeled organic or natural 36% Labeled organic 27% In recyclable packaging 18% Described as eco-friendly 17%

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KEY QUESTIONS 1. W hat are the consumer trends in food purchases today? ow do enterprise systems need to 2. H change to meet future challenges? ow important are small farmers?

3. H hat new enterprise models 4. W are emerging and what role does science play? hat technologies hold the 5. W most promise?

CHALLENGES Agriculture and food security have become key elements in the World Bank Group’s new strategy to eliminate poverty and create shared prosperity. To succeed, however, this strategy requires more investment in agriculture and better food systems. The challenge for the World Bank Group is that it interacts largely with governments, but it is farmers in the private sector who account for most of the investment.

When we talk about enabling the global food system, we have to keep in mind the importance of small farmers, who require land, credit, and markets.

Many large companies do not yet know what good food is and are reluctant to change a business model that has worked well for so long until multidisciplinary science can remove ambiguity and emotions from the definition. ➥

FOOD

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New enterprise models for food: Security, Nutrition, and Logistics

“If we could reduce the amount of food thrown away globally, we could reduce greenhouse gasses, one third of which are produced in the food supply chain, and that would make a difference in the ecology of the planet.”

John Ruff, Immediate Past President, Institute of Food Technologists

“When we talk about enabling the global food system, we have to keep in mind the importance of small farmers, who account for a large portion of all agricultural investment combined.”

Nicholas Haan, PhD, Director, Global Grand Challenges, Singularity University

➥ How do you get enterprise to change

when, based on strict financial metrics, it does not need to change? Enterprise adaptability should be our focus today.

As we try to develop new models for food and food systems, how do we use science to build trust – to utilize science as part of the platform for intelligent solutions as opposed to being polarized by politics?

Climate change will only worsen the current constraints we now face in preparing to produce more food to sustain a growing population: land, water, and energy.

Fresh water makes up a miniscule amount of the world’s total water, which is mostly salt. In the future we will have to desalinate more than we do now.

When we anticipate the challenges of the future, we should consider not only population growth but also the fact that a large portion of the world’s future

population will be in Asia, not the United States, which means difference food choices and demands.

Are we thinking broadly enough today, as we technologize the next frontier, about the ecological health of the planet as a whole? What does desalinization really mean for the ocean? What are the long-term consequences of genetically modifying what has evolved over millions of years?

Choices have to be based on good science – not necessarily the best science – using shared information, and they have to take into consideration the complex mechanisms and potential consequences of what we do.

OPPORTUNITES If we could reduce the amount of food thrown away globally, we could reduce greenhouse gasses, one third of which are produced in the food supply chain, and that would make a difference to the planet’s ecology.

In southern India, the government is setting up organizations to teach not only the science of food production but also leadership. It wants to encourage medium-sized food processing businesses to establish themselves within 50 miles of where food is grown. We have an opportunity to learn from this.

Although agriculture is the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gas admissions, it is also the only sector that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

Agriculture therefore represents not only a major challenge to sustainability but also an opportunity.

“Large companies need to be prepared to change the way they operate, even before consumers start asking, for the benefit of our children and grandchildren.”

Harold Schmitz, PhD, Chief Science Officer, Mars, Inc.

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FOOD

When we think about food we often think about production, but nutrition is a broader and more complex question.

As such, it presents more opportunities for improvement. Malnutrition accounts for some $3.5 trillion of lost production annually. When children are stunted, they are stunted for life, and that happens within the first five years. Healthy bodies should be our goal, and there are significant opportunities to improve in this area.

New technologies hold tremendous promise. One is synthetic biology, which can bring farming to urban areas. Imagine looking out of your office window one day and seeing this great skyscraper with a farm. It’s an incredibly efficient farm that uses hydroponics, aquaculture, and recycled resources, such as water and fertilizers. Or, think about the potential of new farms created in our vast oceans, either on or below the surface of the water, to address land constraints.

The supply of fresh water does not have to be a constraint. Our planet is full of water, but what we lack is the energy to desalinate it and move it to the right place.

We hope that technology will provide access to abundant energy in the future.

As the world adds more people with higher producing power, it will demand more food, particularly meat. We see this trend emerging already. In-vitro meat, which is animal tissue synthetically grown, requiring no water, ranging land, or the killing of animals, has great potential. It may seem a little far out there, and people may say, “I will never eat that,” but in time they may not have a choice because land and water resources may be in short supply. Most people believe that there is a high correlation between the level of processing and food nutrition, but some studies demonstrate this may not be true and that processed foods may offer more than previously thought.

We have an opportunity now to bring the best of science back into agriculture and food; to forget the emotions that have led us down the wrong fork in the road.

Government policy should play an important role in at least three ways.

One is to explain the full cost of our food systems. Today, we do not think about the full cost of our food when we pay for it – the broader costs, that is, in terms of environmental damage and water resources. Our governments around the world have the responsibility to engage with the private sector and with the marketing industry to make sure we understand the full cost. Secondly, our government has to provide the rights to R&D and enter into partnerships with the private sector to invest in R&D if we are to be able to continue on the cutting edge of the innovation necessary to meet our challenges. Last, government is critical in overseeing safety and regulations. ■

“The magnitude of the challenges we are facing means we are going to need multiple solutions.”

John Ruff, Immediate Past President, Institute of Food Technologists

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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Sustainable Sourcing Models for the Food Chains: A New Material Sourcing Framework SESSION PANELISTS: HOWARD-YANA SHAPIRO, PhD, Chief Agricultural Officer, Mars, Inc. TOM TOMICH, PhD, Founding Director, Agricultural Sustainability Institute, UC Davis

MARK DEAN, PhD, Professor of Engineering, University of Tennessee

JEFF PFITZER, Director, Gaining Ground, Benwood Foundation

SITUATION

KEY QUESTIONS

Only in the past 15 years have we had the capacity to examine hard evidence about sustainability phenomena on a national, continental, and global scale.

We have begun to understand how the food system impacts the environment and society, for better and for worse.

To help achieve a sustainable food and agricultural system, companies will have to bring sustainable sourcing to their business models. Society will no longer allow companies to avoid responsibility throughout the entire food supply chain.

Companies must demonstrate that their current practices will not be detrimental now, or to future generations.

The challenge is to figure out what it will take to get companies to a sustainable sourcing model, and to understand which parts of the food system are the most critical strategic intervention points.

1. H ow can we create sustainable sourcing models?

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hat exactly does sustainable 2. W sourcing mean, and who determines its definition? hat are the social and 3. W environmental aspects? hat are the barriers to 4. W sustainable sourcing? ow do we get the information 5. H we need to measure sustainability reliably?

CHALLENGES Food systems in general are incredibly complex and multifaceted.

Consumer values align strongly with sourcing locally for transparency as well as concerns about the environment, ethics, health, culture, and community. But there is still much confusion about what local means and about knowing how and where food is grown because there is often a lack of transparency on the label.

Price and convenience are still major barriers for the smallest farmers, who get priced out of their local market because they cannot complete with larger, nonlocal farmers, especially in meat proteins.

For the foreseeable future, at least 80% of the food in the system is going

to be in larger entities.

Sustainability means meeting current and future needs without undermining the ability of future generations to meet their needs. But that definition does not give much guidance about how to develop sustainable sourcing models.

How do we get the information to measure sustainability reliably? The question of what we measure has no consistent voice.

The food system has a significant social dimension. The most controversial aspect of this has to do with access to food and the issues around the concentration of power. Resistance to science in food often has less to do with the scientific method than with the question of who is setting the agenda for asking the questions that determine what sustainability is.

Sustainability used to involve food companies engineering improvements within their own walls. The biggest realization to come about in recent years is that the heaviest footprint in the food system is not within the factory walls, however, but upstream. This is why sustainable sourcing is key.

Food companies control about 20% directly. They can make their factories superefficient by installing advanced lighting systems, capturing every drop of water and reprocessing it, and improving transportation. But even if they achieve all their targets, there is still that other 80% at the farm level. So we have to look at the agricultural giants, and ask what they ➼

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Sustainable Sourcing Models for the Food Chains: A New Material Sourcing Framework

“Sustainability is meeting current and future needs without undermining the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

But that definition does not give much guidance about how to make things sustainable.”

Tom Tomich, PhD, Founding Director, Agricultural Sustainability Institute, UC Davis

“How can you certify food produced by someone who is living in poverty? That cannot possibly fit any reasonable social justice criteria or definition.”

Howard-Yana Shapiro, PhD, Chief Agricultural Officer, Mars, Inc.

are doing to reduce their footprint, whether it is through nutrient input, efficiency of water use, or climatic adaptability.

We cannot put leverage on selforganizing systems that couple social and ecological systems in order to get predictable outcomes by decree or engineering design. We have to be in a different mindset to develop a new set of systems analysis and management tools.

The food industry’s business model is a major barrier to information sharing.

Oversimplified, it is a classic low-margin model that competes on arbitrage opportunities. For this reason, proprietary information about price, location and quality has tremendous value. It allows the industry to seize opportunities, but also makes it reluctant to share it.

Consumers are increasingly concerned about social and environmental issues that are not necessarily embodied in the products they buy.

Who do you trust, and what do you trust? If a branding claim uses the words “naturally grown,” what exactly does that mean? Or the words “organic,”

➥

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“biodynamic,” “superorganic,” or “conventional?” The consumer has to understand these terms and trust that there is a legitimate certification process that allows something to be labeled these statements.

Sustainability is a very complex problem with many blockers (policy, societal norms, and distribution) and many intangible factors, such as the tendency of farmers to opt for crops biased toward their success rather than broader sustainability. How do you make farmers choose what might be best for local, regional, and global sustainability?

We do not have any unified theory of sustainability today. If you take the approach that sustainability is what people say it is, what you get is a list of about 350 issues and between 2,000 and 3,000 associated indicators, which we do not know how to weigh.

OPPORTUNITIES Farmers often make decisions without much information and insight about local, regional, and global sustainability issues. There is an opportunity to bring information technology as a tool to help expose farmers, distributers, and consumers to the facts.

We have to start delivering insight about sustainability through mechanisms that are familiar to people, like weather maps, for example. We could leverage maps that show hotspots for things like disease, pests, or drought, which would help both farmers and consumers understand the issues around sustainability.

We have a lot of data already but we need to be able to integrate and share it in ways that can help guide farmers to make better decisions about sustainability, especially in emerging economies

“How do you get farmers to choose what might be best for local, regional, and global sustainability rather than what is simply best for them?”

Mark Dean, PhD, Professor of Engineering, University of Tennessee

FOOD

UN Photo by Kay Muldoon

UN Photo by Ciganovic

such as India, Africa, and Brazil, where farmers have little access to the information portals we are used to, such as television.

Getting price information from developed market centers to local farmers in remote, emerging economies is the easy part. The hard part is getting information about social and environmental vulnerabilities of local farmers back to the market centers. And unless we can do this, how can companies make credible and legitimate claims of sustainability?

We live in an era of connectivity in which our capabilities to link information on a global scale are gaining momentum, opening up new avenues for improvement.

We can improve our understanding of the issues around sustainability by providing greater coherence to information, and that should be our focus.

How do you maintain transparency on a large, global scale when you bring in outside agents with a whole host of motivational impulses to manage certification programs? There needs to be a dynamic and on-going conversation about certification because as soon as you create a system, people are going

to figure out how to game it. The more information we make available and the more transparent that information is, the better consumer advocates can respond.

Business models are generally driven by revenue and profit. But in the emerging world (Africa, India, and parts of South Asia) people buy based on trust. How do you integrate trust into the business model? There is an opportunity to put an economic metric against it that demonstrates how it strengthens a corporate brand and adds value.

Data itself has low value, but the insights pulled from it have tremendous value and should be shared freely with farmers who can benefit from it. The question is: How much data do you want companies to control? Where is the moral compass on trying to control data that would allow farmers to do better? And how do we create incentives for farmers to contribute data?

We have to create a system of data sharing that yields profits for some people and insights for others. The big changes occurring in the world that impact our climate, water, nutrition, and health are also creating vulnerabilities for companies. They are causing companies to worry about factors beyond their control, threatening future opportunities, and return on long-term investment.

The private sector will eventually have to advocate for policy changes, and this will lead to all kinds of uncommon collaborations and alignments between the private and public sectors, with NGOs working for transparency and accountability. We have to develop a new system of finance that fits into a sustainable model. Information is going to be key in creating sustainability in food and agriculture. We can learn a lot locally and apply it globally. But the business models for that have yet to be fully developed. ■

“Consumer values align very strongly with local sourcing, but there is still much confusion about what local means.”

Jeff Pfitzer, Director, Gaining Ground, Benwood Foundation

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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SECTION TWO / FOOD

The Frontiers of Food Innovation

SESSION PANELISTS: AMBASSADOR KENNETH QUINN, President, World Food Prize

PHILIP E. NELSON, PhD, 2007 World Food Prize Laureate; Professor Emeritus, Purdue University

JO LUCK, 2010 World Food Prize Laureate; President, Heifer International

IFTIKHAR MOSTAFA, PhD, Senior Agriculture Economist, World Bank Group

JOHN RUFF, Immediate Past President, Institute of Food Technologists

KIMBERLY REED, Executive Director, International Food Information Council Foundation

SITUATION The single greatest challenge we have ever faced is whether we can sustainably feed the nine billion people expected to inhabit our planet by 2050. Finding ways to bring innovation to the food system now is critical. Innovation will play a critical role, but many challenges stand in the way, as well as many opportunities.

