St. Gallen Symposium Magazine 2017 by St. Gallen Symposium

47th St. Gallen Symposium Magazine

#disruptiondilemma

EDITORIAL

Dear Reader, What does the symposium mean for the University of St. Gallen? Disruption! For the 47th time, the event turned campus life upside down, in the best possible way. The topic of this year’s gathering raised, among many other issues, the dilemma of whether technology might disrupt future symposia. Why physically fly hundreds of people to this picturesque corner of Switzerland when you could host a virtual symposium accessible to the whole world? The answer seems clear. Many of the symposium’s most interesting conversations happened spontaneously over lunch on the piazza, or over a glass of wine and a cigar in the lounge. And isn’t it the human touch that really matters in the end? As an international team of journalists, photographers and illustrators, we listened to your conversations and sat down with prominent Leaders of Today and Leaders of Tomorrow. The most interesting and challenging ideas about disruption in the field of business, politics, science and society are covered in this magazine. For example: The president of Estonia shares how her country is dealing with cyber attacks (page 44), cyborg Neil Harbisson describes the feeling of being trans-species (page 66), and data analyst Michal Kosinski explains how algorithms are taking over our lives (page 80). Since disruption is not a static phenomenon but an ongoing process, we would like to encourage you to keep discussing the topic via #disruptiondilemma and to also take a look at www.symposium.org/magazine. On behalf of the magazine team and the 47th International Student’s Committee (ISC), we would like to sincerely thank you for your participation, lively debates, and commitment to the St. Gallen Symposium. Kind regards,

JULIA KRAMER

NELSON LOCHER

EDITOR IN CHIEF

MAGAZINE PROJECT MANAGER

TABLE OF CONTENTS “In an economic sense, some tech companies are like countries.” 14

PRIVATE VS. PUBLIC: BRIDGING THE GAP Denmark will soon have a special technology ambassador to connect its government with private tech companies. What is this new tech ambassadorship all about? Will it work? And what does it mean for other industries?

“WE ARE ALL ORANGE” A glimpse through the eyes (and the antenna) of Neil Harbisson, the first person to be officially recognised as a cyborg.

44 “CYBER ATTACKS ARE ALWAYS HAPPENING. IT’S LIKE COSMIC DUST” President Kersti Kaljulaid says that investing in a digital Estonia was the natural way for the country to face modern challenges. But the tiny country's transformation isn't complete.

22 BANKING’S DIGITAL FUTURE Venmo, PayPal and various other start-ups working to challenge the legacy companies of the finance industry are collectively known as “fintech” – short for financial technology. Banking is a case study in how to see disruption coming and yet struggle to deal with it.

70 48 STILL FIGHTING FOR CHANGE In 2011, revolutions later dubbed the "Arab Spring" disrupted life in over 20 countries. Across the region, young people are continuing to work for a better future.

ON MARS, PEOPLE WILL LIVE IN IGLOOS AND EAT CRICKETS A new generation of visionaries spreads enthusiasm about space not seen since the moon landing – while also tackling problems like world hunger and climate change.

SECTIONS Business 8 Politics 38 Science 58 Society 78 Symposium

84 THE MISUNDERSTOOD ARCHITECT Around the world, the work of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava is both admired and despised. He denies repeating his designs and believes that architects today “build in a very fragile way.”

98 HUMANS OF ST. GALLEN It takes hundreds of volunteers and dozens of paid staff to make the St. Gallen Symposium a success. Here are some of their stories.

SYMPOSIUM

Speakers 106 Topic Leaders 108 Plenary Sessions 110 Work Sessions 113

Circle of Benefactors 116

ON THE CLOCK For many people, the internet and the smartphone have erased the division between work and private life. It’s not uncommon for people to look at their phone every twenty minutes or so to check for new emails, even when they’re off the clock. To find out how online communication has changed work-life balance and workforce expectations for others, we sat down with four super-busy people to get their points of view on the subject. These were their revelations.

Patrons 120

102 3 TO WATCH Over 900 people submitted essays to the St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award Competiton. The top six had the opportunity to present their ideas on stage and be grilled by experts; only three were invited back the next day to receive awards.

St. Gallen Foundation for International Studies 121 ISC Team 122 Magazine Team 126

BUSINESS Clayton M. Christensen’s theory of disruption may have been an essential starting point for a discussion about innovation-driven growth, but twenty years after Christensen coined the term, ‘disruption’ has taken on a life of its own. Every business either seems to be a disruptor, or is being disrupted. Fight or flight. Now or never. But how many start-ups really make it to the top? And how many established companies are actually taking measures to avoid a Kodak moment?

“PEOPLE ARE TOO EXCITED ABOUT BEING DISRUPTORS.” DISRUPTION DILEMMA – A new idea might lead to a business opportunity, or a business’ demise. When it comes to innovation, a firm must be ready to fight for its survival – and face a trade-off between earning lots of shortterm profit or betting on sustainability over time. ELÍAS CAMHAJI (TEXT) TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

Joshua Gans has been working closely with the concept of disruption for the last 20 years, but he is not a fan. For decades, being disruptive was seen as something negative: Parents did not want their children to be disruptive troublemakers, for example. Suddenly, things changed. In 1995, Harvard University Professor Clayton Christensen coined a term that changed the way scholars and decision-makers understand innovation in business. Suddenly, hundreds of business schools around the world were encouraging students to get out there and come up with disruptive ideas. The concept took over. What was once business school and management jargon is now a broadly used term. Does this kind of popularity undermine the theory’s explanatory power? Inevitably, Gans says, the catchiness of the word led to confusion about what is really disruptive when it comes to business. However, identifying truly disruptive ideas is just part of the problem. The other issue is what firms should do about it: Should a company stick to the strategy that once drove its success, or does it need to change radically to survive? Which decisions must successful disruptors face after they are the new market leaders – and targets for the next generation of disruptors? These puzzles encouraged Gans to

step into the conversation. “Disruption is a business buzzword that has gotten out of control. Today everything and everyone seem to be characterised as disruptive— or, if they aren’t yet, it’s only a matter of time,” he says. What is your definition of disruption and why does it matter? It is what a firm faces when the choices that once drove its success end up being the same choices that end up causing it to fail. We pay attention to it because it is a wake-up call for complacency. Even when you are doing well, there can be challenges around the corner. There is nothing that lasts forever, but there are things you can do to have a longer life span as a business. You have stated that disruption has become a cliché. Why is that? Because we always need a cliché. At first, the notion of disruption caused a lot of fear. Then, the notion of being the person that causes it became exciting. What is wrong with Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation? It is a repackaging of old ideas, like innovation. It is useful for teaching and engaging students, but I am not enthusiastic about it, because I do not think it is good advice.

DILEMMA

JOSHUA GANS Joshua Gans is a professor of strategic management and holds the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair in Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management. Gans earned a PhD at Stanford University and graduated with honours in Economics from the University of Queensland. In 2016, he published "The Disruption Dilemma".

The two of you are engaged in a dialogue. He even endorsed your latest book. We are friendly with each other, but we disagree. He has a different way of looking at disruptive innovation. He is not as scientific, in the traditional sense, but he is very open to discussion. What is the disruption dilemma about? It is about the trade-off between earning a lot now and long-term sustainability. Everyone wants to have a company that makes a lot of money and lasts forever. Unfortunately, that is not possible. Is disruption inevitable? I think it is inevitable in the sense that there is no perfect insurance against it. There is always something that may arise and force you to make a decision. Could you blame a firm for not foreseeing a technological breakthrough? Disruption does not affect big firms because they are stupid or lazy. In fact, they might be doing their jobs very well, which is why it is very interesting. You can even be aware it will occur, which is still more interesting. The real puzzle is why, if you knew it was going to happen and had all these chances to react, you still canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get out of this situation? Kodak knew â&#x2020;Ś

what was going on, Blockbuster too, but somehow they just couldn't react. I find that a fascinating issue. We can do things better. There is some craziness in the system, and things we don’t understand, but how we deal with problems is not obvious. My hope is students might figure something out. Can you aspire to be a constant disruptor? People are too excited about being disruptors, and it is not something that necessarily pays off. When you disrupt somebody, you become part of the same industry, and you can be disrupted as well. You are not unique. For instance, Netflix started off as a disruptor, but then it became much more traditional. Technological changes have happened all the way through economic history. Are business models being overturned faster than before? No. Maybe we think things have changed because there are a lot of innovations mainly coming through our smartphones, but I do not think change is more powerful than it used to be. I think technology

has changed the way we live, but I am not a big believer in the “new economy” or something like that. Are innovators too cocky? Should they listen to the incumbents’ criticism? Definitely not. Incumbent firms have their own interests and biases. Successful innovators make it because they are optimistic. Innovating is kind of an insane thing to do. You have to be passionate about your idea; otherwise it is too hard to succeed. Is there always a benefit for the consumers, or should that not be taken for granted? Generally, yes, there is a gain for consumers. That is why people have been so enthusiastic about disruption. Which sectors are being disrupted the most? Where are incumbents facing the biggest challenges? Disruption tends to concentrate wherever the highest rate of technological innovation is going on. Mobile apps are affecting traditional sectors like the car industry. Basically, people are carrying around a computer in their mobile phones. I suspect that,

as we move on, we should keep an eye on artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals. One feature of disruption is that it is very uncertain. You know it might happen, but you do not know what the next thing is and what its impacts might be. This is why I prefer to think of insurance rather than forecasting. u

JOSHUA GANS

DISRUPTION: A FIGHT OVER DEFINITION? Harvard’s Clayton Christensen invented the theory of disruptive innovation. He claimed that incumbent companies were focused on sustaining incremental innovation on existing products. As firms change the product, a portion of the customers that were used to its former version feels dissatisfied. The disruptor starts giving customers a cheaper product. The incumbent company, meanwhile, sees the threat and has the capacity to respond, but it does not. They tend to prefer to serve the majority of customers rather than to focus on the needs of a niche. Disruption happens when the disruptor gets bigger and eventually pushes the incumbent out of the market. While working as a research assistant at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, Baljir Baatartogtokh decided to examine 77 cases that Christensen cited as evidence. She spoke to academics at top business schools, experts, and firms from several markets. Baatartogtokh claims that Clayton’s theory only holds true for 7 out of the 77 cases. In her opinion, disruption has become a buzzword, often used in completely different contexts from what was originally intended. “The use of the word has been corrupted. It has come to mean innovation and new ideas, but that is not how the theory emerged. It originally refers to very specific scenarios,” says Baatartogtokh, a Leader of Tomorrow at the 47th St. Gallen Symposium. “The endoscope did not disrupt surgery, postal services were not disrupted by email providers. They are different ideas that coexist and serve different purposes.” The term became so catchy that it is now constantly used outside of the business world. Suddenly, there were disruptive NGOs, disruptive art, and disruptive politicians. When he proposed his theory back in the mid-1990s, Christensen probably never imagined it was going to be so popular.

DISRUPTION DILEMMA

“INNOVATING IS KIND OF AN INSANE THING TO DO. YOU HAVE TO BE PASSIONATE ABOUT YOUR IDEA.”

REACH OUT – Denmark will soon have a special technology ambassador to connect its government with private tech companies. What is this new tech ambassadorship all about? Will it work? And what does it mean for other industries? TAMILLA ZIYATDINOVA (TEXT) TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

Interactions between the private and the public sector do not always run smoothly, especially when it comes to digital issues. Conflicts between state privacy watchdogs and social media companies over data breaches, encryption wars between intelligence agencies and text messaging firms, and rigorous attempts at regulating app-based ridesharing businesses by cities and municipalities in an effort to protect traditional taxi drivers are just three examples of this difficult relationship. Denmark hopes to bridge this “digital divide” between the public and the private sector by appointing a digital diplomat. AN AMBASSADOR FOR DIGITAL AFFAIRS It's Anders Samuelsen's flagship proposal, the Danish Minister for Foreign Affairs. He argues that reaching out to technol-

PRIVATE VS. PUBLIC: BRIDGING THE GAP ogy companies is a necessary step for his country because “there are a lot of tech issues at stake right now.” From settling data disputes to acquiring employment opportunities and even to fighting Islamic State terrorists, many of the big questions of today require close involvement from private, digital businesses. Several countries are struggling to keep companies with online platforms and disruptive business models in check by crafting new laws or filing lawsuits. Denmark wants an extra means of interaction: direct dialogue. “Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, and so on move at a very fast pace,” says Samuelson. “You cannot regulate everything.” The ambassador model is appropriate because some tech companies are as significant as nation states. “We need a more direct dialogue with these heavy play-

ers because they affect the daily lives of Danish citizens more than some countries,” Samuelsen says. They are also akin to countries from an economic point of view, he explains: “In an economic sense, some tech companies are like countries, yes. For example, Amazon has a total value that is three times the gross domestic product of Denmark.” The new post will be filled this summer. The tech ambassador will then be sent to California’s Silicon Valley. From there, he or she will work with giants such as Google’s parent company, Alphabet, but also with smaller companies that might grow up to be giants in the future. “The ambassador might be able to pinpoint which small companies are going to be important in a couple of years and enter into dialogue with them from an early stage,” says ↦

16 REACH OUT

“IN AN ECONOMIC SENSE, SOME TECH COMPANIES ARE LIKE COUNTRIES.” ANDERS SAMUELSEN

Samuelsen. The many tasks the envoy will have to take on include creating job opportunities by convincing big companies to open up offices in Denmark and finding fast ways of closing down extremist social media accounts in order to prevent terrorist organisations from recruiting fighters through online channels. Although the appointed person will reside in Silicon Valley, “it’s really a worldwide job,” says Samuelsen. Akin to a traditional foreign relations ambassador, the Danish tech ambassador will have to travel all around the globe to protect Danish interests. CHANCES AND CHALLENGES Alec Ross, senior advisor for innovation to former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, applauds the idea. However, he warns that the Danes “are going to have to work hard to get the companies to take them very seriously.” Denmark is a relatively small country, Ross says, and although it’s quite advanced in terms of technology, it will need a really digitally savvy diplomat to accomplish anything. “If the companies see this person as a typical bureaucrat, as just the typical civil servant,” Ross says, “they will probably just ignore them.” Besides establishing direct dialogue and fostering friendly ties with the tech sector, Ross encourages Denmark to use this opportunity to also implement more digitalisation within its ministries. For instance, he recommends the future ambassador use Facebook and other popular social networks to hear and understand

the Danish people, their perspectives and their needs. Internet entrepreneur and dot-com pioneer Dan Wagner praises Samuelsen for recognizing the importance of technological development. “Sending a digital ambassador to Silicon Valley to interact with major companies and get insights from the Valley back to the Danish community is a good idea. Even if the only thing that comes out of it is that this digital ambassador comes back to Denmark with insights into how to create successful digital businesses in Denmark, it’s a worthwhile investment,” Wagner says. “If they’re able to create awareness of Denmark as a potential base for American companies looking to expand across Europe, then I think it’s even better. And I’m sure that there will be other benefits, too.” Wagner does stress that the diplomat will have to bring something of real value to the negotiating table if they want a certain company to move to Denmark. Tax breaks and talented people with strong technical skills could serve as good incentives. He also says that it might become harder to strike deals if more countries follow in Denmark’s footsteps, as Samuelsen expects. “The problem is that if every country did it, nobody would get any real value from it, because companies like Alphabet are not going to entertain every single digital ambassador,” he says. “It’s fine with one, but if there’s many, there needs to be a clear remit.” Indeed, consulates and trade representatives from multiple countries, including Austria, Canada and Ireland are already present in Silicon Valley, meaning

Denmark is really going to have to work hard in order to make its mark. As with all new ideas, there are also critics. Technology commentator and writer Evgeny Morozov, for example, does not believe in the approach at all. “I find it an absolutely ridiculous idea,” he declared with a grimace, declining to elaborate. WHAT SECTOR’S NEXT? Samuelsen has not considered applying this relationship to other industries just yet. Technology companies are his priority – for now. “I think I will just work on this first. I have not considered any other sectors yet,” he says. The idea does not make sense for all industries either, he explained. The oil industry, for instance, does not need a special ambassador, because “working with oil companies fits within traditional regulation frameworks quite well.” Nothing needs to be changed there to make deals happen. Whether appointing ambassadors to the technology field, or to any sector for that matter, is the best way to alter the lovehate relationship between the private and the public sector for the better remains unclear. Wagner does believe it will help bridge the gap, improve the interaction and possibly even stimulate the public sector to innovate for once. “Right now, I don’t think there’s any innovation coming out of the public sector at all,” Wagner says. u

DISRUPTIVE MOMENTS IN BUSINESS ELLIOT GUNN (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

MARTIN BLESSING (DE) President Personal & Corporate Banking and President UBS Switzerland, UBS Group AG The biggest change, which I hadn’t foreseen and changed our business, came from negative interest rates. I'd been in banking for more than 20 years when negative interest rates suddenly happened. I would not have expected that we could see negative interest rates for such a long time, and even have negative yields on 10year Swiss government bonds. The financial crisis had a huge impact: The industry had to adapt to it with deep restructuring. But negative interest rates go beyond that, because they fundamentally change the way we do business.