Who will innovate, and how? What role will – and should – science and technology play? And are we doing all we can today to prepare for innovation and change?

KEY QUESTIONS 1. H ow can we feed the world utilizing the resources we have? hat does it mean, in practical 2. W terms, to promote sustainability through innovation? ow can education and awareness 3. H help encourage innovation? hat are the risks and 4. W opportunities of more science in our food? hat role can young people play 5. W in innovating the food system?

CHALLENGES Food losses occur before food even gets off the farm, caused by spoilage, insects, bad weather, and many other factors.

Food waste, on the other hand, occurs at the consumer end of the chain. How do we help small farmers save their product and also expand the market for it? More of the world could be fed, not by producing more, but by saving more of what is produced.

Various groups, including the public, the media, private industry, and the

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government have trouble focusing on the scientific facts about food, nutrition, and health, making it difficult to collaborate with scientists, academic institutions and NGOs to find practical solutions.

One of the biggest barriers we face is the demonization of food processing.

When our ancestors half a million years ago put their crops or animals on a fire, they were engaging in food processing, making it more digestible, palatable, and nutritious. Today, when we discuss the issues and risks of food processing, we should keep this in mind and base our assessment of food processing on scientific facts rather than simply reacting to a feeling that we no longer want science in our food. Scientific and technological innovation in food will be crucial to being able to provide future generations with abundant, safe, and healthy food. It cannot make progress if we suddenly and arbitrarily put a stop to it.

Agriculture is a chain. We should not focus only on production because the system only works if we are able to effectively and efficiently distribute food to the consumer.

A billion people make less than a dollar and a quarter a day, and 70% of those are farmers. If we cannot ensure a market for their product, let alone allow them to feed themselves, then food security will become a much bigger issue. ➥

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The Frontiers of Food Innovation

“The single greatest challenge human beings have ever faced is whether we can sustainably feed the nine billion people who will inhabit our planet by 2050. Innovation now is critical.”

Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, President, World Food Prize

“Thirty seven years from now we’ll be at 2050. Who will make a difference between now and then? It is the children today in kindergarten through grade eight. Think how important they will be in affecting innovation and change. It’s our responsibility to educate them properly.”

Kimberly Reed, Executive Director, International Food Information Council Foundation

OPPORTUNITIES

➥ Promoting sustainability through innovation begins when you work with communities on the ground; in rural areas and developing countries. It is not only about taking the knowledge we have directly to those who can apply it in their lives and in their work. It is also about listening to farmers to understand their needs and goals within their own societal and environment context.

There are many simple, unrealized opportunities today to raise awareness about the importance of understanding the benefits and necessity of modern food production technology. It all comes down to better communication.

Engaging in communication with the media, academia, government, and private industry will be critical in bringing people

to understand what food science has been historically, and what it can do to feed the world going forward.

Thirty seven years from now we will be at 2050, and the world will have nine billion people. Who will make a difference between now and then? It is children today in kindergarten through grade eight. Think how important they will be in bringing about innovation and change.

It is our responsibility to educate them properly.

It is important that we plant the seeds of future knowledge by establishing curricula for teachers concerning the science of feeding the world. Some of these young people will become farmers or food technologists, or work in NGOs, or the government.

There are many unrealized opportunities for agro-business and

NGOs to be talking to each other more; engaging in dialogue to find common goals for innovation and to better understand how each is impacting the other.

If we truly want to address sustainability, we have to talk about climate change. The World Bank, for example, is working on what is called “Climate Smart Agriculture,” which is underpinned by a public-private partnership. It aims to accomplish three goals. The first is to raise agricultural productivity and food nutrition. Secondly, it aims to increase the resilience of farmers to the contingencies of climate and climate change. Thirdly, it looks for ways in which agriculture can take back the carbon it emits.

There is an old Chinese saying: “Give a man a fish and he’ll live today; teach

“Promoting sustainability through innovation begins by working with communities on the ground, in rural areas and developing countries. It’s not only about taking the knowledge we have directly to those who can apply it in their lives and in their work. It’s also about listening to farmers to understand their needs and goals.”

Jo Luck, 2010 World Food Prize Laureate; President, Heifer International

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FOOD

a man to fish and he’ll live forever.” We could add: “Teach a man (or woman) to preserve their fish and they will not only develop an industry but employ people and a village.”

“Anyone who cares about alleviating hunger and protecting the environment should work quickly to remove the bias against GM crops.

A good first step is for educated, scientifically literate people to avoid being taken in by the myths about genetically modified food.

These innovations have too much potential to empower individuals and feed the world to be thwarted by falsehood and fear mongering.”

Marc Van Montagu, Op-Ed article in the Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2013

Science is the way that our civilization should make judgments. We should endeavor to bring people together who can reflect on and debate different sides of an argument, whether they are critics of genetic modification or proponents of agro-ecology. It is the only way we are going to meet the challenges we face.

The World Bank has set about to eliminate the extreme hunger experienced by people living on less than $1.25 a day. It aims to raise the prosperity of the bottom 40% of the world’s population by 2030.

In order to reach this goal, we will have to invoke the passion that comes with new technologies.

How can various participants in the chain capture value equally or equitably?

The first step is education. You really need to have education at the various stages,

from farmers to retailers, to realize that they are working toward a common goal, which is to enrich the world. It can be done, but it will take time.

Young people always ask: “How can I help? What can I do?” There are many ways that young people can help. They all begin with understanding the problems and looking for solutions. And oftentimes the solutions are not found in creating something new, but in applying existing technology in a new way.

We do not require more productivity to feed the 840 million people who go home hungry every day, or the nine billion people the world will have to support by 2050. We need production that is accessible, affordable, culturally appropriate, environmentally friendly, and resilient to climate change. ■

“It is important to look for ways to innovate at every intersection along the value chain, both on the farm and off it.”

Iftikhar Mostafa, PhD, Senior Agriculture Economist, World Bank Group

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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SECTION TWO / FOOD

Abundance Intelligence: A Systems Approach

SESSION PANELISTS: CYNTHIA BARBERA, Founding Leadership Committee, Global Action Summit

MARK DEAN, PhD, Professor of Engineering, University of Tennessee

GREG KANDANKULAM, Project Manager, Real NewEnergy

RAY RODRIGUEZ, PhD, Director, Global Healthshare Initiative, UC Davis

ERIK EUWE, Managing Partner, QVS Consulting

SITUATION How can we create the food systems that we need in order to feed the world’s growing population, effectively and efficiently, in the future? All people have a fundamental right to food, and global food abundance is possible. But the question we have to answer today is: How do we build “abundance intelligence” among young leaders to promote innovation and methods that create viable, scalable alternatives to scarcity and competitive win-lose strategies?

Innovation will be the key to developing a systems approach to creating abundance and reducing the loss and waste of 40% of the food we produce worldwide.

Promoting innovation, however, will require purposeful collaboration between academia and private business to spur entrepreneurship, as well as privatepublic sector partnerships that provide the necessary incentives. In order to thrive, innovation must be supported by enlightened public policy, especially in the developing world, where the failure of public policy and corrupt leadership is stunting innovation.

Innovation requires data. Coordinating and sharing data across disciplines can provide insights that are not obvious to people working only in their own areas of expertise, allowing us to explore new ways to optimize food systems and create more capacity. To do this, there has to be transparency and greater access to

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the data generated by governments, institutions and companies. But this is a challenge for two reasons. First, data has inherent value to those who possess it, and it is therefore not shared as freely as it should be. Secondly, many issues still exist concerning the quality of data gathered by different sources.

KEY QUESTIONS 1. H ow do we build “abundance intelligence” among young leaders to promote innovation and systems methods that create viable, scalable alternatives to scarcity and competitive win-lose strategies? ow can technology and big 2. H data be used to create a systems approach to agriculture and food that can help us achieve our vision of global food abundance? ow can we create a system of 3. H transparency and access to the data gathered by governments, institutions and companies? hat opportunities can arise from 4. W collaboration between academia, NGOs, the private sector and government? hat are the economic incentives 5. W that can spur action?

CHALLENGES Innovation requires data. There has to be transparency and greater access to the data generated by governments, institutions and companies. But this is a challenge for two reasons. First, data has inherent value to those who possess it, and it is therefore not shared as freely as it should be. Secondly, many issues still exist concerning the quality of data gathered by different sources.

Data itself is not sufficient. We need to understand it and put it in perspective before it becomes useful. It needs to be structured in such a way that it is not fully structured so that it can be shared, integrated and looked at from multiple perspectives – and that is big data. But many organizations are not ready to cope with big data yet.

It is a significant challenge to get the right data, interpret it and deliver it to the people who need it most to make decisions, especially in developing areas.

It is important to ask the right questions to build the right frameworks for interpreting data. No one framework is appropriate for every situation, every problem or every region. You have to remain flexible. ➥

FOOD

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Abundance Intelligence: A Systems Approach

“Coordinating and sharing data across disciplines can provide insights that are not obvious to people working only in their own areas of expertise, allowing us to explore new ways to optimize food systems and create more capacity.”

Mark Dean, PhD, Professor of Engineering, University of Tennessee

“It is important to ask the right questions to build the right frameworks for interpreting data. No one framework is appropriate for every situation, every problem, or every region. You have to remain flexible.”

Greg Kandankulam, Project Manager, Real NewEnergy

➥ Is it important to be looking at the same data in order to be asking the right questions? And who decides which questions to ask? How do we start to come together, as a world, to decide what kind of data we should be looking at, and what are the ends we should be aiming to achieve?

A pernicious cycle of poverty and disease globally enslaves about 2.3 billion people at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Technology, whether it is applied to health or communication, has to help break that cycle by improving food nutrition.

Financing big data is also a challenge.

More and more, we are seeing a shift from philanthropic giving to impact investment. But how do we define success when we talk about big data in the context of impact investment? It has to be defined by building up scalable projects to a top line result, which is harder to finance than one disruptive device, for example.

One of the main factors preventing venture capitalists from making impact investments in the developing world today is the question of reliable data.

OPPORTUNITIES Coordinating and sharing data across disciplines can provide insights that are not obvious to people working only in their own areas of expertise, allowing us to explore new ways to optimize food systems and create more capacity.

Unstructured data has a basic structure, captured from the source, but it is unfiltered and uncompressed, allowing us to look at it from different perspectives and place different interpretations on top of it. With big data, we collect it all, and as we get smarter we will determine how to correlate it, provide it with spacial and temporal locality, and figure out how to

connect it with other data so that it can be properly interpreted.

A lot of the data we collect is unclean, not validated, and does not correlate properly. But once we have enough of it, the good data will start to dominate.

We do not want to throw away any data today because it may contain valuable information that we can learn to interpret in future. Throwing away data would be like assuming the earth is flat, and discarding any of it suggesting otherwise, then never discovering that the earth is actually round.

An example of the value of big data can be seen in the sequencing of the genomes of a hundred food crops specific to Africa. The sequencing occurs one plant at a time, and then in parallel and multiple databases, where the process of structuring begins. When you start comparing two sequences in parallel, you begin to see the similarities and

“Transparency of information will take commitments from people and companies that care enough about offering something back to the world and are willing to say this is the new horizon.”

Erik Euwe, Managing Partner, QVS Consulting

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FOOD

UN Photo by Rick Bajornas

UN Photo by Kibae Park

differences. It is then that the data takes on greater and greater value, such as revealing a regional genome in one plant that encodes a resistance to a certain virus. This is important information for the small farmer in Kenya.

Data will be at the root of change and abundance in the developing world. But we are not going to achieve abundance until we have tools that allow small farmers to gain the insights they need from big data, such as which crops to plant and when to harvest.

We have to formulate new kinds of nutrition. It is within the realm of possibility that people can gain the same nutritional benefits delivered by 2,000 or 2,500 calories a day from only 1,800 calories if they contain the right mix of vitamins and minerals. But it will take a lot of intelligence to get us there.

There are some interesting differences between the ways Americans approach

problems and innovation, and how Europeans do. Americans, for instance, are really good at hyper-focusing on one problem at time; one disruptive technology at a time. And Europeans, in most cases, are really good at the broader frameworks for integrated problem solving.

Incentivizing collaboration will allow us to better share and use big data. We have to ask ourselves what kind of data we should be looking at in the early stages to move toward some of the bigger impact changes that will bring investors to the table.

Studies of famine have uncovered an interesting paradox. In some famines, food actually leaves the affected area instead of flowing to it. This suggests that rather than being caused by a failure of the food supply, some famine situations represent a failure of the capabilities and capacities of groups to be able to command enough food.

Transparency of information will take commitments from people and companies that care enough about offering something back to the world and are willing to say this is the new horizon.

It will only take a few to jump in and get it started.

Governments play an important role in private-public partnerships because they are able to open the doors that allow the private sector to utilize its technical expertise.

One of the problems today is that the Western world is not fully aware of all the problems it is facing. If you want to change the world – to alleviate poverty, expand healthcare and so forth – you need to understand that data transparency is crucial. Putting all the data on the table and exposing it to different perspectives, not just to those of large companies, will help create a level playing field on a global scale. ■

“One of the main things preventing venture capitalists from making impact investments in the developing world today is a lack of reliable data.”

Ray Rodriguez, PhD, Director, Global Healthshare Initiative, UC Davis

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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SECTION THREE / HEALTH

Building an Abundant Ecosystem for Health

SESSION PANELISTS: WILLIAM H. FRIST, MD, Former Senate Majority Leader

JEAN-CLAUDE SAADA, Chairman & CEO, Cambridge Holdings, Inc.