DENNON OOSTERMAN (CA) Founder & CEO, ReDeTec In places you don’t expect, many people will get involved with the mass customization of products. 3-D printing changed the pace of innovation without requiring large amounts of capital to transform the physical world, in the same way the internet changed the digital world.

LANCE JAMES (US) Chief Scientist, Flashpoint Prior to 2010, I spent most of my career trying to get the media to pay attention to cybersecurity. Then a mainstream shift happened. In 2010, there was Stuxnet, the Iranian malware program that shifted digital warfare from science fiction to reality. In 2011, the computer security firm RSA got breached. Once these attacks started piling up, all you could hear about in the media was hacking.

ROLAND BUSCH (DE) Chief Technology Officer & Member of the Managing Board, Siemens AG It might be a trivial answer, but I think it’s the World Wide Web. When I started studying, the first computers were out, we were still using cards with holes punched into them; emails and mobile phones followed. Today, where these devices were once connecting people, they are now connecting with other devices: The internet of Things is being created as we speak.

TOP TIPS FOR DISRUPTION-PROOFING YOUR COMPANY

Being prepared and surrounding yourself with innovative people are two key-factors to remember if you want to stay in business. RICARDO DELLA COLETTA (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

NEAL CROSS Neal Cross, Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) of DBS Bank, was recognised last year as “the world’s most disruptive CIO” by a panel that included Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak and Virgin’s founder Richard Branson.

DISRUPT OR BE DISRUPTED Cross’s vision for today’s business world is quite close to surviving in a jungle: you must adapt to the environment to avoid disappearing. “In times of disruption, you have no choice. Either you sit back and get disrupted, or you create disruption,” he says. BE PREPARED “If you cannot see the disruption coming you are in trouble. It is easy to see it coming: Think about being in the DVD business, music stores or bookshops: they were hit fast, but still had some time.” FOCUS ON E-CULTURE Cross says e-culture is “the fundamental thing” today. “You can not operate like a bank in this new world of digital disruption.

Don’t digitalise your bank. Digitalise your staff and they will digitalise your bank.” DISRUPT YOURSELF Cross’s experience taught him that to be competitive, you need to be ready to reinvent your business. “We are doing a huge scale of transformation to make us more like a tech company or a start up,” Cross says. “Our CEO’s message is that we are a 22,000-person start up, with 340 design projects and over 1,000 experiments running every year.” DO YOUR HOMEWORK You do not have to build something revolutionary from scratch, according to Cross. He says that someone who does not want to be pushed out of business needs to be con-

stantly informed regarding who is the best in its field. “As an innovator, do not reinvent the wheel, just find out what the world’s best [wheels] look like,” says Cross. “That is what I have done through my career, and that is why I have been so successful.”

19 TT BUSINESS

Neal Cross holds one of the highest offices of the Singapore-based bank DBS, owns an eco-friendly hotel in Indonesia and usually walks around in a khaki short sleeve shirt. Alec Ross wrote a best-selling book in which he examines the changes that will shape our economic future and recently decided to run for public office in Maryland (USA). Despite their different profiles, they have one thing in common: Both men say you do not need to reinvent the wheel to avoid being disrupted. Just make sure you know what the world's best look like and who is leading the changes in your field.

ALEC ROSS Alec Ross is author of the New York Times best-seller "The Industries of the Future" and was a senior advisor for innovation to Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State. Ross recently jumped into politics himself and is now seeking a nomination as Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland in the US.

JOIN FORCES Not everybody is an innovator, Ross says. If you are in a company that is not leading change, go find out who is. “One way is simply to join forces with disruptive companies. You may not be the inventor, but you can be the employee or the partner of a company that is shaping the future.” INNOVATE IN POLITICS Ross is now running in the Democratic primary for the governor of Maryland and he believes that a key factor to be successful in elections is to bring geeks and engineers to politics. “They are the ones who are really innovating in politics and winning elections. They are figuring it out how to be persuasive; they are the people who are doing electoral engineering,” Ross

says. “If you are not the disruptor in politics you are losing the election.” GATHER YOUR DATA “Land was the raw material of the agricultural age; iron was the raw material of the industrial age and data is the raw material of the information age. Our ability to harvest oceans’ worth of data and to build things with it is the biggest factor transforming the global economy right now.” BE IN AN INNOVATIVE ENVIRONMENT Ross believes that one way to be the “disruptor and not the disrupted” is to surround yourself with innovators and to spend time socially and professionally with those who are “imagining the future.” “If you are older, you should spend

time with young people. I think that a lot of the changes are actually driven by people in their 20s,” he says.

FREE TRADE: WHAT NOW? SHIFTING CONSENSUS – 2016 was a year of rising protectionist sentiment and the emergence of the regional over the international. A business leader and a politician share their thoughts about the new risks and opportunities this uncertain global economic climate presents. ELLIOT GUNN (TEXT)

A woman from Mozambique now studying at a Japanese university. A young Israeli entrepreneur launching offices in Germany, Japan, and the United States. A German student in Switzerland with exchange experiences in parts of Asia. These brief biographies, gleaned from chance encounters at the symposium, represent the best of a globalised world, where people, and their ideas, move freely across borders. Most Leaders of Tomorrow grew up in a world where exchange was increasingly the norm. It has also been a time of intense public debate over whether globalisation has been good for the economy, environment, and culture identity. Is the future of free trade in doubt? Calls to reform trade regimes, or eradicate them entirely, have swept the globe since 2010. This reached its apex during the 2016 United States elections, which some pundits dubbed the “free trade elections.” Candidates from parties across the ideological spectrum made increasingly critical judgements about both past and future trade agreements. As a result, the US abandoned

the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which originally covered 12 states and a collective total of a quarter of world exports. Member states are set to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the historic 1994 agreement between the US, Canada, and Mexico, under different terms. The United Kingdom, with its exit from the EU last fall, may face difficulty reaching trade deals with the EU and other major economies, given the shift towards protectionism within the polities of those countries themselves. Since the 1980s, the number of new free trade agreements (FTAs) has edged over 300. They vary widely in scope, number of members, aims, and common rules. Generally, FTAs work to reduce or eliminate tariffs and non-tariff barriers. This is key to ensuring that goods, services, capital, labour, and perhaps most importantly, ideas, can move across borders easily. Each of these items alone, or taken together, have been essential to enabling disruption of business as usual. There has long been a consensus among economists that free trade is good,

1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in effect

1960 European Free Trade Association (EFTA)

1975 Asia-Pacific Free Trade Area

centrated, most viscerally seen through factories closing in response to a loss in market share. As the West looks inwards, the world looks elsewhere. China is leading the way through the possibility of a regional trade pact (the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) with small and large countries in the Asia-Pacific region. This move aligns with President Xi Jinping’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative to connect Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa with modern transportation infrastructure, which will boost trading and investment among the 65 countries to be connected. China’s ascendency to global leadership has created some anxiety and uncertainty about its motives, but this shift to the East also presents new business opportunities

and hotspots of growth. “Innovation comes from market pull, and that’s not always [in] the mature economies,” explains Roland Busch, Chief Technology Officer and Member of the Managing Board, Siemens AG. He notes that the biggest market for robotics will be in China, and supports cross-country efforts that “release the genius of engineering abilities” to continue improving and creating new technologies. Amidst the trade deals that have fallen apart, a certain optimism is necessary to forge new paths of economic growth key to creating the kinds of jobs that we want to have in the future. “You have to look forward,” Busch says, more optimistically than most. “I believe in the capabilities of any nation.” u

SHIFTING CONSENSUS

and counterintuitively, that it does not have to be bilateral to be beneficial. The 2016 public vacillation between excitement and outrage over free trade has taken academics and policymakers by surprise. Trade policy is known to be the domain of dry, economic analyses conducted by technocrats. Part of the reason why populists have rallied behind protectionism is that elites have taken the uneven distribution of benefits, and costs, of free trade to different groups of workers, sectors, and regions for granted. There are winners and losers in every policy decision, trade-offs to be made. In theory, trade liberalisation ought to benefit all. In reality, the gains are diffuse, such as when consumers save money by spending on cheaper imports, and the costs are con-

ROLAND BUSCH (DE) Chief Technology Officer & Member of the Managing Board, Siemens AG “For Siemens, we are not so concerned about [trading restrictions] because we are present in 200 countries in the world. In most countries we have manufacturing. Take for example the United States: we have 60,000 people there, we have invested 1 billion Euro in R&D year by year… But still if you reduce the ease of trading, you will harm the overall growth of economies. I think [free trade] balances the competencies [found] in different countries and different opportunities. We are a believer in free trade and an open competitive environment…that’s what we hope the political systems will go for.”

1995 World Trade Organization established 1991 Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR)

1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

JOHANN N. SCHNEIDER-AMMANN (CH) Federal Councillor of the Swiss Confederation “We develop our international network first through the World Trade Organization; second, through bilateral agreements with the European Union; and third, through bilateral free trade agreements with Far East countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. We are negotiating as many free trade agreements as possible since we are an open market country. We need the opportunity to earn every second Swiss franc internationally; we are very much interested in entering all markets globally.”

2017 Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)

2016 Trans-Pacific Partnership (US withdraws)

Future? Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA)

Future? Commonwealth Free Trade Area (CFTA)

Future? Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)

Future? China–Japan-South Korea Free Trade Agreement

Venmo, Paypal and other payment services offer seamless money transfers, challenging traditional banks. Yet at the 47th St. Gallen Symposium, top bankers saw increased competition as a positive development. Several were more worried about internet giants like Facebook, Google, Apple, or Alibaba moving onto their turf. “My view is, we should be very excited about the potential for disruption,” says John Flint, chief executive of Retail Banking and Wealth Management at London-based bank HSBC. In the past decades, banks competed around product complexity, leverage, physical distribution networks and in the dotcom business. Fintechs have put the consumer into the midst of the next round. For established banks, the solution is clear: Hire former fintech staff, relaunch their own banking apps, and sometimes simply copy the latest trends to keep pace with finance’s avant-garde. “Fintech will educate customers on new experiences in finance,” says Neal Cross, chief innovation officer at Singapore's DBS. “Second, it softens up regulators. They now talk to start-ups, retailers, and tech companies.” But fintech does not solely benefit customers. It’s helpful for banks, too: A subfield of fintech, called regtech, for regulation technology, uses software to keep up with the latest regulations. “There is no way humans can keep the increasing amount of regulations in their head,” Francisco Fernandez, CEO of Avaloq, an IT-provider, says. Fernandez recently opened a new bank account. He had to fill out 81 pages of forms – on paper. With the help of a web crawler, his personal information could have been gleaned from Facebook or LinkedIn. Biometrics such as his fingerprint, retina scan, or face could serve as identification, ensuring the bank is in line with anti-money laundering regulations. In India, for example, regulation is ahead of Europe. DBS Digibank, a subsidiary of DBS, took advantage of that: To open a bank account, customers download an app, go into a coffee shop, give their thumbprint, and are done. The procedure brought in a million new customers in less than a year.

BANKING’S DIGITAL FUTURE

SEBASTIAN BEUG (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

THERE ARE DOWNSIDES The real threat to the banking industry is not from start-ups but from established internet giants. Apple has launched a payment service called ApplePay in the US, in 2014 and is now moving into European markets. Facebook is pairing up with Transferwise, an international money transfer start-up, to potentially move into finance, too. “When you already have a billion customers, you can be in any business and be very successful,” Cross says. “Don’t forget, these are the firms that invented digital in the first place.” Cross sees a misunderstanding in most industries around disruption. “In the finance industry, most people think banks need to move into the digital world,” he says. “The real issue is that the digital world is moving into banking.” China may be the best place to spot the real threat. A non-bank such as the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, the world’s largest retailer, has attracted 400 million customers for its payment service AliPay. To avoid fighting a battle you cannot win, Cross suggests pairing up with the internet giants. DBS already partners with WeChat, a social network owned by the Chinese internet giant Tencent, which has close to 1 billion users.

ACTIVE NEWCOMERS However, most of the newcomers’ activity is focused on payments. Venmo, PayPal, ApplePay and WeChat have neither a banking license, nor the ability to offer a broader range of products than a payment or expenses-management app, let alone a real bank account. For John Flint, the challengers a just a potential threat. “Moving money around is not the same as looking after it,” Flint says. According to Flint, the industry hasn’t had a real problem with start-ups, because payments represent just seven to ten percent of global banking revenues. “China is the only place in the world where fintechs really work”, says Cross. According to him, 52 percent of all payments by volume done in China are done using fintech, but by value they represent less than ten percent. “If you are doing a large payment, you are using traditional methods,” he says. Banking is now learning a lesson in competition. Usually, banks charge borrowers a higher interest rate and offer a lower interest rate to lenders. The low interest rate environment shrank that profit margin. And some startup banks offer basic accounts for free, increasing competition. To keep up, banks imitate low-cost airlines and offer services around their basic

product – for example, investment alarms, or a feature to store passwords or a will. But if everything is broken down by technology to a nice banking app and handy features that are easy copied, where is the unique selling point for a bank? “It comes back to something that you find very boring: The quality of customer service,” Flint says. “The substance of what we do is not going to change.” Cross has three visions for the future offinance. The first, and by far most unlikely, scenario is that there are no banks in the future, and we move to a blockchain model where everyone’s net worth is stored on a decentralised system. In the short term, banks could work more with fintech companies, telecoms, and retailers, creating a better experience for the customer. Banks might even become the plumbing of finance – they just do their job but customers don’t see their brand. In that case, low-level clerical jobs might disappear. But “you will still have skilled bankers, people exercising judgement,” Flint says. “The real bankers – the ones that need a degree from St. Gallen – will stay in demand. Technology will not replace that.” u

FINTECH FOLLIES

FINTECH FOLLIES – Start-ups working to challenge the legacy companies of the finance industry are collectively known as “fintech” – short for financial technology. The rise of these challengers illustrates how it's possible to see disruption coming and yet struggle to deal with it.

PLAYING LEAPFROG – A generation of newcomers is using technology to overcome poverty and create a new culture of entrepreneurship on the continent. ELÍAS CAMHAJI (TEXT)

Africa’s economic narrative swings constantly from extreme optimism to absolute pessimism. After decades of underdevelopment, poverty, and political turmoil, the sub-Saharan part of the continent became, in the early 2000s, the world’s most dynamic region in terms of growth. The boom was driven by an expansion of commodity exports, which created a growing middle class and new business opportunities throughout the continent. It was dubbed “Africa’s rising.” Then the 2008 financial crisis paralysed the region’s momentum, and scholars began to question if the trade enlargement had really changed the economic outlook or merely perpetuated post-colonial structures. Too much trade, in other words, did not translate necessarily into development. In the following years, another revolution has occurred in Africa. A new generation of innovators are applying technological solutions to social problems and also defying the pre-existing business models. “We are still at the beginning stages of understanding the impact that these technologies can have in development, but it is already happening on multiple fronts," says Leslie Maasdorp, Vice President of the

OPPORTUNITY THROUGH INNOVATION

New Development Bank. For instance, people who had never used a landline phone or a bank card now own mobile phones and use e-banking on a daily basis. Samuel Agutu is one of the faces of this new revolution. He owns Changamka Microhealth, a mobile platform that provides health services to low-income communities. The company operates in Kenya, where only 5% of the population has access to public insurance due to an out-dated coverage model that restricts it to formallyemployed individuals. Changamka allows its customers to register and pay for affordable healthcare electronically. By eliminating endless queues to apply for public services, you also eliminate incentives for corruption, he argues. “New technologies and innovation can disrupt traditional models, and lengthy bureaucracy processes that were not working,” says Agutu. Thato Kgatlhanye developed a firm that sells schoolbags that transform solar energy into electricity. She came up with the idea as she realised many students from her community in South Africa had to walk long distances to go to school and were exposed to sun during the day but unable to study at night. She has now li-

censed the product, which has benefited 10,000 children across Africa. “You can tell the continent has skipped some traditional steps, so there is tons of potential for businesses that apply new technologies to grow in leaps if the right kind of thinking is applied,” she says. So what is the key? According to Kgatlhanye, monetizing ideas with a good balance of technology and human impact. Maasdorp identifies three sectors where this revolution may transform how business was done before: water supply, health care, and education. “In some respects, there will be complete disruption, some systems will collapse, in other cases there will be greater collaboration between old systems and new systems, and between public and private actors,” he predicts. If he’s right, the conditions right now are promising: Africa has proven to be successful at applying technologies for development mostly because the continent has not only the fastest growing population, but also the youngest population in the world. Where there is great need, there might be also great opportunities for newcomers. u

Africa has been one of the fastest growing regions over the last decade, but it's far from reaching its economic potential.