ERIC BING, MD, PhD, Director of Global Health, George W. Bush Institute

CLAIRE POMEROY, MD, MBA, President, Lasker Foundation

JEFFREY R. BALSER, MD, PhD, Dean School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University

BILL GRACEY, President & CEO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee

SITUATION

KEY QUESTIONS

CHALLENGES

Our healthcare system as we know it today is a broken system. It was designed around brick-and-mortar buildings that we all think of as hospitals and clinics.

These structures support services, delivery of services, and procedures–i.e. heart transplants, cardiac biopsies, MRI, and CAT Scan images. We are moving towards a system built around individual people, a system that is centered on the patient to improve health and healthcare at large. Today, we have a healthcare sector in which all of these individual services are delivered. The value equation is the outcome of the patient divided by the cost. Today we have value-based care.

What’s more, 18% of the United States’ GDP goes into healthcare services and the country cannot afford higher than that.

1. W hat does the GDP-to-healthcare ratio really mean?

We have been running a very good healthcare system but not achieving the mission of health. When you look at the determinants of health, healthcare only constitutes about 10% of what makes a community healthy. Much time is spent on that 10% when our mission is health.

The other 90% includes behaviors, genetics, and social factors. When you look at a child, what is the biggest driver of their health status? The education status of the mother. And if you look at an adult in our society, what’s the biggest determinant of health? His or her socioeconomic status. These social determinants must be addressed to accomplish the mission of healthy communities.

What needs to happen for us to address those social determinants of health? Care must be delivered in new ways outside of brick-and-mortar buildings. Community partnerships are needed to determine what health problems are important to patients.

The current economic incentives in the healthcare sector don’t motivate us to do things in this new way. ➥

hat is the responsibility of the 2. W provider and consumer alike? ow do we use technology and 3. H supercomputers to effectively deliver healthcare?

4. How do we make the system more sustainable in a world where resources are not going to increase? ow do we immerse “health” in 5. H everything an individual does?

6. How important is U.S. leadership in raising global health standards and lowering the burden of disease? hat are some of the lessons 7. W learned from other countries that may help with the healthcare transformation that is going on across the United States?

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HEALTH

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Building an Abundant Ecosystem for Health

“What if we were able to create an opportunity where movement, access to fresh food, access to colleagues, and access to family all became and easier way of life?”

Jean-Claude Saada, Chairman & CEO, Cambridge Holdings, Inc.

“When you look at a child, what is the biggest driver of their health status? The education status of the mother. And if you look at an adult in our society, what’s the biggest determinant of health? His or her socioeconomic status.”

Claire Pomeroy, MD, MBA, President, Lasker Foundation

➥ Outpatient Facilities

OPPORTUNITES

The Cost of Obesity Despite our good will and the resources we have spent on mitigating disease, obesity is still at an all time high. Four out of five major diseases are related to obesity. We spend $200 billion dollars a year on the issue without significant results.

Academic Health Centers The large academic health centers in the Unites States, about 120 medical schools, with 20-30 making up 80% of the biomedical science infrastructure of this country, are a big part of the solution.

How do we really begin to leverage what we’ve invested in these resources?

Today, if you’re a graduate student in the cancer center and you discover a new signaling molecule that is relevant in the growth of a tumor, you can actually see a drug in clinical trials before you finish your PhD. That was unthinkable 20 years ago. That is what the biomedical research engine and academic medical centers are bringing to the public. We have to figure

Twenty-five years ago, there was a big drive towards healthcare facilities on an outpatient basis; hospital beds declined and outpatient services became popular. Twenty-five years later, healthcare expenditures are almost at three trillion dollars. If we continue along that line, these expenditures will be at 25-30% of GDP in the next twenty-five years. That’s akin to a national security risk.

out how to begin to deliver that kind of capability broadly across the United States.

In California, an executive order called Health in All Policies, which required the various parts of state government to meet regularly and talk. Representatives from the transportation department had to meet with representatives from the housing department who in turn had to meet with representatives from the health sector. All departments were mandated to come together and talk to each other, which increased collaboration. We need to move beyond that approach and also look for funding. To do so successfully, we have to align the incentives to collaborate.

“Today, if you’re a graduate student in the cancer center and you discover a new signaling molecule that is probably relevant in the growth of a tumor, you can actually see a drug in clinical trials before you finish your PhD.” Bill Gracey, President & CEO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee

“The ability to focus and invest on the things that make a difference is where we really need bipartisan U.S. leadership.”

Eric Bing, MD, PhD, Director of Global Health, George W. Bush Institute

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HEALTH

UNFPA Photo by Francine Egberts

Better Design, Better Life What if we were able to create an opportunity where movement, access to fresh food, access to colleagues, and access to family all became and easier way of life? What if we were able create an opportunity where movement, access to fresh food, access to colleagues, and access to family all became an easier way of life?

OneC1TY is a mixed-use development in Nashville, which combines all the attributes of mindful living – made easy.

You create a neighborhood – in this case, 20 acres of development – where you have everything from healthcare delivery to apartments and offices. By way of design, you put all your parking away from your pedestrian walkways, so that you’re not comingling cars with pedestrians. You make all your healthier retail – from your organic food, to organic kitchens, to

farm-to-mouth cooperatives – you place all your healthier retail on the first floor where people can have easy access. You create events and daily activities in the plaza that motivate people to come out of their residences and participate. You have five acres out of 20 that constitute a green area with a community table, where people can collaborate.

Lessons from Africa A dramatic transformation has taken place in many low- and middle-income countries. Because these countries don’t have enough financial resources to spend on the healthcare sector they have to innovate. In Rwanda, for example, by the year 2000, infant and maternal mortality was one of the worst in the world. The solution came from the community. Rwanda addressed the challenge by having communities

nominate volunteers to work as health workers. There are 45,000 community health workers throughout the country today. The workers are fully trained and because they’re from the community they serve, they are very responsive. For example, they can connect people with a mobile phone to the hospital. It’s almost like a neighborhood watch, but instead of looking for crime, they are looking to stop disease.

Seventy-five percent of people in Africa have access to a mobile phone. Health providers are able to use these devices to remind patients to take their medications or send them their test results. If someone has a question, the healthcare provider can text it in. These very simple methods make it easy to get care to people. ■

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

JULY 2014

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SECTION THREE / HEALTH

New Enterprise Models for Health

SESSION PANELISTS: SUNIL KRIPALANI, MD, Associate Professor, Vanderbilt University

RAY RODRIGUEZ, PhD, Director, Global Healthshare Initiative

MARTIN RASH, Chairman, RegionalCare

JASON DINGER, PhD, President and CEO, MissionPoint Health Partners

ERNIE CLEVENGER, President, CareHere, LLC

SITUATION The financial and business models of today’s healthcare system play a significant role in how healthcare is delivered and how it can be transformed.

Most leading strategic analyses of the current challenges our health system faces point to the urgency of changing the financial incentives and models through which we work to support the health of people.

Sixty percent of deaths globally are due to non-communicable diseases, except in Africa where infectious diseases continue to be a more common cause of death. Chronic illnesses like heart disease, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes are becoming the main causes of mortality throughout the developing world.

In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly member states met to address this issue. They pointed out that by 2030 there will be five times as many deaths in the developing world due to noncommunicable diseases than infectious diseases.

For example, cardiovascular disease is on the rise in the developing world. Unlike in the U.S., where cardiovascular deaths may be most common in the population over the age of 65, in the developing world, deaths occur while people are still in their prime working years – under age of 60.

Pain management and palliative care should also be taken into account.

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For example, in Zimbabwe end-of-life care is an integral part of the practice of medicine – something not accepted widely in the United States. We have a predisposition to pursue technology, diagnostics, treatment, and the objectification of disease, but we do not comprehensively understand end of life care, and treat that as a lesser medicine or a lesser need.

KEY QUESTIONS 1. W hat would it take for a venture capitalist, a patient investor, or even a philanthropic investor to invest in the healthcare system in the developing world? hat would be a reasonable return 2. W on investment or reasonable profit to make from such an investment?

How long should an investor stay in the nation? hat expertise and know-how 3. W can the United States offer the developing world in order to deal with a probable epidemic of cancer in the next 20 years?

4. What is the role of diagnostics as an entry point for new enterprises for health in the developing world?

CHALLENGES There is, in the United States at least, an opportunity to profit from prevention. But it is difficult for organizations to transform and focus on prevention rather than treatment.

We live in a country in which 2,000 Medicare members generate a staggering quarter billion dollars in costs each year.

It is hard to see a return on investment from traditional health and wellness.

However, there exist less apparent factors that contribute to health and wellness in general. We know, for example, that lowering the stress of visiting the doctor reduces costs in the long run. Having a caregiver at home, or using a stool to climb into bed to reduce the risk of falling, are also examples that are not always apparent. Lifestyle changes, as opposed to clinical treatment, can also lower costs dramatically. These are all aspects of preventative health and wellness that need more attention and funding.

Wellness is intuitive and yet difficult to quantify. The challenge, therefore, is to show that wellness activities do in fact have a material impact on costs and profitability in the healthcare system. The model has to be redefined to attract financing to health and wellness with a level of confidence.

Thirty percent of the factors that contribute to disease are economic and educational. We have done much research on environmental stressors, such as poverty, domestic violence, racism, ➥

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“A high school student developed a blood-based test for cancer diagnosis using carbon fibers. Such innovation will completely change what can be deployed in resource-poor settings, where traditional diagnostics personnel simply don’t exist.”

Ernie Clevenger, President, CareHere, LLC

“One area in which the financial benefit of wellness will become most evident, both in the U.S. and the developing world, is the workplace. As urbanization increasingly affects how people live and work, employers will see the benefit of introducing wellness programs to reduce their costs.”

Jason Dinger, PhD, President and CEO, MissionPoint Health Partners

➥ and prejudice. Many of these are prevalent in the developing world. We will have to raise awareness of them and explore ways to reduce them.

Beyond the infectious diseases that dominate discussion in the developing world health industry, we are now faced with a wave of noncommunicable diseases.

Cancer is going to devastate the developing world. Currently, there are no facilities prepared to address high rates of cancer in the developing world. There are no cancer registries and there is very little follow up or protocol compliance. What could we, as a developed nation, offer the developing world to deal with the probable epidemic of cancer over the next 20 years?

Example: A high school student developed a blood-based test for cancer diagnosis using carbon fibers. Such innovation will completely change what can be deployed in resource-poor settings, where traditional diagnostics personnel simply don’t exist.

There is another part of the cancer question, which relates to cultural norms.

In many parts of the world there is a cultural bias against discussing the disease openly. If we can bring people to accept an open discussion, then hopefully diagnostic advances will also be accepted in the community and utilized. If the cultural part isn’t addressed, then there may not be as much uptake of some of the innovations in care and it may lessen their impact.

OPPORTUNITES One area in which the financial benefit of wellness will become most evident, both in the U.S. and the developing world, is the workplace. As urbanization increasingly affects how people live and work, employers will see the benefit of introducing wellness programs to reduce their costs. This is a way U.S.-based businesses could partner in a financially vital way with employers who have invested interest in keeping

their employees and the general population healthy.

Existing and inexpensive cloud technologies can help in preventing diseases. For example, RFID tags can be embedded in clothing and send data back to the cloud, where it can be assessed by experts who will send information back to local patients and their doctors. That is one way the developed world can offer something to the developing world. A new vision for healthcare in the developing world could focus on broadband wireless connectivity and smartphones. At some point, smartphones could become a physician’s assistant.

In the developing world, there is lack of information about where disease is, who has disease, and what the etiology of that disease is. And so there is little epidemiology and diagnostics.

There are companies that are going to be able to do massive testing on micro-liters of blood. The new iPhone is going to have a new set of technologies.

“There’s big money running after diagnostics in a big way.

It’s largely technology companies. I don’t see them as clinical; they are technology companies sourcing clinical knowledge.”

Sunil Kripalani, MD, Associate Professor, Vanderbilt University

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UN Photo by Eskinder Debebe

There is substantial investment going into diagnostics in a big way. These investments are coming largely from technology companies, they are not coming from the clinical sector. They are technology companies sourcing clinical knowledge.

For example, a nonprofit in Cambridge, Massachusetts has developed what are called pattern paper diagnostics based on 3D printing – little tiny bits of paper that can tell a lot about the diseases one has.

Ultimately, this means that diagnostics can be an entry point for new health enterprises in the developing world.

Example: In Bangladesh rabies is widespread but there is very little information on how pervasive it really is.

In which provinces is it most prevalent?

How many people have died from it?

We don’t have enough information and people live in daily fear of being bitten by a rabid dog.

Privacy can also be a hurdle. Employers

in other countries often know what their employee’s condition is and they can become a player in helping to get them healthier. HIPAA was actually in part a liberalization of privacy. Patient consent is not required for PTO (Payment, Treatment, and Operations) information flow, and data should be free to move among the payer, provider, and organization without the patient’s consent.

The original intent for HIPAA was to be a liberalization to permit the flow of data, in a more rational environment.

Transnational companies and employers can lead the way. For example, a company that has a plant both in Brasilia and in Bangkok may be interested in seeing care for their employees improve. This company has the ability to transfer policies and innovations from one area of the globe to another in order to get a positive outcome on their employee’s health.