Global GDP

Foreign Direct Investment

Source: World Bank, 2015

Source: UNCTAD, 2015goes to

2% GDP Sub Saharan Africa

2% FDI Africa

Poverty

Global Population

Source: World Bank, 2013

Source: UN

50.7% of people who live on less than $1.90 are in sub-Saharan Africa

16% in Africa

BUSINESS – The symposium invited future leaders from around the world. Here are three active in business we think are worth keeping an eye on. ELLIOT GUNN, ELÍAS CAMHAJI & SEBASTIAN BEUG (TEXT) LUKAS RAPP & TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

FROM CUTTING-EDGE APPS TO AN UP-AND-COMING STOCK EXCHANGE, HERE ARE

3 TO WATCH MILLENNIALS ARE TAKING OVER Stacey Ferreira started her first software company when she was 18 years old. My Social Cloud, an online password manager, was bought out in 2013 by Reputation.com. Ferreira eventually left the company to have “the college experience” at New York University. During her studies, she co-authored “2 billion Under 20,” a book about how millennials around the world are revolutionizing the workplace. “The biggest difference is we grew up with technology at our fingertips, so you can be running your own company when you are 18,” she says. She dropped out of college a few years later to work on a new start-up, Forge, that uses technology to let employees choose when and how many hours they want to work, so firms can benefit from flexible labour pools.

STACEY

FERREIRA der

CEO and Co-Foun Forge

27 BUSINESS

HADEEL

ELSAFADI Co–Found er Davinci B ox

GAZA’S FIRST FEMALE TECH ENTREPRENEUR In 2014, Hadeel Elsafadi participated in Gaza’s first startup accelerator, Gaza Sky Gigs, which promoted tech entrepreneurship in one of the world’s most restrictive economies. Elsafadi is based in the region’s startup hub, Jordan, and is the first Gazan woman to study animation. There, she works on Davinci Box, her start-up offering 2-D, 3-D, and motion graphic design services. When it comes to the challenges of balancing her studies with running a startup, Elsafadi recalls her father’s advice. “You must be a strong woman, not just for yourself, but for other women to reach their dreams,” he told her. As an ambassador for Arab women in computing, Elsafadi mentors her peers in entrepreneurship and programming.

ANGOLAN BROKER FOSTERS LONG-TERM DEVELOPMENT Walter Pacheco is the Executive Director of BODIVA, Angola’s stock exchange. Founded in 2014, the exchange's trade volume was over USD 1 billion in 2016, more than double its 2015 volume. For now, BODIVA (the name stands for “Bolsa de Dívida e Valores de Angola”) trades government bonds, but will open to corporate stocks in the next two years – a business that Pacheco is developing. While working to convince firms to list themselves on the marketplace in Luanda, the former banker hopes BODIVA will foster economic development in the country. “You do not have a long-term perspective without long-term finance instruments,” he says. In the next decade, he wants BODIVA to become the continent’s second-largest stock exchange, after South Africa’s.

WALTER

O PACHEC or e e Direct Exchang Executiv Angolan Stock – A IV D BO

“I, PERSONALLY, DID HAVE TO CHANGE...” “…and yes, we still have to talk about it.” LUKAS RAPP (TEXT & PHOTO) Men are rarely confronted with the same challenges and demands for sacrifice that women are, especially in the male-dominated business world. As a society, we have made progress on LGBT rights, same-sex partnerships and in our thinking about what gender is. Meanwhile, the very basic differences between men and women in the workplace are not discussed. Sometimes, it feels as though this imbalance will last for decades.

Instead of finding excuses and trying to solve the problem from a male perspective, listening would be the first step in this long-overdue process of achieving gender equality. To that end, we spoke with women attending the St. Gallen Symposium to better understand the obstacles they face every day – and how they’ve succeeded in spite of them.

Faraja Nyalandu (TZ) is the founder and Executive Director of Tanzania-based Shule Direct. “As a woman, I had to prove myself so much more than I typically would have. I take it as a challenge. I think the biggest thing for me is: ‘If I don’t do this right, it is not just about me, it’s about so many other women who also have to overcome the same obstacles.’”

Ingrid Harb (US|MX) grew up in an environment where becoming a housewife was a woman's typical fate. Today she runs a forum to empower other women to succeed in life. “I personally did have to change. I came from a culture where women don’t have that empowerment. They aren’t encouraged and don’t have the same opportunities as men.”

Priscila Bala (BR) earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management and is an Early Stage VC Investor at Octopus Ventures, which supports young entrepreneurs. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I think if I were a man, I would expend a lot less emotional energy, because nobody would second-guess me.â&#x20AC;?

Nanxi Liu (US) Until she was five, Liu lived in a rural village in China without running water. Today she is chief executive and co-founder of Enplug, a company that produces software for digital displays. â&#x20AC;&#x153;When I speak in meetings with potential investors, I am always talking numbers. I know that when I go into a room with my male colleagues, potential clients always look at the other men on my team, even if I am the CEO. I don't have the immediate credibility I would if I were a guy walking into the room."

Heben Nigatu (US) is a writer for Buzzfeed and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”. In 2016 she was named one of Forbes' 30 under 30 in Media. “I have become way more aware of how I speak and how I enter a room. Men take up space, both physically and with their voice. They speak in definitive sentences. There is no up-check at the end.”

Susanne Ruoff (CH) is the first female CEO of the Swiss Post. She got her job after making her way past a long list of around 200 competitors. “I don’t really believe in cultural differences between men and women. What I see is our different roles in society. If you are, for example, in Switzerland, we have a very traditional way of thinking. It’s a clear-cut partnership between man and woman, and often the woman stays at home when the kids are small.”

Samar Samir Mezghanni (TN) published her first book when she was ten years old. She was selected as one of the 17 United Nations Young Leaders for the Sustainable Development Goals. “If I were a man, the road would have been clear and straight for what I am doing. But because of my gender I had to make a lot of detours to get where I want to be. It didn’t necessarily make me slower, but I think it made me smarter.”

Symone Sanders (US) served as press secretary for US Senator Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign in 2016. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t actually change much to fit into the male business culture. I think cultural politics and media is a heavily male-dominated industry, but I was more aware of myself, and not afraid to speak up. That helped me in politics and media, whereas in other spaces it might not have been as applicable.â&#x20AC;?

Martina Fuchs (CH) speaks nine languages and is a China Global Television Network host and business reporter. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I had to think like a man and act like a lady. In terms of work attitude, I had to work much harder to compete with my male counterparts â&#x20AC;&#x201C; especially in TV journalism, where you have a lot of aggressive and competitive males.â&#x20AC;?

POLITICS Looking at the fast-changing political landscape, you might start wondering if George Washington had a point when he warned against innovation in politics on his deathbed in 1799. But now that politicians and popular movements have begun challenging the establishment in earnest, Pandora’s Box has been opened – and we are forced to rethink the status quo. As Winston Churchill is supposed to have remarked: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

“YOU HAVE GOT TO GO INTO PEOPLE’S ECHO CHAMBERS.” CENSOR OR SAVIOUR? – As accusations of “fake news” fly from both sides of the political spectrum, long-time journalists and politicians alike are searching for ways to educate people in media and digital literacy before public discourse is poisoned permanently. RUBEN DIELEMAN (TEXT) TOBIAS SCHREINER (FOTO)

British journalist and free speech advocate Timothy Garton Ash has been called a “historian of the present.” As a reporter in the late 1980s, he personally witnessed revolutions and transformations in the former Eastern Bloc states. Now, the wave of democratisation following those upheavals is long gone. A nationalist attitude has arisen throughout Europe. Simultaneously, online discourse increasingly triggers ideological violence. According to Garton Ash, liberal values such as freedom of speech are under threat. If these populist revolutions follow the usual course of history, then, according to Garton Ash, simple fact-checking could be considered a counterrevolutionary effort. You covered democracy movements early in your journalism career. In some of those countries – Russia, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic – populist, even authoritarian politicians are on the rise. Did those movements fail? “If you look back in history, for every revo-

lution there is a counterrevolution. So it is, in a sense, normal that there is a countermovement after 40 years of progressiveness and liberalism. What Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayip Erdogan, Viktor Orban and Donald Trump have in common, for example, is not only illiberalism, it is anti-liberalism. It is a conscious reaction against the world order that we have known for so long.” Your face turns very serious when you speak about this conscious reaction. Are you concerned? “Obviously, an awful lot of people feel “left out” by globalisation and liberalisation. They see that the world changes incredibly fast. To them, it seems their own street has become unrecognisable in the course of a decade or two. One of the significant mistakes we have made is that we have gone too fast in social, economic and cultural change. Discontent with the pace of this change is collected and voiced strongly by populist politicians and ↦

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH Timothy Garton Ash is a former Eastern Europe correspondent. He has published nine books, including the new “Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World.” Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University.

contain a warning: do not take this seriously. Also, we really need to learn to understand the new dynamics.

You observe that – as a consequence – freedom of speech is used in order to spread hate speech, or what you have called dangerous speech. How should we deal with this paradox? In my book on free speech, I argue that the internet is the largest sewer in human history. Most of what is coming out of it is just often anonymous rubbish. There is hate speech, and then there is a narrower category that I call dangerous speech, which is intended – and likely – to produce violence. In my view, the latter category is what the state has to go after.”

What do you mean by learning the new dynamics? Starting in primary schools and continuing all the way to university, we need to educate people in media and digital literacy and how to deal with the large variety of sources available today. People nowadays get their news from an extremely wide range of sources and the danger of “alternative facts,” of disinformation and misinformation, is that we have no idea about what we are consuming.”

Could you name an example? “Consistent dehumanisation in a dangerous setting is dangerous speech. Take Der Sturmer’s agitation against the Jews in the mid-1930s, or jihadi incitement to violence against the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo. The question is about the context in which the speech is judged. In the British context, where you have wideopen media, the antidote is already there. The question is at what point the big platforms, like Google, Twitter, Facebook should be instructed – or ordered by law – to take down speech? Clear instruction is needed. What we should not do is have those platforms basically make a series of censorship judgments.” But we cannot control all the content on the internet, right? “[Policing social media] does indeed still leave a vast ocean of content. We – academics and journalists – need to get into a conversation with the search engines and social media platforms about how they can help differentiate between the cleaner water and the absolute filth, the true sewage. It is like food labelling, but for journalism. That is an interesting way to go.” How would this labelling work in practice? “It should be telling the consumer: this has been prepared by a professional journalist or a newspaper staff member, and it has been fact-checked. It could say that an article is an op-ed, or satire. It could

But often, even though articles have been fact-checked, the truth does not appear to matter. “At one level, it is a problem of fake news and alternative facts, which we have to identify. On another level is a simplistic, emotionally warming, nationalist – i.e. populist – narrative. Opening peoples’ minds to the fundamental flaws of this thinking is a much more challenging thing to do. You’ve got to go into people’s echo chambers, and then you have to try to persuade them to at least listen to you.” u

CENSOR OR SAVIOUR?

their supporters, especially online. This is a disruptive reaction to another disruption of a more profound kind.”

FIRMWARE UPDATE – President Kersti Kaljulaid says that investing in a digital Estonia was the natural way for the country to face modern challenges. But the tiny country's transformation isn't complete. RUBEN DIELEMAN & RICARDO DELLA COLETTA (TEXT) LUKAS RAPP (PHOTO)

As a country that only recently regained its independence, without natural resources and with a population of only 1.3 million, going digital seemed like a natural way for Estonia to boost its economy. And so it did: After years of investments aimed at making the country one of the most connected in the world, over 30% of Estonian voters used the internet to vote in the 2015 elections; the information and communication technology (ICT) sector represents 7% of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP); and in late 2014 the government started a programme which allows foreigners to digitally establish their business in Estonia. Although Estonia seems to be transforming itself into “e-Estonia,” they still must face challenges that are not so different from those many Europeans countries had to address in the 20th century. “We lag a little bit behind on our societal responsibilities to those who are suffering, those who do not have good health, and those who are elderly and retired," Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid says. Also, the digitalisation of the small Baltic state is taking place at a time of increasing worry about cyber-security threats. Kaljulaid, however, says her country knows how to protect itself, and that new risks

“CYBER ATTACKS ARE ALWAYS HAPPENING. THEY’RE LIKE COSMIC DUST.” shouldn’t discourage nations from betting on online solutions. “Everybody has learned to live with cyber risks,” she says. This year marks the 10th anniversary of a wave of cyber attacks against corporations and government websites in Estonia. What has Estonia done to prevent this from happening in the future?  There is a constant danger. Cyber attacks are always happening. They are like cosmic dust falling on you. In 2007, for the first time, we could see where the attacks came from. We just know how to protect ourselves now. Everybody has learned to live with cyber risks, and everybody needs to protect themselves. It starts on an individual level, with something called “cyber hygiene” [proactively thinking about cyber security to resist digital security issues - ed.]. How different is the Estonia you grew up in from the Estonia you are president of?  When I was born, during the Soviet occupation, we did not have freedoms at all. There was no freedom to do business, no freedom to leave the country, no freedom to speak your thoughts. So it could not be more different. Estonia has developed quickly and it is one of the societies ready

to accept that digital is here to stay. Something which tells me that the country is ready to be a digital society is related to the fact that people accept that there are risks online. They say: “I will take care of my own cyber hygiene; I will also make sure that my children know how to protect themselves on the internet; and even if there are risks, I will not stop using digital services.” I like to compare it to driving cars: Everybody does it. We know it can be dangerous, maybe even lethal, but we do not stop driving. The use of digital services is exactly the same. Around 30% of the voters in Estonia vote online. Does this represent a cybersecurity risk? Not at all. First, it is important to say that I would never advise a country to start implementing their digital services for voting. You need to build trust in the system by doing something much simpler, like applying for social services and registering your children in school, so that people learn to trust the digital environment and recognise that it has never betrayed them, that they never lost any data and that nobody ever hacked their data. In fact, they know much better who is reading their data than those who file on paper. It is much better protected. ↦

KERSTI KALJULAID Kersti Kaljulaid is 47 years old and was elected President of Estonia in October 2016. Before that, Kaljulaid worked for 12 years as a member of the European Court of Auditors.

6.8%

GDP from the ICT sector 30.1%

People using internet to vote 86.7%

People with broadband coverage over 30mbps

88.4%

People using the internet regularly Tax declarations made online

95%

0.00%

20.0%

40.0%

Now to the voting. The e-voting system in Estonia consists of several security measures. To this day hackers have not succeeded at breaching the software. For voting, you need your ID card itself, with two PINs. And when you vote, an email is generated, so you know you have voted. Within the digital voting period, you can recast your vote: That guarantees that nobody bothers to try to hack the system. Let us imagine that somebody is threatening a person to make them vote one way, or bribing them. It does not make sense because the person would go and vote again. I voted digitally from Luxemburg so my trust in the system is absolute. How does the digitalisation of Estonia help the country meet its citizens’ basic needs?  Nothing is done in isolation. Estonia does not have corporate income taxes, for example, in addition to being a digital society. We only tax dividends when they are taken out. Our educational system performs well: It is ranked 3rd in the global Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, very close to the Finnish system, and it is egalitarian. Every child can get an education, which guarantees social mobility. School does not depend on your parent's profession. Attending university is free in Estonia, too. So education is an important part of digitalisation. We also do not have natural resources to export. In our lumber sector, we are quite strong, exporting wooden houses. But everything we do must be somehow digitally powered. ICTs are natural for us: The digitalisation of our society started in

60.0%

80.0%

98%

Bank transactions made online

98%

Prescriptions prescribed online

100.0%

both the private and public sectors, with our private sector recognising that there are gains for them in order to save costs and operate in a low-income country with a low population density. Historically, businesses have had problems reaching people due to our low population, banks as well. So everybody recognises that digitalisation is an opportunity for us, and that is why we did it. We recognise the great opportunities for people and small businesses, and it has lived up to the expectations. Also, good governance, rule of law, a low level of corruption, free media, quick access to the European Union and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) have contributed to developing the Estonian economy. Estonia is known for its e-Residency programme, a scheme to attract foreigners willing to establish their business in the country. Is the target of achieving 10 million e-residents by 2025 too ambitious, given the fact that there are only 10,000 signed up right now? One percent of Estonian businesses now are created by e-Residents. But of course, the services offered to Estonian citizens are far more numerous because a high number of them are public services, which of course e-residences do not need. But they can also use them; if they establish a company in Estonia they will use our electronic tax port, so they do gain a lot in administrative savings if they establish a company in the country. One warning: It is not a tax haven construct. Our tax port knows of every bill written which is higher than EUR 1,000. This is subsequently checked

Source: e-estonia.com

and evaluated with other parts of the eresidency system. So it is not a tax haven, it is the opposite: It is a transparency haven. A surge in e-Residency applications from the United Kingdom was reported after Brexit. Is Estonia profiting from Britain leaving the European Union?  No, we are not. We are very sad that Great Britain is leaving the European Union. The e-Residency programme has existed for two years now. We created the possibility of e-Residency for all the citizens of the world, if they want to benefit from our digital society. We have benefited a lot from the help of more developed countries: This is our way of paying them back. Did digitalisation help bridge the gap for integrating the Russian-speaking minority in Estonia?  Definitely. And it is not only Russians – the Russian-speaking minority consists of different groups. Some came voluntarily during Soviet times, but some were forced to settle during that time, too. That was during the occupation, and that is past us now. Our minorities, whichever language they speak, recognise the value of living in a free democracy, where they can speak their mind, even if their opinions differ from those of the government. I'm not sure that is actually possible in Russia, nowadays. Do you fear that with Brexit, the European Union is losing a strong advocate for sanctions against Russia? Europe has 28 advocates for sanctions against Russia. Every country in the European Union acknowledges that Russia

47 FIRMWARE UPDATE

is not happy with the value-based architecture of security, which means every nation is sovereign. Russia has crossed the borders of Ukraine, which wanted to orient itself towards the West. Everybody in Europe sees that this cannot be allowed. Inside the European Union or outside the EU, I am quite sure that the United Kingdom feels the same way. We have discussed this together. What is the biggest challenge for Estonia in the future, in your opinion?â&#x20AC;¨ Estonia is a country which has learned very quickly how to grow economically, but we lag a little bit behind on our societal responsibility to those who are suffering, those who do not have good health, and those who are elderly and retired. Our mentality needs to change. We are rich enough to care for those in need. We need to adequately support them. I myself am working to make this happen. I am not a social democrat, rather a liberal in economic policies, but I see that there are people in our country that need our help. Could increased support for those in need keep populists from gaining ground?â&#x20AC;¨ The original rise of [20th century] populism, in my understanding, came from the fact that people did not really vote according to available information before, because they were working long days, long hours. They had hardly any free time. If you went to vote, you went with the group. Now, people have time to inform themselves, and the information is cheap. It may not be of high quality, and it has become easier to skew the information to mislead those who are not trained to critically evaluate it, and to imagine how society functions. Switzerland is different. Through the system in Switzerland, common people play an essential part in the development of the country; there are referendums very often. That encourages people to learn how society works. We need to educate people to understand politics. u

DICTATORSHIP / ABSOLUTE MONARCHY

DEMOCRACY

AUTOCRACY / RESTRICTED DEMOCRACY

CIVIL WAR / FAILED STATE

SOURCE: WORLD BANK, UN, EL MUNDO

Hosam Katan was 17 when he joined the revolution in his country, Syria. He wanted to study to be a judge and was still attending school, but his plans got interrupted when the Arab Spring started in 2011. Like him, millions of young people from over 20 countries in the Arab world came together to demand rights from their respective governments. Different outcomes emerged in different places. In some of them, more than six years later, the revolution is still happening. For its part, Syria is still in the middle of a civil war between the government of Bashar Al-Assad and the rebels. “There is no doubt that we need and needed a disruptive movement, but when the revolution started I was only expecting to demonstrate for a few days and end the regime quickly,” Katan says. The 23-yearold Syrian is now studying photojournalism in Germany. He started taking photos in Aleppo when the conflict started. “I want people to realise that Syrians are

human beings as well, and that war can happen anywhere,” he says. Although he feels guilty for leaving his country, Katan thinks that he can help his people “by telling their stories and showing their emotions” with his images. Storytelling and access to international and social media made it possible for young people to start the revolution. As an activist and blogger from Morocco, Kacem El Ghazzali (26) knows the power the internet holds: He left Morocco two days before the Arab Spring started because he was threatened with death for writing blog posts about atheism. He’s lived in Switzerland as a refugee ever since. Today he’s an advocate for freedom of thought and works as an international representative at the UN Human Rights Council. “In Switzerland, I have more rights and ways to bring the people’s voices off the internet world and into real life where diplomats and ambassadors can listen to them,” he says.

According to El Ghazzali, the internet is a more important disruption than the Arab Spring. “Social media made people inspired about other societies and made them ask themselves if what they have is what they want,” he says. However, he thinks that the Arab Spring was a failure. “So little has changed in Morocco since the Arab Spring,” El Ghazzali says. “King Mohamed VI still holds all the power.” El Ghazzali believes that the revolution failed in his country because they tried to replicate the original movement from Tunisia. “We have to prepare the people first, because copying it is not going to work,” he says. “Revolutions are social and individual experiences.” Even though in Tunisia the movement was a qualified success and they have free elections, Tunisian writer Samar Samir Mezghanni believes that “the Arab Spring is arguably still happening” in her country. “We are still facing threats to progress we have made because the ideas of democra-

49 MIDDLE EAST

Hosam Katan

Samar Samir Mezghanni

Kacem El Ghazzali

cy and tolerance are not been embedded in our beliefs,” she says. Mezghanni helped establish the first debate clubs in Tunisia and the region during the protests. “With the Arab Spring we learned how to express ourselves freely and respectfully,” she says. “Before that there was a lot of censorship.” The 28-year-old writer also believes that change starts with young people. That is why she uses her books to bring universal values of tolerance and empowerment to children. “My stories are told through symbols. I express reality, but I also leave the door open for them to use their imagination,” Mezghanni says. This is important, she argues, because frustration can lead young people to express themselves in a very aggressive and violent way. “It is for the benefit of everybody for young people to speak with strong voices and not shy away from shaming older leaders today,” she says. u

STILL FIGHTING FOR CHANGE MIDDLE EAST – In 2011, revolutions later dubbed the "Arab Spring" disrupted life in over 20 countries. Across the region, young people are continue to work for a better future. NAHIARA S. ALONSO (TEXT) LUKAS RAPP & TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

TOP TIPS TO AVOID BECOMING A CYBERWARFARE CASUALTY

Hacking has been described as the gunpowder of today. It represents a critical turning point in business and diplomatic security. Three experts share advice on reducing your company's vulnerability – and your own. RICARDO DELLA COLETTA & ELLIOT GUNN (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

LANCE JAMES Lance James is chief scientist at Flashpoint, a software and data services provider specializing in threat intelligence. He is an internationally-renowned expert on the deep and dark web, and was previously head of cyber intelligence at Deloitte & Touche LLP.

PERSONAL DISASTER RECOVERY Backups can be created through Time Machine in MacBooks, but it is better to have one that is off-site. One option is to always carry a separate hard drive with all your important files backed up and encrypted. Schedule weekly alarms so that important files are transferred over to the drive. The other option is to use cloud-based backups, but be sure to choose applications that use encryption that cannot see your data. SpiderOak is one popular backup option. INTERNET “HYGIENE” Do your own research and familiarise yourself with possible threats. Get to know your habits online to be better prepared to pick up on outliers in your network. Chrome stands out as good browser for

security. Malware commonly infiltrates your computer system through compromised sites. This is called a “watering-hole” attack, and installing plugins such as NoScript can disable harmful scripts that run when you access a hacked site. The Mac application Little Snitch is recommended as an intrusion detection system for the computer that controls what goes in and out of your network. 2-FA Use two-factor authentication (2-FA) on everything you use to minimise windows of opportunity for attacks. Almost all companies apply 2-FA as a token or through your phone. The app Google Authenticator is commonly used to set this up. With 2-FA, the chance of hackers getting in are

extremely low unless they also hack your phone, which would be a targeted attack that is unlikely. In failed attempts, you will be alerted to change your password. PASSWORDS KeePass or SpiderOak are good password managers. Rank your passwords using separate tiers: use stronger passwords for higher tiers (online banking), weaker ones for lower tiers (Netflix). Password reuse is not advised, but try to keep variations of passwords within the same tier.

51 TT POLITICS

In the United States, there is an ongoing investigation to determine whether hackers linked to the Russian government meddled with the 2016 American election in favour of Donald Trump. Never before have people been so concerned about the consequences of a cybersecurity breach during an election. Our exposure to online threats, however, goes also beyond politics, cyber security experts warn. Whether it’s your personal accounts or your business, here are some basic steps you can take to be more protected.

ANAT BAR-GERA AND SHIRA KAPLAN Shira Kaplan and Anat Bar-Gera are the businesswomen behind Cyverse, a Swissbased company that provides cyber security solutions developed in Israel. Kaplan was also an analyst in an elite technology unit of the Israeli intelligence service.

CONNECTIVITY MEANS VULNERABILITY Kaplan warns that by 2018 around 20 billion devices will be connected to the internet worldwide. “Everything we can think of, from our phones and financial systems to our nuclear plants, is going to be connected to the internet. And that means a big risk,” she says. REACT FAST There are companies that have been attacked, and there are companies that do not yet know they have been attacked, Kaplan and Bar-Gera warn. “You have to assume that your organisation has been breached,” Kaplan says. “The question is: how quickly can you detect what is crawling in your system and how can you minimise the damage?"

KNOW WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR There are core assets that are key to your business and they are the ones you must protect the most. “If you are a bank, your crown jewels are your client records. Essentially, this is what is exposed to hackers,” she says. EDUCATE YOUR STAFF According to Bar-Gera companies are not exposed to external threats alone. “A lot of times, threats are related to the human factor within the organisation,” she says. “A lot of companies are taking measures to educate their people, like cyber training against phishing. It is a way to show which emails I should not answer and which links I should not click.”

ORANGE ALERT – Business leaders at the St. Gallen Symposium hold their breath as they wait for the American President’s next, unpredictable, move. MARIA VAN LOOSDRECHT & NAHIARA S. ALONSO & RICARDO DELLA COLETTA (TEXT)

Contrary to expectations, stocks went up after Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States in November 2016. Jewell Jones, a Democrat and the youngest-ever state representative of Michigan, says “businesses sort of like Trump.” Part of Trump's support in the business world is explained by some of the policies he adopted so far, like a tax cut plan that benefits high-income earners and high-income companies. Tony Schwartz, a journalist who worked as Trump's ghost writer for the best-selling book "The Art of the Deal," argues that the President of the United States is seen by his fellow Republicans as a “golden opportunity” to pursue an agenda that includes tax cuts and reducing government regulations. “It is an agenda Republicans have not been able to advance, even in their administrations, since Ronald Reagan," Schwartz says. There are probably few people in the world that know Trump's mind better than Schwartz, who spent 18 months with the real estate mogul in the 1980s to write the book. Do not expect, however, kind words on Trump. “Uninterested in people,” “impulsive” and “fragile ego” are some of the terms Schwartz uses to describe the US President. "I do not think Trump has changed since he was seven years old," he says. "Whenever Trump does

TRADING UNDER TRUMP’S SHADOW something right, he has to do something self-destructive or destructive to others very quickly.” How is the international business community managing their business in the US since Trump took office? Adrian Nösberger, CEO of the Zurich-based Schroders & Co Bank, offers some perspective on President Trump: “Trump can be an advantage to the EU,” he says. The uncertainty in the US may drive companies to look elsewhere. “We have started thinking about looking for talent in alternative markets, like Europe and Asia.” Sibylle Kammer, managing director of the Swiss consulting company Zühlke, says it’s difficult to prepare in a concrete way for any possible consequences of the Trump presidency. “Trump is unpredictable. You never know what he’ll do,” Kammer says. Might companies leave the US as a result of his policies? “For businesses, it is not that easy to change locations,” Kammer says. “Whatever he does, we just have to deal with it.” Anat Bar-Gera, a board member of Bank of Cyprus and the chairwoman of the Swiss-based cyber security company Cyverse, says Trump has no direct influence on the US companies she invests in. “I am looking for the next unicorn,” she says. “If people are great at what they do, their nationality plays no role. Trump’s policies will

not affect this, because the top people are too good at what they are doing.” Trump “has no influence over the world – yet,” says Philipp Weckherlin, co-founder and partner of the Swiss-based consultancy firm CE Asset Management AG. “We were expecting uncertainty in the business world, but it did not happen.” The Trump presidency has shown that business works independently from politics. As an aside, Weckherlin adds, “that is good to know.” Luca Martinelli, from the private investor network Btov which has offices in Germany, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, is more wary. He thinks small companies are just “waiting and seeing what happens” with Trump because “they do not have the money to create a plan B.” “Obviously, he is a crazy guy, so it is a dangerous situation,” he says. People from the business world outside the US seem cautious but not too pessimistic about the Trump presidency. Michigan’s Jones does not entirely share this view. “I think we need to pray for the US,” he says. Jones believes Trump “has the potential to erupt” and destroy the relationships the US developed with other countries. He sums up his opinion of the new President of the United States in one sentence: “Trump is good for business, but not good for America.” u

DISRUPTIVE MOMENTS IN POLITICS SEBASTIAN BEUG (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

PETER DAY (GB) former BBC News presenter The Brexit vote was the most disruptive event. I have a Dutch wife and I am worried because it is unclear how she can stay in Britain. We should have seen Brexit coming, just as the Americans should have seen Trump coming. Brexit is a recent event but it is very drastic.

SYMONE SANDERS (US) CNN political commentator and former Press Secretary for US Senator Bernie Sanders Trump! Nobody expected his victory, including himself. It turned the country upside down and mobilised young people into a counter-movement. There is resistance now and a lot of people are engaged in politics who werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t before he was elected.

IRENA SCHNEIDER (US/GB) PhD Candidate, Kings College London I was born exactly a day before the Berlin Wall fell and so I belong to the generation that was born after the 20th century ended. The most disruptive moment for our generation was the election of Trump.

BRANDO BENIFEI (IT) Member of European Parliament One of the most disruptive political events I witnessed in my life was undoubtedly Brexit. Being a convinced federalist, I never would have thought that, instead of moving forward, possibly towards the United States of Europe, the EU would start to lose its members. This should be a major wake-up call for the EU: either we relaunch the project or we will end up slowly losing what our founding fathers fought hard for.

CON OR COUNTRY? – Czech politician Vít Jedlička got so frustrated with what he considers sluggish, corrupt existing political frameworks that he wanted to disrupt the system with his own free state: Liberland. Whatever it will grow up to be, in design it is a place of great individual freedom.

ALICE IN LIBERLAND

MARIA VAN LOOSDRECHT & RUBEN DIELEMAN (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

During his one-on-one session with BBC journalist Stephen Sackur, the giggling, provocative, libertarian Vít Jedlička left participants at the 47th St. Gallen Symposium wondering: Is this guy for real? When we met him later that afternoon, Jedlička and his personal assistant greeted us with smiles. Jedlička – a former entrepreneur and now a professional politician – sports a pin on his lapel: the flag of Liberland. “Basically, anyone can become President,” says Jedlička. Finding it difficult to enact change in his home country, the Czech Republic, he started his own state. Jedlička located a patch of land which was unclaimed due to a border dispute between Croatia and Serbia. Technically, no people live there yet. Croatia (unofficially) denied Jedlička’s claim by posting police in the area to prevent people from entering Liberland. Jedlička refers to this as “de facto recognition,” the only type of recognition Liberland has received to date. To get visitors under these difficult circumstances, Jedlička gives out a prize – USD 200, or the equivalent in Liberland merits – to anyone who can manage to stay on the land for 24 hours. In the last month, he gave out this prize twice. That may not sound like much, but as of May 2017, 446,000 people have applied for citizenship on Liberland’s website. Of this number, 127,000 have fulfilled the require-

ments for joining, such as respecting private property and not being a communist. His libertarian message resonated with some of the symposium’s visitors. Jedlička smiles when he says that at the symposium he will “deliver citizenship to four new residents.” This citizenship comes at two levels: virtual residency and actual residency. “The future is stateless; technology is going to replace the state,” he says. For virtual residency, Jedlička wants to “Uberize” state services: Liberland provides an app, similar to the transportation app “Uber,” that will help people do business with each other, but also access basic services like police force. Jedlička’s vision and his actions do not quite match up: For all his talk of the stateless future, most of his efforts focus on the 7.5 square kilometre chunk of land he’s claimed. “It’s nice to have it,” he says. MERITORIOUS SERVICE Around 400 people have successfully gone through the full application process. They either paid 5000 euros or 5000 Liberland merits, which are measured in the amount of help people dedicate to Liberland. His seven-man would-be government has already been criticised for its homogenous nature. Jedlička wishes people would stop bothering him about gender balance. “I just wish there was a female who would organise the legal system,” he

says, “one that was smarter than the male who applied.” Jedlička’s main wish for his country is that it is “a tax paradise for everyone.” The government, he argues, should stay out of services such as formal education, healthcare, and public transportation. Liberland’s citizens should fend for themselves, even when it comes to issues that go beyond individual responsibility and generally require state action, like climate change. For Jedlička that is a moot point, anyway, since he contends conspiratorially that global warming is something made up by a secret society aiming for global governance. He does not believe guiding people is helpful in any way. “Individual freedom” is at the heart of everything Jedlička does. Even to his own son, now 9 months old, Jedlička cannot promise an education. In Jedlička’s vision of the future, Liberland’s richest citizens will be the ones with the official power. These people buy into Liberland’s “landfund.” This does not literally divide the land; citizens, like shareholders, buy a percentage which determines their voting power. There are no checks and balances in place. “If two people want, they can tear the country in two” Jedlička laughs. “We can always make a new Liberland.” u

55 CON OR COUNTRY?

POLITICS – The symposium invited future leaders from around the world. Here are three active in politics we think are worth keeping an eye on.