We are starting to see prevention in the hospital setting. One of the earliest

UN Photo by Mark Garten

examples was making hospitals tobacco free. More and more hospitals incorporate behavioral counseling and prescription of nicotine replacement therapy. In the future, we’ll see more of these hospitalbased initiatives serving as a model for how others can address chronic disease management and prevention. There are some basic infrastructure issues, which are going to be challenges, including the current investment culture and the influence of societal norms. However, the future is bright in that we will be able to leverage the talents and the skills wherever they are – our ability to do things remotely has increased exponentially.

If we can develop and leverage remote medicine, we can reach people in faraway rural areas where we could not before.

Patients in remote rural area can see doctors via iPhone or iPad, and no new infrastructure is required because people have already jumped ahead to wireless technology. ■

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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New Enterprise Models for Health: Wellbeing, Population, Health Behavior, and Society SESSION PANELISTS: BRUCE BLOOM, PhD, CSO, Cures Within Reach

SUNDEEP DUGAR, PhD, President and CEO, Sphaera Pharma

BRUCE GERMAN, PhD, Director, Food for Health Institute

RUSSELL ROTHMAN, MD, Director, Center for Health Services Research, Vanderbilt University

SITUATION

KEY QUESTIONS

CHALLENGES

Encouraging good health behavior is a major challenge. Almost 50% of patients do not take their medications as prescribed and some studies indicate that 20% do not even fill their prescriptions after leaving the doctor’s office. It is even harder to get patients to adopt good dietary habits and exercise routines.

How can we better encourage people to change their behavior in ways that will help them avoid health problems?

Treatment is the other side of the equation. How can we create better incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop and promote effective therapies that may not be profitable in the short term? Can we devise new ways of compensating companies based on how much they contribute to improving overall health and reducing overall healthcare costs?

Finding solutions to these problems will require us to come up with new enterprise models.

1. W hat can we do to help the world get healthier?

What if it turns out we really cannot get people to change their health behavior?

Is there some other way we can reduce healthcare costs and make people healthier? The ability to change health behavior is a luxury we have in the developed world. But it is hardly practical in developing societies, where meal choices are limited. Moreover, developed countries have access to data about food choices that most developing societies do not have. How can we expect the developing world to start to make behavioral changes without the necessary knowledge?

The funding mechanisms that determine how therapies are being discovered are not working properly.

The pharmaceutical industry is designed so that companies will take up projects that promise a reasonable return on investment. Often, companies will look to achieve over a billion dollars in third-year peak sales. However, the problem is that the business development projections made by these companies are not always correct. ➼

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ow can we better encourage 2. H people to change their behavior in ways that will help them avoid health problems? an we improve the health system 3. C by creating better incentives for pharmaceutical companies?

4. How do we change the funding mechanisms that determine how therapies are discovered and developed?

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New Enterprise Models for Health: Wellbeing, Population, Health Behavior, and Society

“Instead of compensating pharmaceutical companies and others for making a drug that they can sell at a huge profit, why not compensate them by how much of an improvement in health and reduction in healthcare costs they make?”

Bruce Bloom, PhD, CSO, Cures Within Reach

“Our public system approach to healthcare has traditionally been top-down. We have to turn it into a bottom-up approach by engaging the local community.”

Russell Rothman, MD, Director, Center for Health Services Research, Vanderbilt

OPPORTUNITES

➥ One way to help the world get healthier would be to repurpose drugs that are already approved for human use.

This means taking a drug that has already been used by patients for one disease and finding other disease indications for its use. The benefit is cost efficiency, since most of the costs and safety issues are already known.

Our healthcare system has created incentives around return on investment.

We are now experiencing a radical shift towards value-based reimbursement and accountable care. This is allowing us to finally move closer to a system concerned with the population as a whole rather than only the individual, with incentives to

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improve overall health and reduce cost in the long run, not just in the short term.

When it comes to improving health behavior, coaching approaches offer a lot of promise. But we have to figure out what level of intervention is required to help a patient maintain healthy behavior over the longer term.

When we look at the psychology of health behavior, we note that decisions are often made irrationally. We have an opportunity to promote incentives for people to make rational decisions, as well as to devise sound metrics for monitoring and self-reporting. In the United States for example, environmental influences have a great impact on health behavior.

At the federal funding level, we should seek funding to study human

milk and breastfeeding support. This will allows us to shift the funding model so that it brings greater benefit to infants.

Currently we don’t understand breast milk comprehensively: its composition, its structures, and its functions. We have started to understand it from an evolutionary perspective, which we hope will lead to preventative targets. What emerges from an evolutionary approach is a spectacular biological strategy. To prevent obesity, breastfeeding should be promoted as long as possible, at least for the first six months of life exclusively.

Community Engagement Our public-system approach to healthcare has traditionally been top-down. We have to turn into a bottom-up approach by

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UN Photo by Rice

engaging the local community. This way, we can better understand the challenges and barriers to behavioral change and identify potential facilitators.

Finding Therapy Models That Work The global therapy model, which is led by the pharmaceutical industry, is not working for all patients. We are allowed to market drugs that work for a percentage of patients. We need to develop a more personalized model based on the individual.

We could benefit from more research in the area of comparative therapy effectiveness. We have to evaluate Drug A against Drug B, or Lifestyle C, as opposed to evaluating Drug A only against a placebo. Drug companies

currently do not like to assume that risk.

They are concerned primarily with being able to show that Drug A works, rather than whether or not it works better than a different treatment.

With the discovery of essential nutrients, the 20th century became known as the First Great Era of Nutrition. But the 40 or so molecules that scientists have identified as necessary to human life were brought into practice on a populationwide basis, without much consideration given to personalization.

Studies are now emerging that suggest a subset of the population is metabolically unable to regulate its food intake control, and that obesity in that subset is due to aberrant microbiota. If this is true, then obesity treatments that work for some

people will not work for others. Until we come to a better understanding of the causes for obesity, we cannot find effective solutions. ■

“The funding mechanisms that determine how therapies are being discovered are not working properly.”

Sundeep Dugar, PhD, President and CEO Sphaera Pharma

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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Frontiers for Health Innovation: Prevention to Slow Demand

SESSION PANELISTS: ARLENE GARRISON, PhD, VP, Oakridge Associated Universities

MARK DEAN, PhD, Professor of Engineering, University of Tennessee

STEVE BARES, PhD, President and CEO, Memphis Bioworks

STEVE CURRALL, PhD, Dean, Graduate School of Management, UC Davis

SITUATION

CHALLENGES

OPPORTUNITIES

What are the new frontiers in health innovation? Where can we expect technology to advance? And more importantly, how are we, as a society, going to develop, refine, and utilize those technologies to safeguard health? These are the questions we face today, and they will take on greater urgency going forward as many countries age demographically.

How can we integrate the general population-based information generated by big data with a personalized approach to diagnosis and treatment?

How can physicians benefit from big data if they are not part of a larger organization, like Kaiser or Mayo, that holds the information and insights?

Patients and physicians have to feel comfortable that the data they share will be kept secure and private if we want to collect and leverage it fully.

How do you structure a process to move a technology from conceptualization to the point of commercialization? What are the best ways to bring researchers and entrepreneurs together?

Deploying innovative technologies presents various challenges. Developing countries may not have the necessary infrastructure to allow it and companies in the developed world may not see the financial incentives to deploy this new technology in the developing world. In addition, the developed world may have its own set of barriers, including a lack of incentives for doctors to assist and promote certain new technologies.

Disruptive innovation and technology can enable us to bring disease diagnosis and treatment out to distant communities that are less technologically developed. We have already seen technological innovation that has produced smaller, portable imaging and ultrasound devices. We are now seeing advances in photo-acoustic microscopy and various other non-invasive diagnostic techniques.

There are many new platforms being developed for the delivery of medicine, such as nanotechnology, biodegradable films, and materials that can be ingested to deliver medicine continuously over long periods.

Interest in new technologies does not rest exclusively with the civilian side.

The military has considerable interest in some areas of research and development, and provides funding for things like regenerative medicine.

Researchers have taken a renewed interest in personalized medicine. Penn State, Duke, Indiana, and Vanderbilt universities all have strong programs looking at different ways the genome is connected to the analysis and ➼

KEY QUESTIONS 1. H ow can we develop, refine, and utilize new technologies to protect health? here can we expect technology 2. W to advance?

3. I n what ways can big data help, and what are the challenges it presents?

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“Big data will be a valuable tool in advancing diagnosis and evidence-based healthcare. It will reduce errors and improve the quality of treatments moving forward, though challenges still exist.”

Mark Dean, PhD, Professor of Engineering, University of Tennessee

“We have to organize information in layers aligned in such a way that allows us to detect correlations we may not have been previously aware of.”

Steve Bares, PhD, President and CEO, Memphis Bioworks

➥ determination of how an individual can be treated more effectively.

Bioinformatics, is at the core of this.

Imperial College, Chapel Hill, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech all have strong programs running in this area.

It is possible to integrate the generalized population-based information generated by big data with a personalized approach.

Big data is organized in layers. The overlays allow us to look down through the layers of both temporal and spacial factors, and visualize a point of intersection that can help us detect a correlation we may never have considered before.

Big data will be a valuable tool in diagnosis and evidence-based healthcare.

It will reduce errors and improve the quality of treatments going forward,

though challenges still exist. We have to greatly enhance our computing power to support it.

When we hear about big data, an emphasis is often placed on the difficulties of analysis, but equally important are the various issues across all three levels at which we have to work with the data to gain insight: theory, measurement, and analysis.

Many doctors who are not part of larger, hospital-based organizations could start to share information in a way that is anonymized through some type of a cooperative. Insurance companies could do the same in order to gain insight and evidence that would allow them to reduce the cost of insuring certain individuals.

Big data can also be used to reduce animal

diseases that impact human health.

Non-clinical data can be as valuable as clinical data. For example, a project is underway to predict the health of poor communities in Memphis using basic GIS mapping to trace access to quality food based on ZIP codes. This approach can be broadened globally to understand why, for instance, certain regions like the Middle East have high concentrations of diabetes or a deficiency of Vitamin D that do not correlate with the rest of the world.

We are developing methods of forecasting disease outbreaks around the world, and then coupling that forecasting model with health data gathered in different locations to look at epidemiological trends.

The University of California, Davis,

“Technology has allowed the reintroduction of the garage shop model, whereby you can develop new technologies with only information and a little funding.”

Steve Currall, PhD, Dean, Graduate School of Management, UC Davis

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UN Photo by Staton Winter

has a funded a science foundation designed to take science and engineering concepts into commercialization. The foundation aims to foster collaboration across 10 campuses and three centers of expertise: health (human, animal and environmental), health and migration, (economics, anthropology, and sociology), and women’s health and empowerment (cancer and reproductive health issues).

Technology has allowed the reintroduction of the garage-shop model, whereby you can develop new technologies with only information and a little funding.

Awareness is the key to changing people’s health behavior. New devices can monitor a person’s activity throughout the day and provide feedback on how well they

are doing. We are working on devices that take this to the next level by monitoring things like blood sugar and oxygen, in a non-invasive way, as well as heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature. If we could record that information over a week, for example, we could start to see trends that offer new insights.

New and innovative technology already exists and can be deployed. For example, technology that allows a cell phone to be used as a diagnostic device. We can use such a device to take a very detailed picture of a lesion and then send it wirelessly to a doctor 3,000 miles away for diagnosis.

The doctor in turn can convey treatment options to a technician in the field.

Cultural barriers can be hard to address, but they open up opportunities

UN Photo Sebastian Rich

for inter-disciplinary collaboration across the life and social sciences, engineering, and humanities. There is much we can learn from those who study the humanities and understand culture and religion.

Such collaborations will be important as we implement various new diagnostic and treatment options around the world, and much more can be accomplished on this front. ■

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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Abundance Intelligence: A Systems Approach

SESSION PANELISTS: BLACKFORD MIDDLETON, MD, CIO, Center for Biomedical Informatics

TRENT NICHOLS, MD, PhD, Senior Research Staff, Oakridge National Laboratory

KRISTEN BECK, Girls Who Code, Global Action Summit Fellow

CLAIRE POMEROY, MD, MBA, Director, President, Lasker Foundation

NITESH V. CHAWLA, Director, Data Inference Analytics and Learning Lab, University of Notre Dame

SITUATION

KEY QUESTIONS

Intelligence in the healthcare system can be viewed in a number of interesting ways.

What do we know, how do we learn it, and how do we use it to make more effective diagnostic and treatment decisions? We currently manage knowledge in healthcare in a curtailed way. Our physicians often lack complete records due to inadequate sharing of data between healthcare providers. Difficulties include the curating and delivering of information to the point of care in a timely manner.

We need to find new ways to make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions based on more information and hard evidence.

Big data, from credible sources, including randomized control trials, can help physicians understand where knowledge is absent, observe trends that would not otherwise be apparent, and draw valuable inferences. If we want to improve decision-making in the microcosm, at the individual patient level, we have to improve knowledge in the macrocosm, using big data as a decision support tool.

1. H ow can we realize the full value of our investment in healthcare IT?

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ow can we find new ways to 2. H make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions based on information and hard evidence? ow do we gauge the quality 3. H of data and information? hat is the difference between 4. W data and information?

5. I s it possible to have or share too much data?

CHALLENGES We are not going to realize the value of investment in healthcare IT unless multiple, idiosyncratic record systems become seamlessly integrated with one another, providing truly representative big data sets.

If every clinic, hospital or healthcare system has to rediscover best practices, then we will be facing a $25 billion problem in knowledge engineering and management costs.

When we think about abundance in knowledge, we have to recognize the challenges in creating, maintaining, and vetting knowledge, as well as determine how to disseminate knowledge properly.