FROM GERMANY'S CDU TO CNN DEBATES, HERE ARE

3 TO WATCH

CONSTANZA LAMBERTUCCI LEGLER & TAMILLA ZIYATDINOVA & RICARDO DELLA COLETTA (TEXT) LUKAS RAPP & TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

NOT AFRAID OF “CONSERVATIVE” LABEL Diana Kinnert has a tattoo on her left arm and never takes her cap off. Although she doesn’t resemble a typical politician, Kinnert, 26, is one of the best-known young faces of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Party (CDU). Kinnert is trying to push her party to embrace a more progressive social agenda to attract young voters, including support for same-sex marriage. (In Germany same-sex couples can enter into civil unions but don’t enjoy all the rights of a heterosexual marriage.) “The CDU has to follow civil society, and if Germans today are more progressive, we have to go with the flow,” she says. Kinnert isn’t running in this year’s parliamentary elections, but says she might run for public office in the future.

DIANA

KINNERT Vice President use GmbH Global Media Ho

57 POLITICS

SYMONE

SANDERS Political C ommenta tor CN N

SHE LEADS BY EXAMPLE Symone Sanders was only 25 when she was hired as Bernie Sanders’ press secretary for the 2016 US election. The call came as a surprise: She got the position after 27 other unsuccessful job applications. During the campaign, she addressed and crafted narratives around racial issues and inequality. Now, she is a political commentator on CNN. Sanders praises political disruption: “If people had not been disruptive, we’d still be sitting at segregated lunch counters,” she says. Her advice to other young people includes policies she sets for herself: Know what you want, don’t ask for permission, bring yourself into the damn room and just do well at whatever it is that you want to do. Read the whole story on www.symposium.org/magazine

FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM OF SPEECH, LOUD AND CLEAR As an atheist activist and anonymous blogger in Morocco, Kacem El Ghazzali defended freedom of belief and speech in Muslim countries. When his identity was discovered, he was kicked out of school, beaten, threatened with death and – eventually – forced to flee his homeland. Since 2011, El Ghazzali has continued his fight from Switzerland, where he was granted asylum and now serves as the international representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union at the UN Human Rights Council. He receives e-mails daily from young people in the Arab world who are fighting for freedom of speech and religion. El Ghazzali introduces their stories to the UN, keeps in touch with them, and assures them that they are not alone. “People who are ready to take a risk and speak out for human rights are the only guarantee that the future can be different,” El Ghazzali says.

KACEM

ZALI

EL GHAZ

m ctor r Freedo tific Dire Co-Scien i Foundation fo aw d a B if a R

SCIENCE You can wait for the big names in science and technology to change the rules of the game, or can you push the boundaries yourself: By turning yourself into a cyborg, for example, or by starting an insect farm to feed Mars colonists. But the way we do science is itself not immune to disruption. Instead of decades-long research projects, the pace of new scientific discoveries is rapidly accelerating. Can we keep up?

“IDEALLY, THIS IS A ONE-TIME TREATMENT.” GENE GENIUS – At the age of 32, Rachel Haurwitz runs one of the companies leading the push on CRISPR technology, considered by scientists to be the next big step in DNA manipulation. RICARDO DELLA COLETTA (TEXT) TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

As the Chief Executive Officer of Caribou Biosciences, Rachel Haurwitz dedicates most of her days to running one of the leading companies in the US bioscience sector. But the 32-year-old businesswoman never completely abandoned her white coat. Haurwitz uses the expertise she gathered during her time in the lab to explain to investors and the general public the implications in health, agriculture and industry of six letters: CRISPR, a groundbreaking gene editing tool that promises to revolutionise its field. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Caribou is working to develop commercial applications for the technique. The reason the six letters are creating such a buzz in the scientific community is that they allow an enzyme (called Cas9) to act as a pair of scissors and cut our genetic code in specific places. The “scissors” could target a malfunctioning gene that causes a disease and eliminate it, for example. One team of researchers is trying to erase a mutation that causes certain types of

blindness. Others are working on applications for treating cancer. "CRISPR democratised gene editing," Haurwitz says. How do CRISPR modifications differ from other genetic modification methods? There is a key difference between organisms modified with CRISPR and other genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Most of the older methods take a piece of DNA from one organism and put it into another. The beauty of CRISPR gene editing is that you are not trying to take DNA from one place and put it elsewhere. You are working just within the genome of that organism already. Also: Other gene editing technologies have been around for 15 years at this point, but still require specialists to work with them. The reagents are very expensive and very hard to use, so it often took a PhD in gene editing to do it. CRISPR kind of democratised the process. We have seen thousands of labs around the world picking it up as a tool they use in their standard biology research every day.

How could CRISPR be used for therapy? The idea of actually being able to correct a genetic disease is very compelling to people. Right now, researchers are largely working on diseases originated by a single mutation in one gene, which causes a particular illness. There is a lot of work being done with sickle cells disease (a red blood cell disorder). A number of research groups are also trying to use gene editing to treat cancer, helping the patient’s immune system fight its own cancer. When will health applications be a reality? On the therapeutic side we are in the early stages of research. Most of the companies and the academic groups who would like to develop new drugs are doing research in the lab to ensure CRISPR is going to be safe, efficacious and successful. We are going to see years and years of clinical trials before there are approved products on the market: It’s going to be five, seven, maybe ten years until the first product gets approved. In the food industry, on the other hand, it can move quite a bit faster. Our

RACHEL HAURWITZ Rachel Haurwitz received a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley. She worked in the lab of CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, who is also a co-founder of Caribou. Haurwitz was included in Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” list of the most influential young people in science and health care in 2014. She was also ranked among Fortune's “40 Under 40” list in business in 2016.

collaborator DuPont announced a year ago that they developed their first type of corn based on CRISPR gene editing. They said at the time that they planned to commercially launch it in five years. So the clock is ticking. Have trials been done in humans to assess CRISPR's safety and possible side effects? A trial with humans kicked off in China last year, though there is no public information on how it is going. No one has reported significant events in the animal trials that have been done so far, so that is a good sign. CRISPR is the newest kid on the block for gene editing, and it is an early step in a very long process of drug development. Some of the older gene editing technologies have been tested in humans already and have had some very exciting clinical outcomes. Two patients were treated for their cancer in the United Kingdom in the past couple of years, and several other patients went through treatment for HIV. To the best of my knowledge, there were no significant adverse events due to gene editing. There is a debate regarding the ethics of gene editing and whether we should use DNA manipulation to edit – for example – human embryos. What’s your opinion? Our focus with CRISPR is curing diseases. Our company has drawn a pretty hard line, and said we will not edit human ↦

WHAT IS CRISPR? EDITING GENES INSIDE CELLS Cas9 An enzyme that cuts DNA

Target DNA

They stick together and seek out the target DNA

Guide RNA Directs the Cas9 to the target DNA

Once cut, the DNA can be disabled or altered Scientists can now edit the gene how they wish

Guide RNA

...if the match is complete, the Cas9 then uses molecular scissors to cut the target DNA

63 GENE GENIUS HAURWITZ

embryos. And I think its true for most of the companies – if not all of them – who are working in this area. There are so many severe cases of unmet medical need, so many diseases we have no way to treat right now. Everyone is totally focused on that as an application. How much could a CRISPR treatment cost in the future? We are very far away from this being a commercial product and no one is talking about drug pricing yet. It will probably be on the more expensive side rather than on the less expensive side. There is, however, a general health economic benefit: Ideally, this is a one-time treatment. You would, hopefully, be curing a disease, something a patient would otherwise be on medicine for for her life or decades. The University of California (with whom Caribou is associated) has appealed a US Patent Trial and Appeal Board decision that granted the patent on CRISPR technology to an institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. How does this legal dispute impact Caribou’s work? It does not impact day-to-day operations for us; inside the company we are pretty much head-down working on the science and technology and trying to meet our company’s goals. Certainly it impacts how investors look at the space. But in general, investors have realised they have seen this before and that sometimes intellectual

property gets very complicated in biotech. They seem to understand that as long as you are holding on to something valuable you are going to find a solution to what you need in the long term. We are holding on to some pretty valuable licences, for a variety of universities and companies, and investors have been willing to make a bet on us, just as they have been willing to make a bet on some of the other companies. Is Europe more resistant to genetically modified organisms and gene editing than the United States? Looking at the regulatory infrastructure as well as general consumer feeling, the United States is more receptive to the older genetic modified technologies than Europe has been. The potential of our technologies is irrelevant if consumers are not interested in the products. So we are looking at conversations and partnerships with companies in Europe so we can help to bridge this divide. We are in early-stage conversations with a handful of food companies to understand what their consumers are looking for, and how our technology can play a role in that work. What’s the role a scientist should play when very well-researched evidence, like the science behind global warming, is challenged by public authorities? I am used to being in communities where people respect information coming out of scientists. Clearly, that is not true across all

corners of the United States at this point. Along with other colleagues from Caribou, I participated in the March for Science in April. I certainly had not marched for science before. I had not even considered the concept of doing it. I am still very much figuring out how to have a voice in the dialogue that is happening right now, or in some cases the lack of dialogue. Is there miscommunication between scientists and the general public? Scientists have a bad habit of just believing they have done all the hard work, that everybody should just trust them and that they do not have to explain anything. That is wrong. There are a lot of factors that influence any consumer’s decisions when it comes to food and medicine. We need to do a better job of talking about the science and the research we do and what they mean, rather than just dictating to the community what they should be doing. You are a scientist who decided to become a CEO. How was the transition from the lab to the boardroom? I wanted to be more on the business side of science because I like the idea of building the company’s strategy. I spent many years learning how to design and execute experiments, to move clear liquids from one tube to another. When I became a CEO, I found myself in the position of trying to hire people, raise money and build a company. I had a lot to learn. u

NEUTRINO NEWS – In an age of massive transformation, the scientific process has not changed much. Physicist and Nobel Laureate Takaaki Kajita attributes his breakthroughs to hard work, but admits the prize itself changed his life.

TINY PARTICLE, BIG DIFFERENCE

SEBASTIAN BEUG (TEXT) LUKAS RAPP (PHOTO)

Probably the most memorable moment in a scientist’s life is being awarded a Nobel Prize. In 2015, University of Tokyo scientist Takaaki Kajita received the award for his work on neutrinos, very small and elusive particles that constitute the standard models used in modern physics. Nuclear reactions in the sun produce neutrino particles. Kajita’s discovery of neutrino oscillations solved a mystery about the sun’s ability to continue to warm the Earth. In the 1960s, scientists collected neutrinos for the first time, but the number of neutrino particles they found was only one third of the expected amount. Had reactions inside the sun ceased, but humans did not feel the impact because sunlight radiates slower than neutrino particles? Kajita and his colleague Arthur McDonald, Director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Institute in Canada, have shown that there is no need to worry: The neutrinos are not missing; they change their shape. Neutrinos, it turns out, have mass, a breakthrough in physics that earned the two men the most prestigious prize in science.

A CAREER PATH FILLED WITH HARD WORK Kajita has dedicated his life to the tiny particles. He has been researching and teaching at the University of Tokyo Institute for Cosmic Radiation Research since 1988, and in 2015 he became its director. He carried out his experiments in the Super-Kamiokande detector, an experimental facility in a mine in Japan, a thousand meters underneath the surface, that is the world’s largest underground neutrino detector. Although the discovery was groundbreaking, it had little to do with ingenuity, a bit with coincidence and a lot to do with with a fundamental principle of science: deductive reasoning. “Theoretically, it was predicted that if neutrinos have mass, they change their type or they oscillate,” Kajita says. “After ten years of work, we really understood what was going on and we discovered neutrino oscillations,” Kajita says. It took almost another decade until Kajita and McDonald were recognised by the Nobel committee. “Of course it is an extreme honour to receive this prize,” Kajita says. “In fact, this prize affected my personal life substantially.” Now Kajita travels more than before. “I think that this is good

65 NEUTRINO NEWS

PHYSICS FOR THE PEOPLE By Elías Camhaji

in order to explain the importance of basic science,” he says. The Nobel laureate has the chance to speak in front of various audiences, including the participants of the 47th St. Gallen Symposium, with whom he held a Work Session on “Disruption in Science.” FUNDING IS CRITICAL FOR SCIENCE Disruption in science, Kajita says, is often driven by decisions outside of academics. Asked which decision had the biggest impact on physics in his scientific life, the professor mentions the cancellation of an accelerator project in the United States. The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) would have had five times the energy capacity of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an accelerator at CERN in Geneva, and could have revealed new details about the structure of matter. Attempts to raise external funding for the SSC failed, and in 1993 the US Congress killed the project after a three-fold cost increase from initial estimates. “The effect of this cancellation still seems to be continuing, “ Kajita says.

Despite some financial challenges, the way Kajita and his colleagues do physics has not changed much. The way scientists publish, for example, has not been disrupted the way the internet challenged mainstream media companies and publishing houses. The structure of publishing in journals and the concept of peer review, a time-honoured method to evaluate work anonymously, is still wide-spread, though online hosting quickens the pace of distribution and makes it easier to read articles once they’ve been published. “This structure still seems to be very good for us,” Kajita says. Asked what advice he would give someone starting a scientific career, Kajita appeals to basic curiosity. “When we are children, we think that everything is kind of a miracle, “ he says. “When we are growing up, we lose that feeling, but if you want to become a scientist, you have to keep continuously wondering about nature.” u

A new generation of physicists does not focus solely on research. Cristóbal García, alias the “Particle Boy” – his alter ego and internet persona – fights against the prejudice of science and technology being exclusively the province of economic and intellectual elites. “Science is not about labs and books, it’s about applying knowledge to make people’s life better,” says García, 22. At the age of 19, he created the cheapest particle accelerator in the world: His device costs 1,000 Mexican pesos, approximately EUR 50, and is made out of old cables, used computer circuits, and waste metals. Afterwards, physicists at CERN invited him to visit the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. García comes from San Miguel Totolapan, a very small community in the impoverished Mexican state of Guerrero. He develops prosthetics for low-income people, runs his own foundation, and studies physics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. For him, science can be a social disruptor and a change agent. “Disruption is the vehicle, but it takes leaders, courage, and new ideas to drive social change too,” he says.

CYBORG BLUES – A glimpse through the eyes (and the antenna) of Neil Harbisson, the first person to be officially recognised as a cyborg.

“WE ARE ALL ORANGE.”

ELÍAS CAMHAJI (TEXT) TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

“Have you met the cyborg already?” For three days, all eyes were on Neil Harbisson. His mere presence disrupted the St. Gallen Symposium. Harbisson was born with complete colour blindness, only able to see black, white and shades of grey. In 2004, he had an antenna implanted in his skull. This device allows him to turn colour into sound frequencies. In his words, he listens to colour and can compose music just by staring at different objects. However, his transformation has not been an easy journey. More than a decade later, passers-by still confront him on a daily basis and call him a fraud. It also took him several months to get used to the new sense he had acquired, and to understand what he was feeling. He says he never removes the antenna, even if he is asleep or taking a shower. It is now a part of his body. “I am not using technology, I am not wearing technology, I am technology,” he says, convinced that he does not fit into the traditional definition of what it means to be human. Beyond his eyecatching appearance, Harbisson’s introverted character is unusual for a person receiving this amount of attention.

After 13 years experimenting with the boundaries of human perception, Harbisson is trying to expand his repertoire of senses. In addition to the antenna, the cyborg activist is now developing a permanent Bluetooth tooth implant, which would allow him to communicate “transdentally” using Morse code. He is also working on altering his awareness of time by attaching a device to his head that can keep track of the Earth’s rotation. All of which raises the question: Are humans ready to enhance their bodies permanently with technology? While some question the ethics behind this process, Harbisson asserts it is inevitable. He affirms it is going to lead to a renaissance of our species by disrupting our own bodies instead of affecting other forms of life on the planet. What is it like to be a cyborg? I feel like a part of me can evolve at a different speed. Most of my organic body will not regenerate the older I get, but the other part will get better and better. Getting old is exciting. I also feel that I am technology. This is difficult to express. It is a cyborg feeling. I do not know the difference

67 CYBORG BLUES

anymore between software and brain, or between the antenna and my other body parts. The new sense normalises with the other senses. That happened after about five months, when I started to dream in colour. That was the turning point. What makes someone a cyborg? It is a matter of identity. It has nothing to do with your body. You can have cybernetics inside of your body and not identify as a cyborg. You might not have an implant, but identify as a cyborg. The same happens with men and women that identify themselves as cyborgs, although their biological body does not correspond to that. Being a biological cyborg is something more specific. You merge with technology. There are people that do this voluntarily, to extend their senses and their perception. Other people go through this process for medical reasons. That is why being a cyborg is more about identity.

When did you start recognising yourself as trans-species? I had a long conversation with neurologist Oliver Sacks a few years ago. He brought up the subject of species. This made me think I no longer identified myself with the concept of human. He also suggested I could be a new species. I felt more comfortable defining myself as trans-species. I added senses and organs that are untraditional for our species, but that are present in others. I have an organ that many species have – an antenna – and senses that other species have – infrared and ultraviolet perception. What was it like to sense colour for the first time? Initially, sensing colour did not allow me to identify what I saw. I could feel the vibrations, but they did not make any sense. It was a little bit chaotic, but then I slowly memorised the names people give to colour for each frequency of light. It took me

some time. It was magical, very special, I guess. I felt free, because I did not need to ask anyone about colours anymore. What is your favourite colour? Infrared. I like the vibrations, they are very low. They are among the lowest frequencies. It is very profound and very peaceful. Your antenna can also receive emails and phone calls. Can the internet become a human sense or is it one already? It can be a sensory expansion, for sure. We can also use the internet for senses that are only received through Wi-Fi. The internet can help us to receive many senses, not only one. I think that might be happening soon. There are not many cyborgs in the world. Do you ever feel lonely? I am surprised there are not many more cyborgs yet. When I did it, I thought there would be many more by 2009. I am sure ↦

68 CYBORG BLUES by the 2020s there will be more. I do not have many cyborg friends. There are thousands of biological cyborgs, but they do not identify as such. We are planning to organise a cyborg pride parade next year in Austin, Texas. This might help people who are afraid of coming out of the closet, because there are still many people who laugh at you when you tell them you identify as a cyborg. How do you reply to people who think that what you do is unethical? It depends on the person. Some people are more open, but others will not change their minds. I have received death threats from religious fanatics: They think that no matter what I say, this is against God, that it should be stopped, and I should not be allowed to encourage people to design themselves. After I went to the Middle East, in particular, I received many emails from people saying what I do is evil and outrageous. I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t change their minds. That is very difficult. So, I do not reply to these people. I think that if God exists, what I do is much more about collaboration with him. I am not going against my organic part. Actually, I am giving it more potential by adding new senses and developing them. Do you consider yourself a disruptor? I do not think I am disruptive, I think we as a species are disruptive. We have destroyed this planet in many ways for our own comfort. If we changed ourselves, it would make much more sense. We are very fragile as a species. For instance, we get cold very easily, but instead of installing a heating system, we should be thinking about disrupting our own bodies with technology in order to survive and adapt to different temperatures. You have stated that there is no such thing as white people or black people. Yes, we are all orange. Some people have darker skin or lighter skin, but we are all the same colour. For me, it was a beautiful discovery. As I started sensing colour, I re-

alised saying somebody is black or white is completely false. I also realised that cities are not grey, there is always colour. It is quite hard to find absence of colour. Have you seen anything special in St. Gallen? I like the sound of grass and wood. Those are the dominant tones here. Wood sounds like F Sharp and grass sounds like A. These notes sound good together. If you added violet, you would have D Major. So, I would paint some walls with violet in order to have a major chord, because I saw there were not many violet objects. It would be even more harmonic this way. How do you imagine the future? I think it will be more normal to meet people with new senses and new organs. This will allow us to have a much more profound experience of reality and nature, and it will connect us to other species with similar features. The more you share with others, the more you respect them. Therefore, more people will be vegetarian, for example. What's behind your antenna? I am a pianist. That is why I started this process. I was encouraged to create electronic music when I was at university, but I was not that interested in electronic music. I wanted to create a musical instrument inside my body. It started as art, and then it became my life. I am able to transform reality into music. I can compose music when I move my head. I am still a musician, just a completely different kind of musician. Do you have any regrets? I regret having used my ears when I started this. Using an existing sense to gain a new sense was a mistake. It was like blocking a sense. We have lots of space in our body to create new senses. So, it makes more sense to create a new organ. u

NEIL HARBISSON Neil Harbisson (London, United Kingdom, 1982) is a contemporary artist and cyborg activist. He rose to fame when he became the first person in the world to be recognised as a cyborg by a government. This happened when his passport expired and the British authorities initially refused to accept a photo where he appeared with an electronic device over his head. Harbisson argued successfully that the antenna was a part of his body, and he was finally allowed to renew his passport in 2004. In 2010, he co-founded the Cyborg Foundation, an international organisation that helps humans become cyborgs and defends trans-species rights.

DISRUPTIVE MOMENTS IN SCIENCE NAHIARA S. ALONSO (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

GENTA KONDO (JP) Mechanical engineer “3D printing allows us to create something as amazing as a hand for a kid. This technique enables my ideas and work to be tangible and also accessible. I build hands with open source software and I disclose the data for free online so anyone can build one with just a 3D printer.”

TAMSIN NICHOLSON (GB) Neuroscientist

DAGOGO ALTRAIDE (AU) Mechanical engineer, filmmaker “YouTube is my life. It allows me to make documentaries about science and technology. Thanks to this platform, I can reach people interested in these topics, and I can do it in my own way. I have more than one million subscribers and YouTube connects my work and passion to them. It has also become my source of income.”

“Connecting lab-based scientists and doctors, translational medicine has been crucial for me. This gives me the opportunity to contact and exchange information with medical professionals while I’m doing my research. Scientist can help bring ideas about patients to doctors and the other way around.”

SPACE RACE – A new generation of visionaries spreads enthusiasm about space that has not been seen since the moon landing – while also tackling problems like world hunger and climate change. SEBASTIAN BEUG & MARIA VAN LOOSDRECHT (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

ON MARS, PEOPLE WILL LIVE IN IGLOOS AND EAT CRICKETS Start-up entrepreneurs, billionaires and state-sponsored space agencies are leading the latest push to colonise the planet Mars. At the 47th St. Gallen Symposium, two Leaders of Tomorrow thought farther into orbit and shared their ideas on how to live and what to eat on the red planet. When he was a kid, Robert Nemlander, 29, wanted to become an astronaut. Five years ago, the tall, athletic Finn applied for the Mars One Program, a Dutch foundation that plans to permanently settle humans on Mars by 2032. Out of 200,000 applicants, he was chosen as a candidate and then volunteered for the Mars project. “There are two key challenges for us to go to Mars in future,” Nemlander says, “landing on Mars and sustainable food production.” Humans, and especially Mars travellers, need protein. As you cannot bring chicken and cattle into space, Nemlander took insects into consideration. “Two billion people on earth already eat them as part of their daily diet,” he argues. Traditionally, the tiny beasts are collected by hand from fields, depending on seasons and weather. Nemlander’s idea was to industrialise the production and scale it up. The easiest starting point: a shipping container, available throughout the world. Nemlander took a month off from his job as a civil engineer. With his father, he crafted a prototype that later became the

starting point of his firm EntoCube. Nemlander drove from Helsinki to the Netherlands to get the first load of 3,000 crickets. After a few months, he owned 300,000 crickets – thanks to their exponential reproduction rate. In the meantime, Nemlander dropped out of the Mars One Program due to doubts over the way the organisation works. He says Mars One founders see their project as a media spectacle, similar to the Olympic Games. Now, he consults with NASA about closed-loop food production systems instead. An EntoCube container could be implemented on Mars with few adjustments. ICY HOUSES FOR THE MARTIAN POPULATION But for permanent settlement on Mars, there are three further challenges: First, high levels of radiation rule out simply staying on the planet's surface. Second, almost no building materials can be taken to Mars. And third, astronauts will probably call their Martian houses home forever. That is why Luciana Tenorio, 27, an architect from Peru, got involved in the Mars Society, an organisation dedicated to bringing humankind to Mars. Scrolling through the list of the people involved, she noticed a gap. “I realised that the only people who applied for these kind of programmes were biologists or engineers. I was disappointed not to see any archi-

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tects or designers,” she says. “In the end, if you are going to design something on Mars – create some houses, for example – you need architects.” Four years later, she’s working together with NASA scientists to design our Martian future. Tenorio focuses on how to keep astronauts happy, healthy, and dedicated to their tasks. Her design addresses the fact that astronauts cannot live on the surface of Mars without shelter since they would die from radiation poisoning. So far, many solutions to that have focused on underground living. That might address the physical problem but could cause mental health problems for the astronauts instead, Tenorio says. To provide Mars residents with light, Tenorio designed a shelter that allows astronauts to live on the surface. She had to think out of the box: It will be almost impossible to bring anything big enough to construct a shelter on the space mission. Mars has soil and rocks, but also frozen water deep underground. Water contains hydrogen, which is the best shield against radiation. “So I thought, why not print water walls?” Tenorio says. Tenorio is proposing a dome-like structure made of frozen water, drawn from underneath the red

soil and printed with a 3D printer. The ice layers would be kept frozen by a very thin type of plastic. “You would live underneath ice and have a blue-tinted view of the outside world,” Tenorio says. The ice houses are constructed like snail shells; they look like translucent spirals. She can even change the structure to make some windows: the settlers can look out on the Martian landscape. At the heart of the home is a greenhouse, so people can grow food for themselves. Around that, various rooms are built. Like normal houses, the structures can differ in size and height. Within two to three years, Tenorio will present her first prototype home in the desert of Peru, which has soil that is similar to the Martian soil. After that, it will take another twenty to thirty years of testing before they will be able to start building on Mars. A TASTE OF CRICKET GRANOLA However, Mars is still far away. “It may not be my generation that goes there, but the one that is in high school right now,” Nemlander says. Therefore, he and Tenorio work to ensure their visions also benefit terrestrial-bound humans.

Tenorio’s snail houses, in some form, may be useful for emergency structures on earth. She is working to adapt the proposal to develop structures that are lighter and more resilient to protect people in case of accidents. EntoCube – with seven full time employees and a handful of volunteers – is building its first indoor farm in Finland, the largest in the Nordic countries, and tries to tackle world hunger and climate change. “Cattle production is unsustainable. If you substitute our traditional livestock with crickets, you create a much more sustainable world,” Nemlander says. Nemlander brought a sample of EntoCube’s latest product to the symposium, a cricket granola. Most participants who tried it liked it. “In Finland, we’ve already turned 70% of public opinion in favour of eating insects,” Nemlander says. “A lot of that change is thanks to public outreach.” Facts are convincing, in other words, but only emotions change people’s habits. “As a kid, you want to be an astronaut,” he says. “If you eat insects, you sort of have that opportunity.” u

STAYING ALIVE – The health sector has deeply entrenched habits. In such a conservative sector, is systematic change really a good idea? And do the established practises work for underdeveloped societies? Three experts weigh in.

PHARMA’S RESPONSIBILITY TO THE WORLD

LILIA GEORGIEVA (TEXT) LUKAS RAPP & TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

Medical research has transformed the world in which we live, all but eliminating diseases like polio and smallpox. Yet, other killers – malaria and HIV, for example – remain, their impact disproportionally felt in the developing world. Who is responsible for attending to the needs of the unfortunate? Should the government play a role? Or should big pharmaceutical companies put more effort into researching cures for diseases that affect poorer communities? Goda B. R. Malewana, a Sri Lankan researcher who has spent lots of time working in communities ravaged by HIV, says pharmaceutical companies can help solve diseases in less-developed parts of the world. “It's a very controversial topic,” Malewana says. He points out that even though underdeveloped countries are lacking financial resources, the numbers of infected patients needing treatment are so high that if a proper strategy is adopted, the effort should be financially rewarding in the end. But what do big pharmaceutical companies think? “We are currently not able to develop products for third world countries on a Western standard, because those countries would not be able to pay for the development of the medicine,” says Hubertus von Baumbach, chairman of the board of managing directors at Boehringer Ingelheim, a German pharmaceutical company that has been around for more than 100 years.

Von Baumbach points out that through tier pricing, governmental subsidies and cooperation with NGOs, cures can still reach underdeveloped countries. “But I don’t think it’s only the responsibility of big companies,” von Baumbach says. “If I run my company into bankruptcy while trying to find a cure I won’t be of much help.” Andrew Bastawrous, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, thinks some of the criticism is misplaced. “I think pharmaceutical companies are no more responsible for setting a profit focus than doctors,” says Bastawrous. “Nevertheless, they are institutions that can drive huge positive change. I don’t think it’s fair to call them negative organisations. We need to think about how we can restructure them to be more

responsible to who need help, not close them down.” Boehringer Ingelheim, for example, has introduced innovations in the pharmaceutical business itself countless times over. They are most famous for battling cardiovascular disorders and the creation of Mucosolvan, a drug for respiratory illness, and HIV treatment Viramune. From a legacy company’s perspective, what would healthy disruption look like? Aren’t there dangers to changing already proven and established practices just for the sake of innovation? “I think the most dramatic disruption will be if someone banned patents,” von Baumbach says. “People are already asking, why do pharmaceutical companies get patents for 20 years?” This would also turn around

73 STAYING ALIVE

the way investors look at the health sector. Will anyone invest in developing new drugs at all? According to von Baumbach, removing the patent system means we would need to restructure our value model and find something else to attract investment. He also points out that newly emerging gene-tracking technology will radically revolutionise the pharmaceutical business. “Now we produce our white pills in a global production method but a gene therapy is applied only once,” he says. New treatments would change pharmaceutical markets completely, and introduce new players into the field. So how do big companies like Boehringer Ingelheim deal with disruptors? “We have a very recent example,” says von Baumbach. “The treatment of hepatitis C was revolutionised by a company called Gilead. We had been researching a similar approach for many years, but we were too late.” He points out that in a competitive field like the pharmaceutical sector innovations are bound to happen – and his company cannot always be the one to make them. To cope with getting beaten, they had to do a couple of things: “Economically, we had to scale down on our costs side,” von Baumbach says. “Scientifically, we asked ourselves, ‘what did we do wrong, and how can we make sure we don’t make the same mistake again?’” Although the pharmaceutical field has been disrupted many times over the years, it appears some really big disruptions are on their way. How the players on the market will handle them depends on many factors. And if a poor villager in a developing country will be able to afford the next HIV cure is also a question that will be left hanging in the air unless someone decides to take responsibility. u

ANDREW BASTAWROUS Peek Vision is an organisation that provides smartphone-based eye care. Situated in Kenya, they are working on reaching people with eye problems in areas that are difficult to get to. “Two and a half billion people in the world are not able to see clearly. It is the world´s biggest disability,” says Andrew Bastawrous, CEO and co-founder of Peek Vision. “I believe because it is so big, the problem remains unaddressed.” Bastawrous has a personal connection to his work: When he was a child, he avoided mandatory eye tests, as he was afraid wearing glasses would make him stand out. What he didn’t know at the time was that he was short-sighted. At the age of 12, the issue became unavoidable and he was prescribed spectacles by his doctor. “The effect was instantaneous – I could see things I never saw before. I could see the stars in the sky and the leaves on trees. My social interactions improved dramatically as I was able to interpret people´s faces better.” Although he was reaping the fruits of medical advancement himself, he was aware that such “luxury” was available only to developed societies. “That struck me as deeply unfair.” Nowadays Bastawrous is living in Kenya with his family, overcoming after challenge as he slowly works towards his goal.