How can we be sure that what we learn is disseminated so that it can benefit every patient and every clinical encounter, and that all doctors have access to the best evidence to support their decisions?

Electronic medical records do not always capture the information that physicians need. Often times they capture information that is more useful to insurance companies.

We are sometimes inundated with too much information. One of the problems with electronic records is that we now have too many, and physicians often end up not reading them because they do not have the time. For example, if a medical professional collects 17 pieces of independent information from the laboratory, he or she has a 50% chance that one of them is falsely elevated or falsely low. How can we gauge the quality of information? More information, abundant information, will lead us to new breakthroughs, but we must figure out a way to distill and synthesize that information quickly and meaningfully at the point of care. ➼

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Abundance Intelligence: A Systems Approach

“Our physicians often lack complete records due to inadequate sharing of data between healthcare providers.”

Blackford Middleton, MD, CIO, Center for Biomedical Informatics

“We have to find new ways to capture and deliver information that enable physicians to make better diagnoses and clinical decisions on the spot.”

Trent Nichols, MD, PhD, Senior Research Staff, Oakridge National Laboratory

➥ We have an overabundance of data but not an overabundance of information.

One of the problems is that the inputs are all fragmented and data is not brought together and translated into information. Moreover, the patient needs data translated into information one way, and the healthcare provider needs it translated another. It is the same data, but it is synthesized differently.

How much medical data do people really want to know? How much are they willing to share? Should there be some reward for sharing? Should we allow the monetization of medical data?

It is challenging to enroll people in clinical research trials. This has been something that people do for the common good and it is difficult to identify other incentives to get them to participate.

OPPORTUNITIES We have the opportunity today to take data and create a collective knowledge system that can be applied in practice at the point of care.

Apps for smart phones and tablets can help physicians and patients by providing access to information on health and wellness, but they have to be designed

to accommodate different perspectives espoused by people of different backgrounds and belief systems.

One way to exchange health data seamlessly between hospitals would be through an integrated telehealth network that utilizes the existing grid of agricultural extension stations across the country.

We need standardized formats for collecting a diverse range of data. More efficient medical records will capture things that seem inconsequential now but may be critically important to a future diagnosis.

The first challenge is to build a single patient record that can be tracked over a

“More efficient medical records will capture things that may seem inconsequential now but could be critically important to a future diagnosis.”

Nitesh V. Chawla, Director, Data Inference Analytics and Learning Lab, University of Notre Dame

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UN Photo by Milton Grant

person’s lifetime. It would include data on prescriptions, in-hospital and outpatient facility stays, treatment outcomes, and multiple or second diagnoses. Once we have all the data on an individual patient, together in one file, we could use it to run correlations with similar patients to identify commonalities and differences.

These can provide valuable information to improve diagnoses and treatments in the future.

Patient information belongs to the patient, not to the doctor or hospital.

Part of the solution to privacy issues may be true empowerment of the patient using available technology. For example,

we could put a person’s entire medical record on a chip, and that chip could be carried wherever a person goes to receive healthcare. The healthcare provider would be able to load and add to it, but the patient would remain in control of his or her medical data.

Abundance intelligence, on the other hand, depends on open source platforms, not closed systems. For example, the parents of children who have rare diseases are very keen to share their experiences and data. They come with binders of information, recordings of everything about the child they observe.

Resolving the challenges will require

a workforce that understands and can process big data. We know that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million computer science jobs but American universities will be able to fill only 29% of these. We have to encourage computer science education at a much earlier age, especially for women, who are under-represented in the field.

If we are going to get to the vision of abundance, we have to move beyond tweaking the current system and create a new vision for the system. The fragmentation that we have now leads us to try and stitch together the pieces.

We need leadership to challenge us to think differently. ■

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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Building an Abundant Ecosystem for Prosperity: The Competitiveness Agenda SESSION PANELISTS: TED ABERNATHY JR., Managing Partner, Economic Leadership LLP

JAMES FRIERSON, JD, Founder, Compass Innovation Advisors

CHRISTIAN KETELS, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School

EMILIANO DUCH, MPA, Lead Private Sector Development Specialist, World Bank Group

SCOTT T. MASSEY, PhD, Chairman and CEO, The Global Action Platform

SITUATION The discussion of competitiveness today in the United States is not about abundance.

It is often about anxiety. The reason for this anxiety is international and started before the global financial crisis. It started with a concern that the United States was losing ground to countries like China, which were investing in research and innovation. This anxiety existed before with Japan as well.

Yet today we sense there is a different global environment around us. The preeminence of the United States is no longer a given.

The concerns are also domestic. Even though GDP growth at the top line level is satisfactory – though not great – are we still seeing opportunities for the average American? There are a lot of concerns about inequality, joblessness, and the ability – or inability – to realize the American dream.

These concerns prompted a new iniative at the Harvard Business School four years ago. It aimed to tackle the issue of U.S. competitiveness. The specific task was to understand how private-sector leaders think about competitiveness and work with them to find new ways to make things better.

First, they asked alumni how they see U.S. competitiveness. These are people who make decisions about where and how they want to invest. The answers were not very encouraging. There are few areas where the U.S. is perceived as strong and improving. Clusters are one of them.

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seems to be losing advantage relative to other countries in the global economy.

Secondly, they looked at how U.S. companies make decisions and who they compete against. The findings indicated that the U.S. is competing with the entire world – advanced economies as well as developing economies.The U.S. is increasingly losing five out of six off-shoring decisions and two out of three location decisions. In situations where companies consider whether to put new operations in the U.S. or other locations, two-thirds go somewhere else.

In situations where companies think about whether to take activity from the U.S. and put it somewhere else, only one out of six stay in the U.S. That is an alarming picture.

KEY QUESTIONS 1. H ow is abundance related to competiveness? ow does competitiveness require 2. H us to think about regions and clusters and about collaboration in local regions and in states? ow does competiveness lead to 3. H progress and create the foundations for prosperity and abundance?

4. How can we stimulate collaboration and create action

platforms to ensure people work together? ow can we shift the needle on 5. H how good a cluster is and how good the companies are to reach the potential that exists?

CHALLENGES Over the last few years, new ideas and responses to economic anxiety have been implemented in many parts of the world as well as in the U.S. We know education is ongoing. We know it is important to have economic activity underneath the cluster organization. It doesn’t make sense to start a biotech cluster if there are no biotech firms in a regional economy to build upon. This is what we call wishful thinking clusters. They have no impact; they just waste money. If there is a set of companies doing something, don’t try to limit membership. Be open to everybody who thinks they can contribute and benefit. Don’t exclude foreign companies and don’t exclude large companies.

They often are important players. In Europe, for example, government often makes the mistake of trying to improve entrepreneurs, telling companies what to do. That strategy does not work.

An organization is needed with a welleducated cluster manager and a good staff. Collaboration doesn’t happen automatically. Somebody needs to step up and sustain it over time. ➥

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Building an Abundant Ecosystem for Prosperity: The Competitiveness Agenda

“If there is a set of companies doing something, don’t try to limit the membership. Be open to everybody who thinks they can contribute and benefit. Don’t exclude foreign companies and don’t exclude large companies. They often are important players.

Have private sector leadership setting the agenda.”

Christian Ketels, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School

“Developing clusters and the economic strategies and foundations for prosperity are distinct and complex undertakings. At the heart of it are individuals making choices, learning to trust each other and to work together.”

Scott T. Massey, PhD, Chairman and CEO, The Global Action Platform

➥ Clusters are being used a lot to explain

regional and local economies. There exist some cluster organizations but not many. The ones that do exist often have a deep experience in what works and what doesn’t. How do we leverage that?

Clusters are used by a broader range of organizations, often not under the name “clusters,” with the idea that location matters; related industry and linkages matter. It’s a theme emerging in economic development practice as well. State governments have moved into this slightly, but often without sustained effort. They attempt in perhaps one administration before reinventing the wheel in the next administration. Nothing sustainable comes from this practice. Government has been very skeptical for a long time.

Now that the economic evidence is on the table, there has been a shift in the last few years. We have seen a number of new programs drawing on the idea of clusters.

This is a community that is still dispersed and not very organized.

Developing clusters and the economic strategies and foundations for prosperity

are distinct and complex undertakings.

At the heart of it are individuals making choices, learning to trust each other and to work together. CumberlandCenter came about, in part, to help strengthen the collaborative fabric of our region among universities and businesses. In Middle Tennessee, most of the universities are private institutions that are usually viewed from the prism of philanthropy. The state as a whole ranks eighth in federal research funding. Despite the concentration of research and university activity, however, there was very little connection between those universities and the business community and local economy. They were organizations that businesses gave money gave money to, not institutions that helped drive the economy of the region. The traditional economy of Middle Tennessee was supported by four clusters.

The four basic clusters were insurance, banking, music, and publishing. These clusters seemed impervious to business cycles. They lasted for quite a long time until they didn’t. Suddenly in the 80’s, everything started shifting. The music

companies moved out of Nashville and Middle Tennessee. The publishing houses – mostly mainstream religious publishing – were all based in Tennessee until the mainstream became a challenged industry itself. The banks were bought out and the insurance companies were sold. Suddenly, all the pillars of the prosperity of Middle Tennessee were crumbling.

At the same time, Hospital Corporation of America started. HCA began to develop into what is now the largest healthcare hospital management company in the country. An entire healthcare management cluster spun out of HCA in an organic way. A whole series of related industries grew into the areas of the economy, which were left hollowed out by the changes that undercut banking, insurance, publishing, and music.

How could that be done? How do we plan for this? In part, that is what the CumberlandCenter was created to answer and to do. We had been looking at how to get community leaders from government, from the university, from business, and from the nonprofit sectors; how to get

“If you want to determine if an industry will take root in a location, you first need to understand what it is currently doing and what the link is between what exists and what you want to create.”

Christian Ketels, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School

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the right mix of people engaged in the same conversation, so that unexpected, uncommon collaborations and the new innovation that creates the next wave of prosperity can be created.

OPPORTUNITES Change doesn’t occur by itself; it takes leadership to make it happen. We have to look to Washington and ask what the federal government can do. There are things that Washington needs to do on reasonable issues like immigration, tax code, trading systems, regulations, and logistical infrastructure. Unfortunately, Americans get the impression that nothing is happening in Washington. We know what the agenda is but there is no progress in implementing it. That has to do with politics – a different logic.

The CumberlandCenter asked business leaders about these priorities and their political affiliations. It found that there is broad agreement on these priorities, and on what Washington needs to do, across the political spectrum. But we cannot wait for Washington to act before we act.

Important action is already underway in local regions, states, and cities. The reason is, if we look at economic outcomes including vocational decisions, federal policy plays an important role, but so do local contacts, activities, and actions.

There are vast differences in performance, of course, across U.S. locations. Some are doing well, some poorly; some are rich, and some are not.

All work in the same policy environment so we need to understand more the role of regions.

To understand the key economic drivers at the regional level, the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness does work in cluster analysis. A key issue in

understanding why one location does well and others don’t is that there are regional specializations in groups of related industries. Focus on related set of industries seems to have positive benefits.

In the 1990s, Michael Porter, who founded the Institute, did ground-breaking work on clusters and competitiveness in his book the Competitive Advantage of Nations. His analysis brought the idea of clusters into the modern economy. Now we have been able to use not only case studies but also quantitative economic data to exhibit effects. Regions with strong clusters perform better in terms of wages, innovation, and productivity.

They also perform better in terms of entrepreneurship. Many states tried biotech and failed. If we want to determine if a location has a shot at a new industry, we need to understand what they are currently doing and what the linkage is between what exists and what we want to create.

Clusters evolve in the marketplace and without government involvement.

At the same time, the strength of clusters strongly depends on the policy decisions

that shape the business environment.

There is a role for government in that it shapes general economic policies, which impact the performance of the clusters in a given location. How can we stimulate collaboration, creating action platforms to ensure people work together? How can we shift the needle on how good a cluster is and how good the companies are to reach the potential that exists? It doesn’t need to be government. It can be universities or the leadership of individual entrepreneurs, but government might have a role in engaging with these groups.

Even if you reach a consensus on what the clusters are, the question becomes which region matters? We can spend much time in the map room, but if neighboring counties don’t buy in particularly across jurisdictions or state lines – then you have another persuasion job on your hands. We may have a viable cluster that is part of our economic sphere, but if the county next door doesn’t want to be part of the conversation, then we won’t achieve a comprehensive analysis. ■

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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Best Practices in Cluster Strategy: Sector Specific Initiatives SESSION PANELISTS: CHRISTIAN KETELS, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School

TOM SOMMER, President, MassMEDIC

BOB BREAULT, PhD, Founding Director and CEO, Arizona Optics Industry Association

REBECCA BAGLEY, President and CEO, NorTech

SITUATION

KEY QUESTIONS

A cluster, as defined by Professor Michael E. Porter of Harvard University, is a geographic concentration of competing and cooperating companies, suppliers, service providers and associated institutions. Clusters of Innovation, an initiative of the Council on Competitiveness, undertaken from1998 to 2001, provided a definitive framework to evaluate cluster development and innovative performance at the regional level. It also shared analytic tools, benchmarking results and lessons learned with key decision makers in every part of the country.

The discussion surrounded various case studies in sector specific initiatives, such as Ohio and Massachusetts, to examine the composition and performance of clusters and the regional economies and to unveil how clusters can drive a region’s economic and innovation future. Principal to the situation are the challenges clusters face in diversifying funding, sustaining membership interest and participation, and maintaining collaboration between members who differ in size.

1. W hat are some success stories in clusters?

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hat are the dynamics between 2. W small and large companies in clusters? ow do we sustain the support 3. H of cluster members in the cluster commons?

4. How do we make sure that people pitch in and support the clusters?

CHALLENGES Collaboration between small and big cluster members has been a challenge.

At the start, smaller cluster members and larger members needed an intermediary to work with them. There has been a shift, however, in collaboration between different companies. Cluster members are working closer together and calling each other directly. They know each other and so they see and seize opportunities themselves. In addition, the larger companies are starting to pull smaller companies into conversations that are critical to them because they trust them.

They are starting to direct their activities in such a way that debunks the theory that they are competitors working together.

The real challenges exist with larger companies competing against one another more intensely than smaller companies that are striving for market share. Both see the situation from different perspectives Sustaining the interest and support of cluster members is another challenge.

We have to look at the way cluster members participate and draw them in with program and project development wherever we can. Having a very active board of directors that represents a range of companies within the cluster is very important. Directors help connect people within the cluster and facilitate cooperation, particularly when the cluster is focused on one industry.

Diversifying financial support is another challenge to sustainability of clusters. Some clusters that do not take any money from cluster members are either fully funded by philanthropy or federal grants. But corporate support is important too. One way to generate support is through business Chambers. ➼

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Best Practices in Cluster Strategy: Sector Specific Initiatives

“From 1996 to 2006, we’ve gone from $236 million to $2.3 billion in revenues; from 2,300 employees to over 25,000 employees on our own. That’s what a cluster does. It’s the sheet, the music, and the conductor.”

Bob Breault, PhD, Founding Director and CEO, Arizona Optics Industry Association

“While the medical device industry in the state of Massachusetts is still alive, the focus has shifted to R&D, and manufacturing jobs are being lost.”

Tom Sommer, President, MassMEDIC

CASE STUDIES

➥ The Case of Massachusetts Massachusetts is home to a supercluster of life science industries, which includes biotech and health IT. Massachusetts is also home to the second-largest concentration of medical device manufacturing in the United States.

The state has 24,000 workers in the medical devices industry. And when you count the supply base, the state has 80,000 workers whose jobs are tied to the industry in one way or another. There are 400 OEMs, and countless service firms, including law firms, accounting firms, regulatory affairs consultants, contract manufacturers, injection molders, and more. The state exports medical devices around the world, more than any other product it produces. The supply base is vibrant and robust.

Massmedic was formed in 1996 after then governor of Massachusetts, William Weld and Harvard Business professor Michael Porter co-chaired a council on economic growth and development in Massachusetts. It was established by

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medical device company executives in 1996 and it has grown to become one of the largest regional medtech association in the United States – a place for suppliers and OEMs to meet.

Massmedic’s collaborations have led to legislative changes and better information sharing. It is providing its member organizations access to one another through networking events, information seminars, conferences, issue briefs, and a bi-annual industry directory.

Networking is a critical part of the development of a cluster. We lobby congress and the State legislature in Massachusetts. The Food and Drug Administration is our key partner in this industry. We have helped them develop user fees, reduce review times, and are currently working with them on an issue of regulatory science in medical device innovation to help speed the review of

medical devices. We also work on Medicare and in the area of trade development with the U.S. Department of Commerce.

On the state side, we have been involved in a number of positive initiatives including the formation of a Massachusetts life sciences center, which is a quasi-state organization that supports through grants, loans, and incentives the development of the medical device and biotech and Pharma industries in Massachusetts.

Massmedic also works to promote the state’s medical devices industry, participating in trade shows and the governor’s trade missions to various countries.

Massmedic’s ultimate objective is to help early-stage and emerging companies get to the next round of development. It has established something called Medtech Ignite, a mentoring program providing

“During a period in ‘95 we started losing federal money.

You can count on legislatures to leave. We designed ourselves to outlive them.”

Bob Breault, PhD, Founding Director and CEO, Arizona Optics Industry Association

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early-stage company executives with access to experienced executives in their field. For example, an executive in an orthopedic start-up might be matched with someone who worked at Johnson and Johnson’s Mytech organization. No money is exchanged; it is strictly coaching on a volunteer basis over a period of about three months.

Massmedic also has a shadowing program that bring together medtech entrepreneurs with clinicians. It is sponsored by two teaching hospitals in the region. State health systems in Springfield and Boston’s Medical Center have about a dozen such entrepreneurs paired with clinicians. By following them around, going with them into surgery, and meeting with patients, they are able to observe particular clinical needs that could be met by a technology that could form the basis of a new company.

The Case of Ohio Nortech is based in Ohio and covers a 21-county area. It was started by the business community 14 years ago when traditional industries in northeastern Ohio

were in decline. While declining slowly, they were losing a lot of jobs and presenting a major challenge to the economy.

Nortech created a new organization called Jumpstart with entrepreneurial capital and early-stage funding. It formed another organization to help with broadband access.

And it was a catalyst for a state program started 12 years ago that has invested 1.7 billion dollars in technology-based economic development.

Then Nortech made a decision to diversify the economy. It had the Cleveland clinic. It had biomedical. It had medical devices and worked heavily as an intermediary in that space. Flexible electronics and energy were identified as two areas of emphasis, to which water technologies were later added. It now has 133 members in the energy and flexible electronics cluster. It has not started signing up cluster members in the water technologies cluster yet.

Since June 2010, these companies have created 800 jobs, 97 million dollars in capital, and 52 million dollars in payroll.

Nortech is starting to accelerate areas of emphasis within those companies, and has

identified about 15,000 jobs that can be created over the next five years.

Quasar Energy Group is another success story. It takes organic waste and turns it into either electricity or compressed natural gas. Quasar has grown from 10 employees to 60 since 2010. It built the first adjustor with components from Europe, and then mapped these components back to the supply chain in the United States, which resulted in significant savings. Ninetyeight percent of these components are made in the U.S., and 75 percent in Ohio. Nortech introduced Quasar to a large real-estate developer in Forest City, and they developed a bio-digester in a depressed area. Nortech has also worked with the federal government on a renewable energy credit for the bio-digester. ■

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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Best Practices in Cluster Strategy: Clusters as an Instrument of Regional Competitiveness Efforts SESSION PANELISTS: CHRISTIAN KETELS, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School

BENJAMIN ERULKAR, JD, Senior Vice President, Economic Development, Detroit Regional Chamber

NEIL MCLEANE, Executive Director, New Carolin

LEE ANNE NANCE, EVP, Research Triangle Regional Partnership

JENNIFER ZELLER, Director of Research, Georgia Power

SITUATION

KEY QUESTIONS

Collaboration within clusters is key. Helping guide companies toward collaborating and competing in a healthy way is essential not only to a region’s growth but to a company’s growth and its survival.

The Triple Helix economic development approach to clustering can help solve problems, meet challenges, and create opportunities in new markets.

Clusters are helping the regions discussed here transform from industrial economies to collaborative economies. In the past, individual companies worked hard in order to use their supply and value chains in a cost-effective and successful manner. The future is about networking, connecting, and collaborating. Clusters are going to be one of the greatest drivers in transitioning from an industrial economy to a network-collaborative economy. Clusters engage more stakeholders in the ecosystem to the benefit of all. Sharing challenges and sharing successes and opportunities creates passion and excitement, which leads to innovation.

1. What opportunities are best leveraged together?

2. W hat opportunities do companies have where strategic partnering will help enable their success? hat problems are best solved 3. W collaboratively as an industry, as a cluster, rather than individually?

4. What challenges are still being faced by clusters?

CHALLENGES Working with emerging and disruptive technology clusters involves both great challenges and great opportunities. One of the greatest challenges is knowing who is in the cluster. We have 60% more smart grid companies than we had two years ago. We tend to frame cluster development in the context of all economic development: existing industry, traditional recruitment, and start up support.

Metrics: Much of what is important in cluster development is collaboration, communication, and connecting people.

Measuring these can be a great challenge.

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Attitude and opinion of key political leaders: Cluster-based economic development can some times be viewed as picking winners.

Finding a sustainable business model: The New Carolina cluster had state funding for its first two years. For the next seven years, however, it was funded completely by the private sector.

This poses a major challenge. Companies are less willing to pay for economic development for the broader good. The New Carolina model is successful because it starts with private sector investment in clusters, it then draws public sector funding to match from the state, and finally it is supplemented by federal programs.

OPPORTUNITES One of the greatest benefits in cluster work is helping clusters connect with other clusters. For example, helping the smart water sector connect with the smart grid sector. Or, helping cybersecurity defense companies connect with electricity providers. Cross-pollination is a great opportunity for cluster work.

Workforce analytics is also critical. The availability of skilled talent is the number one concern for prospects today. Skilled talent is at the center of successful cluster development. ➥

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Best Practices in Cluster Strategy: Clusters as an Instrument of Regional Competitiveness Efforts

“Clusters give us an opportunity to target our resources, manpower, and funds and to market and grow our region with the highest probability of success in creating jobs and investment for our citizens.”

Lee Anne Nance, EVP, Research Triangle Regional Partnership

“We need to engage key leadership both at the CEO level and the mid-level. If you don’t get an early champion on board, it’s just not going to work.”

Neil McLeane, Executive Director, New Carolin

Another challenge with cluster effectiveness is the availability of timely data. For example, a cluster can emerge in an area because a company has moved to a town, bringing with it 1500 jobs.

While this move changes the dynamics of an area, it is not going to be immediately reflected in the cluster data. That poses a difficulty within the communities.

➥

Case Study: The Research Triangle Region The Research Triangle region covers a sixty-mile radius region around the RDU International Airport. The Research Triangle Park is a 7,000-acre science park – the largest in the United States. The Research Triangle has been engaged in clusters since 2002, with 11 clusters in total. The clusters center around IT and clean technology.

Clusters are tracked through five-year plan. Sixty eight percent of the new jobs in the region, and 82% of the investments made by industry over the last five years have come from the clusters. The five-year plan goal was to create 100,000 new jobs.

During the first year, 88,000 were lost.

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However, the data shows that by June 30, 2014, the goal is very close to being met.

There has been a 2.6% increase in regional employment growth, compared to a national average of -1%. In the last decade, five of those years being very challenging, GDP growth was 71%.

A cluster approach is necessary because resources for the economic development organization have diminished. Clusters give companies an opportunity to target resources, manpower, and funds and to market and grow the region with the highest probability of success, creating jobs and investment for citizens.

The Triple Helix economic development growth model is used within these clusters. The first example of Triple Helix in the region was the Research Triangle Park itself. Fifty-three years ago, when the park was created, North Carolina ranked 49th in the country in socioeconomic indicators due to poverty levels in the state as well as a lack of workforce development and talent.

By using the Triple Helix economic development growth theory the Research Triangle Park has prospered greatly.

Case Study: New Carolina In 2003 South Carolina had a new Governor and a new Secretary of Commerce. The state engaged Michael Porter to help with a strategic plan. Out of that engagement was launched the South Carolina Competitiveness Initiative, forming in turn the South Carolina Council for Competitiveness, which has now been rebranded as New Carolina.

New Carolina was made up of the Governor, the Secretary of Commerce, and presidents of three research universities. The mission of New Carolina was to find, build, and celebrate clusters.

Over the last 10 years there have been 15 different cluster initiatives developed around the state.

Some of the cluster initiatives that stand out include the Transportation Distribution Logistics (TDL) council, the Recyclonomics Cluster, and the Recyclonomics SC. There are 450 companies in this space in the state.

There is an insurance technology cluster – a regional cluster based in Columbia – focused on writing insurance software for companies all over the world. One of

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the newest clusters, the South Carolina Aerospace Cluster, is anchored by Boeing.

Case Study: Georgia Power Georgia Power has positioned the state of Georgia along with the Georgia Department of Economic Development to look at target cluster initiatives.

Georgia Power views itself as is an external affairs organization for community and economic development.

In 1927, then-President Preston S. Arkwright’s felt that Georgia Power’s core mission was to help communities grow.

He wanted to promote growth within the state by finding tools the state wouldn’t be able to find on its own.

A large initiative of Georgia Power is called Metro South. This is an area south of the airport. Initially the area was not growning the way that North Metro Atlanta has grown. Income levels and poverty levels show the region does not have the kind of high-quality jobs that the north side has. Georgia Power showed through basic data where the area stands vis-a-vis population growth, income, medium age, educational attainment, SAT

scores, and dropout rates. Using Metro Atlanta and the state of Georgia as comparison, Georgia Power showed what the region could look like in five years. The data projections showed that regional employment trends were quite good.

Porsche North America joined Delta in moving its headquarters in the area, which has increased opportunities in the business and finance sectors. While transportation and logistics is the largest cluster in that area, business and finance opportunities are also excellent.

Case Study: The Detroit Chamber The Detroit Chamber has been historically a traditional chamber of commerce. It will turn 100 years old this year. As an organization of any type, it needs to evolve. The chamber has done that by redefining its four strategic priorities to align with what the region needs. They are: 1. Economic development 2. Regional collaboration 3. Education reform 4. Value to members in the implementation of all of those programs.

Chambers need to evolve to meet the needs of their region and their members.

They used to be membership organizations that promoted networking opportunities.

Today, in a society where the cost of information approaches zero, chamber opportunities to promote their value are limited through traditional mechanisms.