GODA B. R. MALEWANA Goda B. R. Malewana is a researcher from Sri Lanka. Even though he’s only 22 years old, he’s working to discover a cure for cancer and HIV. “I get a lot of criticism for being so young,” Malewana says, “about not even having finished university.” His aim is to find a nano-vaccine which would directly target infected genes and therefore get rid of disease once and for all. “I am not the only one researching nano-vaccines out there,” he points out, “but we all have different approaches which makes each research effort unique in its own way.” In his free time, Malewana works Sri Lankan slums, where he engages with HIV-positive people. Seeing the conditions they were living in and how they were treated because of their disease serves as a major motivator for him.

TOP TIPS FOR EDUCATING THE NEXT GENERATION OF STEM STARS

Governments, schools and teachers are approaching education from new perspectives. Fostering personal skills, using technology and being flexible are some of the top trends. CONSTANZA LAMBERTUCCI LEGLER (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

ONG YE KUNG Ong Ye Kung, Singapore's Minister of Education, has been implementing some changes in the way Singaporean schools approach teaching to make the system more flexible and diverse. Like many Asian countries, the small city-state excels in international tests – last year, it outperformed all other countries in the OECD’s latest PISA survey – but that was achieved as a result of a very strict and demanding education system. Ong is now transforming that model to educate motivated students and develop their talents.

SHIFT THE EMPHASIS Singaporean students do very well on tests. However, the education system in the city-state is shifting the focus on grades and qualifications to give more space to teaching personal skills, sports and arts. “Today, information and knowledge are all on internet, and it is possible to Google everything,” Ong says. “But skills you only get from experience.” PROMOTE VOCATIONAL EDUCATION Most parents in Asia want their kids to grow up and be doctors or lawyers, says Ong. Nonetheless, Singapore is starting to encourage young students to follow their passions and develop their talents. In that sense, many students might choose vocational training rather than going to

university. Ong warns that there should be an alignment between how people are educated and the structure of a country’s economy in order to keep the unemployment rate among graduates low. FOSTER LIFELONG LEARNING Education should transcend the classroom instead of being restricted to schools and universities. Through lifelong learning, people continue to develop skills up until retirement. In an era of rapid change, people have to keep on developing skills and continuously enhance their professional careers with education and training.

75 TT SCIENCE

A change in the educational paradigm is taking place, but many countries still fail to educate young people to be inspiring and contributing members of society. Countries that excel on international tests are changing the way they conceive of education and putting the emphasis on teaching skills that empower students, rather than calling for outstanding grades and qualifications. However, there is still a long way to go to achieve quality education for all in a world where 57 million children do not have access to primary education and many are excluded because of their social background, gender or ethnicity.

MAIKKI SIPINEN Maikki Sipinen was educated in the Finnish system, considered one of the best in the world. The Leader of Tomorrow focuses her studies on educational technology and, especially, on learning analytics. Sipinen is now working on an on-going project called EduFellow that harnesses the talent of Finish educators to teach in other countries.

USE BIG DATA TO LEARN HOW TO LEARN For years, schools have been teaching students and testing their outcomes afterward. By then, the learning process is over and it is too late to improve teaching techniques. But with big data, algorithms, analytical tools, and sensors it will be possible to understand the learning process while it is ongoing, “This is something exciting that will disrupt the learning world,” Sipinen says. GO DIGITAL Sipinen says that there are two sides to technological learning tools. Technology is one of them, but it is not just enough to provide technology: it is also necessary to change the culture, the society and the way in which people think about

technology. Sipinen explains that it is not completely possible to digitise education, unless other aspects of civic life – such as voting – are digitised.

countries are doing. However, she warns that it is not enough to copy successful models: “Education systems take place within cultures and societies,” she says.

BE MORE FLEXIBLE Industries, says Sipinen, are changing all the time. Therefore, education systems have to answer to that need and be more flexible. It should be possible to change the chosen academic path. “We are not going to work for the same company for 40 years, because we have no idea what the world is going to be like in 20 years, or even 10 or 5,” she says.

GUARANTEE QUALITY OF LIFE “It should not be the point of education to stress out young people so that they have to study sixteen hours a day,” Sipinen says. She recommends that students spend a few hours doing problem-solving exercises or group work instead of passively listening to long lectures. In her opinion, it is important that people have free time to explore.

FOSTER AN ACTIVE DIALOGUE Sipinen believes that countries should keep their eyes open to see what other

SCIENCE – The symposium invited future leaders from around the world. Here are three active in science we think are worth keeping an eye on. RUBEN DIELEMAN & MARIA VAN LOOSDRECHT (TEXT) TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

FROM DRONES TO AFFORDABLE PROSTHESES, HERE ARE

3 TO WATCH PROPELLER-BORNE PLANTERS Around the world, “fifteen billion trees are cut down every year, and only 9 billion are re-grown. This net loss cannot be turned around with manual labour alone,” says Susan Graham, an Australian engineer and entrepreneur who works at BioCarbon Engineering in London. Graham’s start-up aims to solve global deforestation by using drones to plant trees on an industrial scale – up to a billion trees per year. “Drone technology,” she says, “is now ready for consumer and industrial use and makes largescale environmental remediation possible.

SUSAN

GRAHAM CTO neering BioCarbon Engi

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3-D PRINTING PROSTHESES FOR A LIVING KELCIE

MILLER-A

NDERSON

Co-Found er & CEO Mycorem edy

WE ARE ALL SCIENTISTS Reviving polluted or contaminated soil is expensive, and can take decades using conventional methods. Entrepreneur Kelcie Miller-Anderson says there may be a shortcut: Fungi, of which mushrooms are an example. “Nature’s decomposers” can cut that time by 98 percent at 10 percent of the cost. She started experimenting with fungi at fifteen, in her parent’s basement, after learning dandelions use them to grow in heavily polluted soil. She dropped out of university to work as CEO of Mycoremedy, the company she started. “Your degree, your perceived expertise, doesn’t make a difference for addressing the world’s problems,” Miller-Anderson says. Trials using her fungi on polluted land start this summer in Canada.

Four years ago, Gino Tubaro was asked to make a prosthesis for the son of a friend. The request led the Argentinian inventor, then just 16, to discover the opportunities of 3-D printing. Today he produces 3-D printed prostheses for a living. His clients – mainly kids – upload the measurements of their stump to Tubaro’s website. They can then custom-design a prosthetic hand. Around 500 people have done so already. “On the current market, a regular prosthesis costs more than USD 5,000. The fabrication process takes around 6 months,” says Tubaro. “In order to produce my prostheses, I do not need more than USD 10, it takes me around 20 hours, and the first prosthesis is free of charge. That is what makes my prostheses truly disruptive.”

GINO

O TURBAR r Founde Lab Atomic

SOCIETY In an increasingly interconnected, digital and technologydriven world, do we still know what it actually means to be human? Are we still in charge of defining ourselves, or do algorithms construct our identities? Ironically, we might turn to our phones to search the internet for an answer to these questions. Remember to let the information you find be a conversationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s starting point, not the end of your quest.

BIG BROTHER – Michal Kosinski contends that algorithms are now better than humans at recognizing emotion and personality traits. While trying to warn the world about this development, he is at the same time pushing forward with the new methods and seeing just how much artificial intelligence can discover about us just by analysing our faces. MARIA VAN LOOSDRECHT (TEXT) TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

“WISHFUL THINKING WILL NOT STOP TORNADOS FROM COMING.”

In 2016, Michal Kosinski – a psychologist and data scientist from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business – was mentioned in 2016’s most widely shared German-language article on social media, a Das Magazin article that discussed his research on big data and recent populist victories. According to this article, US President Donald Trump’s election campaign and Brexit advocates both used big data culled from social media to specifically target, and sway, voters. They used potential voters' digital traces, including personal data. This way, they could target people very specifically. Voters were not even aware they were being targeted. The big data company directly involved in these election campaigns is called Cambridge Analytica. The person whose academic research was linked to the technique in the media: Stanford researcher Michal Kosinski, who shared the Das Magazin article on the homepage of his website.

So were you linked to the Trump campaign’s victory? I wasn’t involved. I developed an algorithm that worked in a similar way, but I didn’t share my tool with Cambridge Analytica. It’s not my method, I just said it’s possible to break into your head and infer your personality from your Facebook likes. I just tried to warn people. It can be used for great purposes, but also for bad purposes. Could you please describe your method? An algorithm could take a digital footprint of your Facebook “likes,” or the words you use in your tweets, or in your email, for instance. Then, the algorithm would look at millions of people doing millions of things and find really subtle connections between, for instance, your propensity to vote for a given candidate and your intelligence. And you are the first one to do this research linking psychometrics and big data? I don’t think so, in fact. In particular, using

MICHAL KOSINSKI Michal Kosinski studies big data and psychometrics, or the study of peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s psychological traits, as an assistant professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Before that he was director at the University of Cambridge psychometrics centre, and worked as a researcher with Microsoft to study machine learning. He has two Masters, one in social psychology, with a focus on consumer behaviour, and one in psychology, specifically in psychometrics. Before gaining his PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge, he founded his own consulting company and served as brand officer for a computer company.

specific personality tests in connection to big data is unique. Doing this research and publishing it in the public domain is unique. Do you think you as a researcher have a responsibility for the information you give to the public? I certainly have a responsibility for the information that I give to the public, and I also have a responsibility to inform the public against the risks that are out there. Me not informing the general public doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop companies from using technologies that might not benefit people. But me warning people gives us an ability to have a discussion and change laws, or maybe accept the fact that these things seem to be happening. Maybe we should think about how to change societies to protect them against such tactics. â&#x2020;Ś

How do you think people will adjust to the knowledge that their social media use is so revealing? People don’t care. Come on, people talk about this, and in the end they just keep using Facebook and the internet and credit cards. There’s no other way. Have you changed your ways on Facebook as a result of your research? I keep my Facebook [profile] completely open. I believe that going forward there is going to be no privacy, so it’s way better to act and behave under the assumption that everything you do is public. Would you say privacy is a lost cause? It’s a lost cause. And I am not happy about it. It’s a bit like tornados. I don’t like tornados, I think that tornados should be illegal, and we should give everyone a choice of opting out from a tornado, but this wishful thinking will not stop tornados from coming. And the sooner we move from talking about illegalising tornados to discussing how we organise our society to make it a habitable place when tornados – the post-privacy world, in this metaphor – comes, the better. What are you working on now? I am working on how we determine intimate human traits, like sexual orientation, from faces. Does it work? With perfect accuracy. Aren’t you worried about the ethical implications of that? Aren’t you worried about every single person having their profile picture up on the internet now, and not knowing that a computer vision specialist can do anything with that? That is a different question. Well, yes. I am totally worried, but as I said before, we are quickly moving towards the post-privacy age, so even if you somehow manage to clean your data and remove yourself from the internet I can snap a picture of your face with my phone. That could happen if I were a border guard, for

83 BIG BROTHER

instance. With that one picture, I could know everything about you. In many countries, homosexuality is still a crime. Do you think your research might be used to target gay people? Again, when I tell you people can break into your house through your door, I am not giving them the key, I am just telling you that your door is a weak link. I am not a computer scientist. I am not even a computer vision specialist. So if I can do it on my laptop, then a company whose only job it is to look for faces and check them for hidden traits is doing it already. They are just not telling you they are doing it. You address possible dangers stemming from algorithms and big data. How would you classify your research? Well, in fact, what we were talking about in the beginning is not really my research, it’s just a side-effect of my research. My main interest is in what can we learn about the phenomenon of political views, homosexuality, personality, intelligence, and other human traits from looking at our language, looking at our Facebook likes, or looking at our faces. The face is a good proxy for your hormonal levels, for your health, for your genes, for your developmental history. Basically the face is a good proxy for many underlying processes. And it’s also very easily accessible, because you can go online and get billions of publicly available images. So for me, as a scientist, it’s interesting to see that by looking at faces, we can perhaps find links between hormones, genes, and personalities. Isn’t that what used to be called phrenology, which held that by measuring the skull we could infer personality traits? It used to be called phrenology and physiognomy, and it’s long been considered pseudoscience. Humans can recognise emotion [from facial expressions], but not always intimate personality traits. That might mean the traits are not on the face, or that human beings just didn’t evolve to read these traits. Algorithms can and do read these traits now.

What are some positive applications? It means robots can adjust to emotions, and computers can do the same. They could change the tone or the type of information they are telling you. For example: When a 45-year-old googles “jaguar” and a 12-year-old googles “jaguar,” they are probably not looking for the same thing. Cars could also adjust: they could put on relaxing music when they read that you are stressed, or control the speed or stop the car when they read you are not fit to drive. You’re saying the algorithm is better at reading other people than humans are. How do you feel about that? Machines are outcompeting humans in most of the things we do, and this process is going to continue. I think this is a much larger question than privacy in terms of how the relationship between us and artificial intelligence will look in the future. Increasingly, we rely to a heavy extent on artificial intelligence (AI) – to fly our planes, to manage our information networks, detect our illnesses, solve our societal problems and so on. We have this symbiotic relationship with it, and we just cannot live without it. But soon, interestingly, AI can probably easily live without us. Maybe not yet, but fast-forward a few years. AI will learn how to write its own code. It doesn’t need any input from a human being. A human just has to press start. Soon maybe we won’t even be needed for that. Where does that leave humans? Well, it leaves us increasingly dependent on AI. We cannot step back and we are going even further because we know that AI is amazing at solving those problems. Politicians make their decisions based on experts, and these experts use big data: Machine learning models, or statistical models that look at gazillion of data points and tell politicians what to do. In other words, even decisions on how to run countries are being made by computers. For now they’re kind of hiding behind the politician. And it’s great because computers are way better at decision-making than humans are. u

BUS STOPS & BRIDGES

CONSTANZA LAMBERTUCCI LEGLER (TEXT) TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

In the middle of St. Gallen's Marktplatz, the heart of the historic city centre, a white, modern bus and tram stop inevitably catches the eye. The structure, big enough to fit one bus under its awning, was built by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava in 1996. Like most of his work, it is both loved and hated: The architect has been sued for delays, overbudgeting and flaws in his work, but also honoured with dozens of international recognitions. Like the shelter in St. Gallen, many of Calatrava's pieces of architecture are criticised for busting into cities without much consideration for the local context. Calatrava argues that cities change constantly; he also says that the criteria that prevail nowadays for the preservation of traditional buildings are not the same that people had in the nineteenth century. He cites the Abbey of St. Gallen as an example: “The pre-Romanic cloister was there a thousand years before the actual Baroque church was built.” Calatrava states that the existence of “old” buildings in cities should not impede architects from “putting something of the late twentieth century in the middle of it.” BUILDING OR SCULPTURE? Calatrava’s bridges, tunnels, and buildings have become icons in the cities where they are built and usually add value to them.

Having a Calatrava building seems to be a sign of distinction, because they stand out. Critics, on the other hand, would say that his buildings are conceived as sculptures rather than to serve the citizens. The Spanish architect disagrees: Human beings, he says, are at the heart of his designs. He designed pieces of architecture like the World Trade Center transportation hub in New York; the Tower DCH in Dubai; the City of the Arts and Sciences in Valencia or the Women’s Bridge in Buenos Aires, among many others, with a particular user in mind. Though the commissioning jury was in his thoughts too: Behind a great project, he says, is a great client. HOW TO BUILD A CALATRAVA Calatrava signatures include inexpensive materials, like steel or concrete; large columns; and extensive use of natural light. White is another trademark. Many reprove this repetitiveness in his style, saying that similar solutions to different contexts might not work every time. Calatrava objects: “Bridges can be arches, can be beams, can be suspended bridges, cable-stayed bridges or tubular bridges, but there are not millions of typologies. What I can do is change those patterns to create a new composition. It is like in music: it’s the combination of the notes that makes the melody,” he says.

In fact, Calatrava says he makes an effort to keep himself up-to-date. And in a field that changes as slowly as architecture does, minimal signs of innovations make a difference. So if one day he designs a bridge with a single symmetrical arch and radially-placed cables, like the one he built in Italy’s Reggio Emilia, and afterward he reproduces it in Dallas, but bigger, that is an innovation, he argues. “Especially if you’ve been doing, as I've been doing most of my life, bridges that are unique.” FRAGILE HERITAGE These days, drawing and painting watercolours takes up 90% of Calatrava’s time. When sketching his designs, he does not separate technique from art. He believes that the one is a vehicle towards the other. Technology and materiality are big change makers in architecture: The use of wood delivers a completely different architecture than the use of steel or concrete, for instance. Social needs and revolutionary ideological changes might mould the future of architecture as well. “I hope that buildings rise as a kind of heritage that we deliver to the coming generations, because they survive us,” he said, minutes after predicting that his buildings might not stand for a hundred years. “I hope my buildings survive. But today we build in a very fragile way.” u

THE MISUNDERSTOOD ARCHITECT

THE MISUNDERSTOOD ARCHITECT – Around the world, the work of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava is both admired and despised. He denies repeating his designs and believes that architects today “build in a very fragile way.”