Detroit is a major urban area and serves as the brand equity for the chamber. The chamber serves 11 counties comprising Southeast Michigan. There is a desire to align regional priorities with the state so there has been a conscious effort to coordinate with the governor’s office and the state’s economic development authorities.

There are some interesting trends showing possibilities for diversity in Southeast Michigan’s regional economy. They include, distribution services, publication printing, education and knowledge creation, advanced manufacturing technology, and the measurement of precision manufacturing tools and products.

The chamber is working with the state, counties, and municipalities ➥

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Best Practices in Cluster Strategy: Clusters as an Instrument of Regional Competitiveness Efforts “Chambers need to evolve to meet the needs of their region and their members. They used to be membership organizations that promoted networking opportunities. In a society where the cost of information approaches zero, chamber opportunities to promote their value are limited through traditional mechanisms.”

Benjamin Erulkar, JD, Senior Vice President, Economic Development, Detroit Regional Chamber

➥ to devise incentive programs such

as credit and subsidies. It all begins at the location quotient of the particular sector. If a sector has a low or stagnant location quotient, the argument goes against devoting or designing incentive programs for that particular sector.

In Michigan, at the beginning of his administration in 2011, Governor Snyder eliminated a $1 billion program of film production subsidies. He did so largely on the basis of the sector location quotient being remarkably low. It was a politically controversial move on his part, but he stood by it. His logic was that the film production sector in Michigan was not growing organically and it was therefore not sustainable. As a tool to balance the budget and rationalize government services to business, he eliminated those subsidies. While the move was deemed was politically unpopular, it was economically rational.

Clusters and cluster data can be used to figure out what’s next. In the automotive sector, the question is asked whether the decline had an influence on Detroit’s current municipal bankruptcy or whether it was part of the recovery. The answer to those questions is yes and yes. A look at the cluster data defined what kind of resources can be put into growing and maintaining the auto sector and how we can use that sector to diversify the economy.

In terms of logistics, the question is, what can we do to grow the trade capacity and the export potential of the region?

What infrastructure do we need to focus on so that we can build and improve that trade capacity? Detroit is the fourth largest metropolitan statistical area in terms of exports in the United States – behind New York, Los Angeles, and Houston. ■

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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Experiences from Federally Funded Cluster Efforts

SESSION PANELISTS: MARK MURO, Senior Fellow and Policy Director, Brookings Institution

PHIL PARADICE, Atlanta Regional Director, U.S. Economic Development Administration

SCOTT HENRY, Senior Adviser, Office of Entrepreneurial Development, U.S. Small Business Administration

MARK TURNER, PhD, President and Principal Associate, Optimal Solutions Group

BUZZ PATRICK, Director for Advanced Manufacturing, Tech 2020

TIFFANY WILSON KARP, General Manager and COO, Global Center for Medical Innovation

PERCY LUNEY, Vice President, Education, Research and Development of Workforce, Space Florida

Until the present administration, the United States did not have a national cluster effort. In fact, until the FY 2011 budget cycle, the federal government had paid very little attention to clusters despite wide adoption by national governments around the world and regional and state governments across North America.

Since the administration proposed and received funding in the FY 2010 budget for a single tree clusters program, the effort in the United States has blossomed.

For the last three years, we have watched the launch of multiple programs from the Department of Agriculture’s Regional Innovation Initiative on the rural side, to the EDA’s 16 Challenge, to the Small Business Administration’s Job Accelerator program.

There are now advanced technology skills initiatives ongoing in Iowa and Southern Arizona. There are clean energy projects ongoing in Southeast Michigan, San Diego, and Oregon. There are initiatives working to rally various actors in the food industries in New England, Bristol Bay, and the Finger Lakes region.

And there are other efforts focused on IT, aerospace, water technology, and wood products around the United States.

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All the initiatives are collaborative and aim to convene the actors in a regional cluster by coordinating different efforts.

They all aim to reduce the risk associated with innovation and investment.

There are 74 federally supported cluster initiatives in the majority of states.

Federal funding to the tune of $250-300 million is being used to raise matching funds and catalyze efforts to strengthen the nation’s regional innovation systems.

However, challenges remain with the biggest being that each federal agency continues to have its own authorization, mission, regulations, policies, and procedures.

The exception to the above rule has been the Economic Development Administration (EDA). The EDA has been fortunate in that each one of its grantees has been funded under the same program. The challenge for multiple agencies is to find a relevant role within the funding mechanism, which is relevant to a partnership of applicants.

Currently, the rigidity of the stovepipe funding only allows us to work in a certain manner, which means government agencies are not able to collaborate as well they should.

The Case of 20/20 Tech 20/20 is the recipient of the Advanced Manufacturing Job and Innovation Accelerator Challenge Grants (AMJAC) a $2.4 million awardee – the only one in the Southeast, and the largest award in the country. Tech 20/20 has been doing business with the EDA for approximately 20 years, developing entrepreneurs, technological transfer, and access to capital. It has also been getting technologies out of the lab and the University of Tennessee into the hands of the entrepreneurs who can develop and grow businesses in Oakridge and the surrounding regions. In 2012, with AMJAC, Tech 20/20 expanded into cluster development.

The Case of the Global Center for Medical Innovation (GCMI) GCMI would not exist in its current form today had it not been for the support of the Department of Commerce, the EDA, and the 16 Program. GCMI was formed several years ago by four leading academic research and healthcare institutions in Atlanta – including Georgia Tech.

The Southeast region, where the cluster operates, fosters a tremendous amount ➥

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Experiences from Federally Funded Cluster Efforts

“GCMI was formed several years ago by four leading academic research and healthcare institutions in Atlanta – including Georgia Tech. The Southeast region, where the cluster operates, fosters a tremendous amount of medical device innovation and research.

The cluster has found a good region to thrive being surrounded by leading academic and research hospitals.”

Phil Paradice, Atlanta Regional Director, U.S. Economic Development Administration

“Networking and collaborations in the Central Florida Region, around the state, and internationally, with other clean energy groups have fostered a robust innovation ecosystem to support clean energy technology businesses.”

Percy Luney, Vice President, Education, Research and Development of Workforce, Space Florida

➥

of medical device innovation and research. The cluster has found a good region to thrive being surrounded by leading academic and research hospitals.

The Case of Space Florida Space Florida (SF) is a cluster economic development organization serving as a special district in the state of Florida. It focuses on aerospace and the aerospace supply chain. Space Florida is working with Elon Musk and Space X as well as Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic.

It has effectively taken over the shuttle landing facility.

SF was deeply impacted by the recent shuttle program shutdown; 9,000 workers in a four-county area lost their jobs and

20,000 workers lost work in the overall supply chain.

Working with Brevard Workforce, the Space Coast Energy Consortium, and the Technological Research Development Authority, a proposal was put together, developed as a clean energy cluster to take advantage of the applied technology and energy that exists at the Kennedy Space Center at NASA. It has provided positive input to the community as more new companies are brought into the area.

Networking and collaborations in the Central Florida Region, around the state, and internationally with other clean energy groups have fostered a robust innovation ecosystem to support clean energy technology businesses. ■

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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“The rigidity of the stovepipe funding only allows us to work in certain manners.

It doesn’t allow us to collaborate as government agencies as well as we should.

However, five different federal agencies getting together, working together, it actually is pretty amazing.”

Scott Henry, Senior Adviser, Office of Entrepreneurial Development U.S. Small Business Administration

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Role of Federal Policies in Shaping Clusters

SESSION PANELISTS: CHRISTIAN KETELS, PhD, Faculty, Harvard Business School

PHIL PARADICE, Atlanta Regional Director, US Economic Development Administration

ERIN ANDREW, Director of Innovation Clusters and Skills Initiatives, US Small Business Administration

TED ABERNATHY JR., Managing Partner, Economic Leadership, LLP

DAN BERGLUND, President and CEO, State Science and Technology Institute

SCOTT STERN, PhD, Professor and Chair, Management and Technology, MIT

NEIL MCLEAN, Executive Director, New Carolina

SITUATION Cluster structures matter for job growth, entrepreneurship, and new firm formation. To have impactful innovation we must foster entrepreneurship. The creation of new firms fosters job growth and survivability in new businesses.

Bringing people together in regions and clusters where there is true comparative advantage is a task that takes problem solving and pragmatic hard work. When it is done correctly it works wonders for the region and new businesses.

An emerging body of empirical evidence shows that this isn’t just an economic industrial phenomenon; policy and initiatives also matter. Local institutions can get some funding to do something for a few years but when the funding ends they have to reinvent themselves.

Collaboration in times of plenty is easy. In times of scarcity, it can also be easy. Where it gets difficult is when we have a winner/loser approach. It is then that collaboration doesn’t happen. What we have currently is a battle approach.

We know that public policy, legislative, and regulatory issues are directly tied to infrastructure and workforce issues. These issues are interconnected and can only be managed when the parties are all at the table and continuing the partnerships.

As a country we are at a critical juncture as it relates to jobs, economic growth, innovation, and shared prosperity.

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The economic landscape we face today is like none we have faced in recent years.

The U.S. is currently presented with two macroeconomic trends, one representing great opportunity and the other significant challenges. How we address these challenges and opportunities will determine the future we have as a country.

The U.S. is having a resurgence in business investment, particularly in the advanced manufacturing sector.

This is due to our national comparative advantages: our strength in research and development, continued increase in productivity of American workers, strong rule of law and intellectual property protection, reliable supply chains, and new opportunities created by the expansion of domestic energy resources. The rising cost and difficulty of doing business overseas has contributed to this comparative advantage. A recent foreign direct investment survey of executives from 302 companies across the globe spotlights the impact of these factors on our economy.

The survey has been conducted each year since 1998. China took the top spot for foreign direct investment, a spot they kept until 2012, while the U.S. ranked fourth.

The 2013 survey showed, for the first time since 2001 that the U.S. has bumped China out of the first place. Brazil came in third place, followed by Canada. India dropped to fifth place from second. After a decade in which the U.S. lost jobs, we now see companies starting to bring these jobs back to the U.S. ➥

KEY QUESTIONS 1. How can we move forward with a federal policy that is favorable to clusters?

2. W hat should the relationship between federal and regional efforts be? ow do we benchmark practices 3. H and initiatives? How do we benchmark organizations in a meaningful way?

4. What is the federal government doing well already and what should it be doing when it comes to clusters?

5. What is the right level and type of engagement with the government?

PROSPERITY

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Role of Federal Policies in Shaping Clusters

“The American economy in the last quarter century is a story of some regions and regional industries growing and others declining.

Cluster structures matter for job growth, entrepreneurship, and new firm formation. To have impactful innovation we must foster entrepreneurship.”

Scott Stern, PhD, Professor and Chair, Management and Technology, MIT

“It’s important that the public sector supports the efforts of the private sector to the extent that we have the capacity and authority to do so in our own legislative framework.”

Phil Paradice, Atlanta Regional Director, U.S. Economic Development Administration

CHALLENGES There’s been a significant amount of growth of clusters in numerous industries.

Branding and selling what clusters are, not only to get government funding, but also to get industry partners on board remains a major hurdle. Industry partners need to be the advocate. We are not going to be successful or sustainable if we have some government funding but no other source of financial support. Pushing the metrics conversation is really helpful for longterm sustainability.

The inner agency cluster has been a challenge from a funding perspective as well as bureaucratic perspective, which slows things down. The federal government has identified some opportunities where its agencies can make it easier for the grantee to cut through the red tape but challenges still remain. The Small Business Administration (SBA) in

particular is interested in how clusters impact the GDP. The ingredients are there: we have the clusters, the workforce, the educators, and the educational institutions. But we need to improve our collaborations so that we can be more effective in addressing the issue of bureaucracy.

There are several cluster initiatives that get their funding locally. Yet, there has not been a conversation on the national level until recently about the impact of these cluster initiatives in the regions they operate. For example, members in Congress know the cluster initiatives by name but they do not know the type of cluster in a more substantive way.

For women specifically, there is vast investment in STEM but we are not efficient in getting these women to start businesses and patent products in these type of industries where there are gaps in

the supply chain and where women could easily fill those gaps. We need to explore outreach strategies, which different clusters could be using to increase the diversity in that specific industry.

The Economic Adjustment Assistance (EDA) has a requirement that regional strategies be employed and that investments follow those regional strategies. Regional strategies used to be a product of the public sector, with public elected officials being the key element within those regional strategies.

A decade ago we modified that, and the requirements are now heavily weighted on private sector involvement. What we found was that the private sector had to be a key component in the public sector’s disposition of scarce resources.

It’s important that the public sector, specifically the EDA, support the efforts of the private sector to the extent that we

“Collaboration in times of plenty is easy. In times of scarcity, it can also be easy. Where it gets difficult is when we have a winner/loser approach. It is then that collaboration doesn’t happen.”

Ted Abernathy Jr, Managing Partner, Economic Leadership, LLP

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have the capacity and authority to do so in our own legislative framework.

The question becomes: if a startup company had federal equity dollars in it would it even want them? Would it want to create a set of rules for the requirements that may come attached to those federal dollars? Should the federal government be in the venture capital business at that level?

The multiagency partnerships need to be collaborations that are driven by interest and reason not relationships that are forced. We have congressional committee structures and congressional interests that are rooted in the 50s and 60s economic development. Congress has authorized those in the 2010 America Competes Act. It authorized a regional innovation program at a $100 million that would fund these types of activities. There is a real question in the reauthorization of

the America Competes Act as to whether the regional innovation program will exist.

The House Democrats have suggested in their proposal to authorize it at $500 million. The House Republicans have not issued an actual draft bill, but what they have offered in terms of general principles is that the regional innovation program is not included.

OPPORTUNITES Regions should be empowered to implement and develop their own regional economic strategy. Benchmarking the problem is central to this. We can measure results both in the short and long term and in multiple dimensions, which will allow us to get a portrait of what types of interventions matter for whom and when and over what period of time. The most

robust evidence is going to ultimately require a continuing program of true experimental evaluation at the level of randomized clinical trials.

In order to enable effective rather than misleading benchmarking we have to develop integrated and cluster specific data. But how do we benchmark practices and initiatives and how do we benchmark organizations in a meaningful way? One needs to connect the data collection more clearly to the underlying phenomena and policy calls. We cannot evaluate a policy or make an intervention unless we know the population.

From the state’s perspective, the workforce investment act funding that the states were using to finance cluster activities was cut significantly. States no longer have the flexible financial support they used to have in order to invest in clusters. At the federal level, with every administration we have different advocates, but when those advocates leave the clusters suffer.

The organizations that have a purpose and a direction and that can maintain a continuum of the theme are important.

These are the entities that seize the opportunities in the most efficient way.

They work with local leadership and understand the needs of the marketplace very well.

Economic developers are trying to better understand this funding philosophy.

Almost every state lost 40% in its manufacturing base in just 12 years. At the same time, technical service clusters increased by 40%. What does that mean for the community? The federal government isn’t always the answer to the community. While the federal government is an important player for convening the community in the beginning, the community must be able to sustain itself in the long run. ■

EDITOR’S NOTE The Global Action Report highlights more than 18 hours of presentations, discussion and debate on the full range of issues covered at the Global Action Summit. Every effort was made to reflect both the tenor and intent of all comments as well as dissenting viewpoints when offered. Some comments or facts may have been omitted or included as part of a broader concept to help the reader. The resulting summary is a distillation and thoughtful effort to create a coherent, continuous narrative from the lively exchange of ideas presented in all the sessions.

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GLOBAL ACTION PLATFORM

Global Action Platform: A Global Agenda for Abundance Food + Health + Prosperity

The Global Action Platform convenes, aligns, and mobilizes global corporations, universities, investors, government agencies, and NGOs to create abundance through innovation in food, heath, and prosperity. The Platform

■ Advances a social leadership movement, ■ Invests in innovation and new businesses, ■ Deploys online work groups and global communications to accelerate action, and ■ Focuses on the intersection of food, health, and prosperity.

Specific program initiatives include the annual Global Action Summit; forums at the World Bank Group, the National Press Club, and Meridian International Center; multi-million dollar impact investments and awards; online services; a global Summit Fellows program for young leaders; publications and annual reports; content sharing with the G7, G20, APEC, and BRIC Summit publications; and a global corporate award program for shared value.

The Global Action Platform is an open, neutral, nonpartisan, and collaborative platform to convene leaders, make investments, align collaborations, and share ideas and strategies through global communications to create sustainable abundance in food, health, and prosperity.

The Platform aims to identify and invest in sustainable, scalable innovations that offer the promise of transformative impact in the intersection of food, health, and prosperity.

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With input from an international steering committee and national expert advisors, the Global Action Platform was designed in 2013 around four program activities: Convene, Challenge, Connect, and Communicate. These integrated programs facilitate action through dynamic leadership events, investments, ongoing working groups, and global communications. In 2014, a five-year roadmap was initiated to inform decisionmaking among cross-sector leaders and scientists.

Specific programs of the Global Action Platform include: CONVENE ■ Global Action Summit ■ Global Action Fellows ■ Global Corporate Awards Dinner ■ World Bank Group Forum ■ National Press Club Forum ■ Meridian International Center Forum CHALLENGE Million Challenge Fund ■ Early Stage Challenge Funds ■ Social Enterprise Funds (Under development)

CONNECT ■ Fellows Social Enterprise Work Groups ■ Online Collaborations and Work Groups

COMMUNICATE ■ Global Summit Program ■ Global Action Report ■ Global Action Platform Website ■ $1

■ Video ■ Social

Library Media

CONVENE: BUILDING A SOCIAL LEADERSHIP MOVEMENT FOR ABUNDANCE THROUGH INNOVATION The Global Action Platform is building a growing social leadership movement to create abundance through innovation in food, health, and prosperity. To build this network and shared understanding, we conduct the following programs and events: Global Action Summit The Global Action Summit is the most dynamic, agile, innovative, and fastest growing forum for today’s global leaders in food, health, and prosperity. The invitation-only summit is the anchorconvening event of the Global Action Platform and is hosted annually in Nashville, Tennessee in November.

The Summit convenes top senior level decision makers from the corporate, government, academic, media, investment, and NGO communities from around the world with a distinct focus on creating abundance through innovation in food, health and prosperity.

The Summit is guided by a distinguished international steering committee and informed by extraordinary partners that include the World Bank Group, The Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness—Harvard Business School, Vanderbilt Medical Center

GLOBAL ACTION PLATFORM

(CRC), UC Davis, the Diplomatic Courier, and the UN Foundation and +SocialGood, among many others.

Global Action Fellows The Global Action Fellows Program enables outstanding students and young professionals to participate in a life-changing educational leadership experience. Fellows are top undergraduate and graduate students from universities and partner organization networks around the world who are selected by their participating institutions to attend the annual Global Action Summit. At the Summit, Fellows learn and practice 21st Century skills that prepare them to address critical issues in the creation of abundance through innovation in food, health, and prosperity.

Global Shared Value Dinner The Global Shared Value Dinner serves as the annual closing ceremony for the Global Action Summit. The event is a celebration of innovation, entrepreneurship, and the impact of the private sector in helping solve the grand challenges facing the world. The cocktail reception and dinner are followed by an awards program moderated by Dr. Fareed Zakaria, CNN and TIME Magazine contributor. The event includes a major keynote address, as well as announcements of new Challenge investments and the presentation of a distinguished global award to a corporation dedicated to “shared value” corporate strategy–i.e., to solving global grand challenges through new enterprise and innovation.

World Bank Group Forum Each year, the World Bank Group and Global Action Platform collaborate in presenting a leadership forum for banking, investment, and business leaders at the World Bank Group headquarters in Washington, DC. The Forum presents findings and strategies from the Global Action Summit relevant to economic and business development in creating abundance through innovation in food, health, and prosperity.

National Press Club Forum In partnership with the Diplomatic Courier, we present a Forum for journalists and media leaders at the National Press Club. The Forum is

scheduled to take place immediately prior to the release of the Global Action Report, an annual report published by the Global Action Platform in collaboration with Diplomatic Courier magazine and distributed to key global leaders. The Global Action Report features long range editorials by leading research institutions and business leaders in food, health, and economics; summaries of major ideas and recommendations from the Global Action Summit, and progress reports on a five year roadmap toward abundance in food, health, and prosperity.

Meridian International Center Forum To convene leaders of key government agencies and leaders in the Diplomatic Corps, the Meridian International Center and Global Action Platform collaborate in conducting an annual Forum at the historic headquarters, the Meridian House in Washington, DC. The forum provides an opportunity to share copies of the annual Global Action Report and to discuss policy implications of the ideas and recommendations from the Report. ➥

“The Global Action Challenge is a pool of investment funds and an international business competition designed to stimulate global innovation and to invest in innovations and businesses that can have a transformative impact on food, health, and prosperity.”

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➥ CHALLENGE: INVESTING IN INNOVATION AND TRANSFORMATIVE NEW ENTERPRISES In order to accelerate innovation, the emergence of transformative businesses, and the disruptive market changes that can lead to abundance, the Global Action Platform created the Global Action Challenge.

The Global Action Challenge is a pool of investment funds and an international business competition designed to stimulate global innovation and to invest in innovations and businesses that can have a transformative impact on food, health, and prosperity. The Global Action Challenge is based on the understanding that business solutions are the foundation for effectively solving the global grand challenges facing the world.

Through the Challenge, the Global Action Platform helps to launch solutions to issues discussed at its annual Summit and Forums. Challenge funds represent a spectrum of investments; from early stage to late stage venture funds, grants, and social enterprise funds.

Submissions for the Challenge follow published guidelines for each distinct fund and are reviewed by independent experts and investors.

Finalists from the competition make live presentations at the Global Action Summit, where investment decisions are announced at the closing Summit dinner, moderated by Fareed Zakaria, CNN and Time Magazine contributor.

The Global Action Platform works in partnership with Diplomatic Courier, oneC1TY, the World Bank Group, SHOUTAmerica, Oakridge Associated Universities, Wells Fargo Bank, DevDigital, global university networks, and several other constituencies.

Million Dollar Challenge The $1 Million Challenge is a competitive investment opportunity to identify breakthrough prototypes, technologies, or early-stage ventures that hold promise for transformative impact on health and food and are scalable business enterprises. The Global Action Challenge is open to food and/or healthcare innovators and entrepreneurs from around the world. The recipient(s) and top finalists will be recognized at the Global Action Summit scheduled for November 17-18, 2014 in Nashville, TN. The $1M Challenge was founded in 96

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In addition, the Global Action Platform provides concierge enterprise services designed to help organizations, membership groups, and companies developing shared value strategies and innovations that align with the mission and programs of the Global Action Platform.

COMMUNICATE: SHARING IDEAS THOUGH GLOBAL REPORTS AND COMMUNICATIONS TO BUILD CONSENSUS AND INFORMED ACTION The Global Action Platform works to share ideas and innovative solutions globally to key leadership audiences and to the general public. Through our global reports and communications, we seek to contribute to a global knowledge base for food, health, and prosperity and to create a growing global consensus for action.

2013, in partnership with XMI Holdings, Inc. and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, which provides independent administration of the $1 Million Challenge, including inquiries, review, and ranking of submissions.

Early Stage Challenge Funds The Global Action Challenge offers early stage investment opportunities at the $50K and $100K levels for innovations and early business development for enterprises that can have a transformative impact on food, health, and prosperity.

The competitive submission is open to researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators from around the world. Finalists are recognized at the Global Action Summit and investment decisions are announced at the closing dinner of the Summit, moderated by Fareed Zakaria, CNN and Time Magazine contributor.

CONNECT: INITIATING SELF-ORGANIZING WORKING GROUPS, PARTNERSHIPS, AND COLLABORATIONS ACROSS SECTORS The Global Action Platform actively seeks partnerships, alliances, and promotes collaboration and alignment among existing initiatives in the food, health, and economic sectors. Through its Connect programs, the Platform provides an online service to support self-organizing work groups and online tools to further collaborations among Fellows, universities, entrepreneurs, investors, and other leaders.

Global Action Report The Global Action Report documents proceedings of the annual Global Action Summit, providing summaries of major ideas, recommendations for action, longrange vision frameworks, and exemplary stories and analysis relevant to creating abundance through innovation in food, health, and prosperity. The Report is published and distributed worldwide in partnership with the Diplomatic Courier. Distribution includes mailings to 25,000 top global decision makers in the corporate, government, university, investment, media, and NGO sectors, and online readership of 2.4 million.

Beginning in 2015, the Report will be released annually as a series in a five-year roadmap toward abundance.

Social Media In partnership with the UN Foundation’s +SocialGood network of social media influencers in 145 countries, the Global Action Platform shares ideas and presentations for a global audience through live stream broadcast of major events and a broad set of social media communications, blogs, and sharing through other media platforms in order to reach a large audience around the world.

Video Library The Global Action Platform is building a library of video presentations from its Summit and other events, featuring leading global experts addressing critical issues facing the world in food, health, and prosperity. ■

SPONSORED | PARTNER CONTENT

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PARTNERS & SPONSORS

Thank you to our 2013 Sponsors for their generous support of this initiative: LEAD INSTITUTIONAL PARTNER

DIAMOND SPONSORS

PLATINUM SPONSORS

GOLD SPONSORS

SILVER SPONSORS

tennessee

www.lifesciencetn.org info@lifesciencetn.org 615-242-8856

ADVANCING and GROWING the life sciences industry in TENNESSEE.

FRIENDS EDUCATION │ NETWORKING │ ADVOCACY

MEDIA PARTNER

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TECHNOLOGY PARTNER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the dedication and work of over 250 partners and colleagues throughout the world who have generously assisted to create the growth and opportunities for of the Global Action Platform over the past three years.

We look forward to your continued involvement and support in 2014 and beyond.

If you or your organization would like to become involved in any of our initiatives in food, health, and prosperity, and the 5-year roadmap to create abundance through innovation, we welcome you to contact us.

The Global Action Platform presents opportunities for global brand placement and leadership participation, reaching elite target markets and audiences through an integrated series of annual programs and sponsorship opportunities: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Global Action Summit – Nashville Summit Fellows Program Global Action Report Global Food and Health Innovation Challenge Media Outreach – publications, videos, and social media Premium Events throughout the year

Contact: CumberlandCenter GLOBAL ACTION PLATFORM Mailing Address: 401 Commerce Street, Suite 140 Nashville, TN 37219 +1(877) 300-5806 (main) www.GlobalActionPlatform.org

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Your innovation has a million dollar future.

2014 Innovation Investment Competition $1 Million for transformative and scalable solutions in the food and health industries www.GlobalActionChallenge.org Apply by August 29, 2014

www.globalactionplatform.org Terms and conditions for Challenge investments are negotiated directly among the interested parties and are expected to be finalized in mutually acceptable and definitive agreements. The Global Action Challenge is a program of the CumberlandCenter, a 501c3 organization – Creating abundance through innovation in food, health and prosperity.