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BAROMETER SOCIAL MEDIA BAROMETER – Experts agree on one thing: The Millenial generation has grown up with the internet and social media as integral parts of their daily lives. But do these so-called “Digital Natives” also value privacy, or are their lives an open book? And what does it mean for companies when any young employee is a potential whistleblower? As part of their Global Perspectives Barometer project, GfK Verein surveyed over 1,000 Leaders of Tomorrow to find out. ANDREW CURRY (TEXT)

would anonymously share information about a bad working environment publicly online

53% 81% actively manage the privacy settings for online profiles compared to 16% that do not

77% of Leaders of Tomorrow with at least 1 month of work experience have already written at least one publicly visible statement about one of their employers

35%

think that those companies will be more successful in the long run in which information can be shared unless it is marked as confidential compared to 22% who think confidentiality should be the default

DISRUPTIVE MOMENTS IN SOCIETY LILIA GEORGIEVA (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

BRENDAN ALPER (US) CEO and Founder, Hater “The most disruptive moment of my life was the day I quit Goldman Sachs to become a comedian. I didn’t even tell my mom. To trade security and money – everything that I thought I wanted – for the risk of following your own dreams was definitely a game changer for me. People need to disrupt their personal life in order to figure out where they want to be!

DIANA KINNERT (DE) Vice President, Global Media House GmbH “I am into transformation of political parties right now – making them modern, more digital and global. Everyone is telling me to focus more on making them democratic again. So it happens that I just met this company which developed an app whose purpose is to introduce direct democracy again in the parliament. Every participant sends his proposal and receives two in return on which he can vote. This makes democracy possible again because you can sort through statements in an efficient way.”

ANDREW BASTAWROUS (GB) CEO and Co-founder, Peek Vision “Getting married was highly disruptive in a positive way. I am inherently a dreamer and lazy, and my wife is a doer and doesn’t like spending too much time thinking about things. Her attitude has been transformative in terms of my story not having ended before it started.”

LESLIE MAASDORP (ZA) Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, New Development Bank The power is with the people – “I grew up in South Africa, which had policies of racial discrimination. I realised the unfairness of the situation and became a political activist. Organising youth and students into political activity, getting arrested, being in prison – all that forces you to confront the fact that governments can be illegitimate. It disrupted my consciousness about the nature of the state.”

SIGIN OJULU (SS) University of Southern California “I never thought I wanted to go to graduate school. But in the end, I went and it changed my life completely. It changed my way of thinking, made me much more critical and broadened my horizons. I ended up doing two masters.”

Dan Wagner, CEO of Rezolve: I am online for almost every minute of every hour of my day. Of course, I am not interacting with my devices all the time, but I am online. In the technology service business, that is normal. You need to be available. For example, if there is a technical issue that is preventing people from having access to the service we offer, I would be on it every five seconds and chase the person that I need down, and I would be furious with them if I do not get a response within a reasonable period. Some might have a view that work-life balance means spare hours should be protected, but I have a different view. I think that we are lucky. There are millions of people who have to work in far worse conditions. Worrying about getting a call on the weekend to disturb a bike ride is part of our success.

Susanne Ruoff, Swiss Post CEO: I always spend at least one hour per day checking my phone, even on vacation. As a CEO, you need to stay connected. But you should not make Saturday morning calls to your employees over nothing. You need to have a basic level of respect. It is also important to clarify your expectations and rules for online communication. That is an extra task bosses have. It is wrong to expect employees to respond to everything within five minutes. When I worked at IBM Switzerland, we made a change from closed office to open office and we had the rule of softly knocking on somebodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s table as a way of asking for permission to disturb them. We did that in the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;90s, but the principle is still valid today: you cannot disturb anybody at any time.

Katerina Lengold, vice president of business development at Astro Digital: Until a couple of years ago, I had no such thing as balance: I was flying back and forth all the time. Now, there are actually hours booked in my calendar for spending time with my loved ones, playing with my dog and a nice dinner. If somebody is trying to schedule a call in that time, my calendar will say I am busy. I spend that time entirely offline. When I started doing that, I became much happier. I think everybody deserves offline time without work interruptions. I will not bug a person on their vacation with requests. If I need something from them, I usually send a note. I try not to call, because that is very disruptive. Availability 24/7 is a dangerous commitment. It limits your capacity to enjoy other things in life.

ON THE CLOCK BOUNDARIES – For many people, the internet and the smartphone have erased the division between work and private life. It’s not uncommon for people to look at their phone every twenty minutes or so to check for new emails, even when they’re off the clock. To find out how online communication has changed work-life balance and workforce expectations for others, we sat down with four super-busy people to get their points of view on the subject. These were their revelations: TAMILLA ZIYATDINOVA (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

LED

Tawanda Mahere, director of emerging markets at Jide Technology: I do not mind sending work emails at night. In fact, I appreciate the flexibility that technology gives me. I live and work in China, and I flew to my home country Zimbabwe last year and surprised my mother for her 60th birthday. I could do that because I could carry my work with me. The work-life dichotomy has definitely been distorted in some industries and that is great. Just before this symposium, I met with a client. During that meeting – a very serious meeting – he answered a call from his son. They actually video chatted for a few minutes. I admired that. That is the kind of work-life balance model that works for me, too. It goes both ways: technology lets you bring your emails to your home, but also your family and friends to your work.

MAKING MEDIA GREAT AGAIN

YOUNG GUNS – Journalism is going through a crisis: declining subscription rates, a US president ranting about fake news and failing business models are common concerns. Two young journalists, Heben Nigatu and Pia Frey, share their views on how to conquer this crisis through change and innovation. CONSTANZA LAMBERTUCCI LEGLER & TAMILLA ZIYATDINOVA (TEXT)

"Who among the people present is not subscribed to any media?" asks one of the speakers in a room full of reporters at the 47th St. Gallen Symposium. Pia Frey, a young German journalist, raises her hand: She gets her information via Facebook and Twitter, listens to different podcasts, uses a variety of apps, reads digital newspapers, but does not subscribe to anything. Frey, like many other young people, consumes content through many different channels that give her the opportunity to interact, as opposed to reading one single newspaper without any reciprocity. Legacy media need to rethink their practices, she believes. Apart from adding more interaction between journalists and audiences, she thinks newsrooms need to work on gender, racial and social diversity. That is also the opinion of BuzzFeed’s Heben Nigatu. The disruption that legacy media need to keep up with new players like Buzzfeed is, in Nigatu’s view, more diversity in their newsrooms. “The success factor of BuzzFeed is that they have made a real effort to be a more diverse workplace,” she says. “The hiring practices of media companies need to be disrupted,” because “the numbers are fucked up.” Most legacy media are failing miserably on the diversity front, Nigatu says, very annoyed. “They need to hire better. There

is a lot of mediocrity out there.” Growing up, Nigatu loved podcasts, but could not identify with most of them. It felt like they were not meant for her and she had to look hard for universal references. “By how something is covered, you can tell who it is for, and who is being ignored,” she says. Now Nigatu co-hosts an online podcast herself, “Another Round,” together with her African-American colleague and friend Tracy Clayton. Diverse newsrooms produce better stories, because more people can identify with them, she believes. In her view, BuzzFeed’s recipe for success is that they have made a concerted effort to create a more diverse workplace. Four years ago, Nigatu was the first full-time black employee. “A lot has changed since then,” she says. Today, 34% of the staff identify with a race or ethnicity other than white. But even BuzzFeed could do better, she admits. Pia Frey knows exactly what Nigatu is talking about. When she walks through a typical newsroom in Germany, she notices that there are too many white men with the same social background and the same educational level. Another problem she observes is the prevalence of a very oldfashioned attitude towards users’ opinion in newsrooms. “Editors sometimes think

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HEBEN NIGATU Heben Nigatu (26) co-hosts the BuzzFeed podcast “Another Round.” She has worked at BuzzFeed for three and a half years. She has also written for the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” In 2016, Forbes placed her on the “30 Under 30 in the Media” list, describing “Another Round” as popular and influential.

PIA FREY Pia Frey is the co-founder of Opinary. Before that, she was a writer for the German newspaper Die Welt and cofounded Pressekompass, which visualises political debates across online media. She has a B. A. in Philosophy from the Hochschule für Philosophie München. they have the wisdom to show the world out there how things are,” she says. In her opinion, news needs user feedback, just like any other product. That is why she created Opinary, a tool that can be embedded in online content and empowers the readers by allowing them to share their opinions. Frey believes that it is necessary to tear down the wall between users and journalists, to engage readers and to embrace user-generated content – especially when it comes to stories that are not widely covered by established media. In a responsible way, of course. Nigatu feels close to the people that listen to her podcast. Her perspective on content creation is refreshing. Rather than going after the highest ratings, as many established media tend to do, her mission is to create a space where her listeners can feel acknowledged, have a good time and rest for while. “If you have gained anything out of that hour, that is enough for me,” she says. She prefers the entertaining, authentic and intimate tone of her podcast over the style of legacy media. “I love when people tell me: ‘I listen to your podcast every week while I am cooking,’” she says. “You become a part of people’s lives.” The intimate setting also gives her the space to cover both light-hearted pop culture topics and daunting subjects like racism.

When rethinking their practices, traditional media must keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter, which are, in Frey’s opinion, the real disruptors. “They invest into making their content accessible on different platforms and they force media organisations to rethink their business models,” Frey says. Frey points out that publishers are as dependent on these platforms as the platforms are on content. But established media are not entirely taking advantage of this. A generation of journalists are not familiar enough with digital news platforms. She is confident that digital tools enrich content, but adds that “it does not always have to be a video, an image gallery, a text and a quiz.” In fact, she thinks video’s impact is overestimated: “It is limited in its use for mobile because it uses a lot of data.” The key is to keep telling stories in the way that makes the most sense, to both the journalist and their audience. u

TOP TIPS FOR BRINGING MORE WOMEN ON BOARD

Gender inequality is a problem from a social and a business point of view. Diversity inspires creativity: When expectations and assumptions clash, true innovation happens. MARIA VAN LOOSDRECHT (TEXT) KATIE CHAPPELL (ILLUSTRATION)

KUNIKO INOGUCHI was one of only twelve female speakers at the conference. She is from Japan, which recently dropped from 101st to 111th on the WEF’s 145-country gender equality ranking. She is professor emeritus at Sophia University in Tokyo and former minister for gender equality and social affairs in Japan.

MAINSTREAM THE IDEA THAT GENDER EQUALITY IS CRUCIAL FOR INNOVATION “The most important point on the agenda is to mainstream the idea that gender equality is crucial for innovation and creativity, which is what you need when you want to get ahead as a business. To do that, you have to be in a coalition with the media, with the intellectual community, and with government organisations.” LIVE YOUR VALUES “As a leader, you have to be both very good and be determined to make a difference. Leadership is about putting your views on the agenda, about bringing innovation to the world. It’s about the improvement of social justice and still making a profit if you are a business, still winning elections

if you are a politician, and still doing very well as a teacher if you are a professor.” PUT GENDER EQUALITY ON THE AGENDA OF SOCIETY IN GENERAL “In a capitalist system, you have to be innovative. If you are excluding women, consumers are uncomfortable with that. If you are a new college graduate, and you are applying at several firms, you will not want to apply to a company that does not have a diverse hiring policy because you anticipate that it is very much behind the social norms. USE YOUR VOICE, EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT (YET) IN A POSITION OF POWER “You have to raise your voice. If you see any new problems associated with gender

equality, you can raise your voice and improve the situation. If you can’t, you can ask friends to do it. Everyone can contribute.”

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The issue of diversity and equality is visible at a conference where the overall picture is dominated by a sea of men in dark suits dotted here and there by women in more colourful outfits. According to a 2016 report from the World Economic Forum, there is still a substantial gender gap in business worldwide; at the pace things are changing today, true equality will only be reached in 170 years. At the same time, the report says that diversity in the workplace is a driver for creativity and innovation, which brings prosperity to companies. Here are some tips for accelerating gender equality:

PAUL NUNES is global managing director at the Accenture Institute for High Performance. Like Japan, the US recently dropped in the WEF’s gender equality ranking: The country went from 28th to 45th place. Nunes seemed almost surprised to be asked about gender equality, but he gradually warmed up to the subject and explained his company’s policies for disrupting the gender gap:

ENSURE HIGH LEVELS OF ACCESSIBILITY AND RELIABILITY IN CASE OF A LEAVE OF ABSENCE FOR A PREGNANCY “We have flexible hours, we are flexible in telecommuting. We have made great strides and work virtually; one of the thing that’s part of the solution in general is that we’ve become a much more virtual society already. People work a lot, but they work at their own hours.” BE COGNISANT OF HOW THE GENDER GAP WORKS AND WHY IT IS THERE “A lot of it is just being conscious. It’s the unconscious bias we don’t really recognise: the guys pick a whole bunch of guys for the team, again, and vice versa can happen. Being mindful of team structure and unconscious biases is important.”

CREATE DIFFERENT EXPECTATIONS FOR MEN AS WELL “Some of the change is going to come when we really create different expectations for men as well, with men taking time out for parental leaves for example. ” BREAK DOWN BARRIERS “Some it is just a psychological barrier. You can’t introduce a new paradigm until the old paradigm literally dies. Believe me, the old thing unfortunately really has to expire before we get rid of the problem.”

SOCIETY – The symposium invited future leaders from around the world. Here are three active in social issues we think are worth keeping an eye on. NAHIARA S. ALONSO & LILIA GEORGIEVA (TEXT) LUKAS RAPP & TOBIAS SCHREINER ( PHOTO)

FROM EMPOWERING WOMEN TO A DATING APP POWERED BY HATE, HERE ARE

3 TO WATCH EMPOWERING WOMEN ALL OVER THE WORLD Ingrid Harb (23) believes that women do not know how much they are worth. After being told in high school by a college advisor she wouldn‘t make it to university, she realised women need a support system to empower them. “We’re scared of raising our voices,” she says. In 2015, she founded the Women Ambassadors Forum. The online platform helps women between 18 and 30 years old come together as a “sisterhood” and help one another overcome the challenges that come with being a young woman in a maledominated world and help each other realise they’re able to become whatever they want. More than 1,000 women around the world have applied so far. They’ll participate in an annual forum that brings together female leaders from around the world, and keep in contact from then on to support each other.

INGRID

HARB ors Forum

ad Women Ambass

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HATING THINGS BRINGS PEOPLE TOGETHER LORENZ N ARKU

LAING Humanit

y in Actio

n e.V.

BRINGING BLACK YOUTH IN GERMANY TOGETHER Laing Lorenz Narku has suffered racism in his own life. The child of immigrant parents, he grew up in a small village in Germany where he was one of the few black kids. He was discriminated, insulted, hit and attacked. As a black German, he realised early on that “when you are black you are not allowed to be anything else.” The 25-year-old wants young black people in Germany to stop identifying as “the black kid” and start thinking of themselves as “the scientist, the mathematician or the journalist.” In 2015 he started his Black Youth in Germany project to bring together black students in the country’s universities so they can support each other and learn they are much more than the colour of their skin. “When we are young, it is crucial to have role models to guide us,” Narku says.

Brendan Alper, the CEO and founder of dating app Hater, has an analytical mind and warm sense of humour that express themselves in his app. While it’s been criticised for promoting hatred, the tool actually tries to form mutual understanding and empathy. You love “Lord of the Rings” but Harry Potter is SO not your cup of tea? No problem! Hater collects your answers and matches you with people who share your interests. Alper’s vision: to disrupt the dating app and create a space where people connect over common dislikes (as well as likes) and form friendships as well as romantic relationships. “People form closer bonds when they have common things to complain about,” Alper says.

N BRENDA

ALPER Founde Hater

r & CEO

SYMPOSIUM The symposium brought brilliant minds from all around the globe together to talk about disruption in the world of business, politics, science, and society. But letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not forget how the symposium itself disrupts the life of the organising committee and the support crew. And what does the event mean for the winners of the St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award? The impact of these three days is bigger than you might imagine.

HUMANS OF ST. GALLEN HUMANS – It takes hundreds of volunteers and dozens of paid staff to make the St. Gallen Symposium a success. Here are some of their stories. NAHIARA S. ALONSO (TEXT) TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTO)

SIMONE FRIESS, 22

SEVERIN SCHMUGGE, 22

WUTCHARAPONG MASANTIA, 40

“This is the second year I am volunteering for the symposium, and I chose to do it as a caterer,” Simone Friess says. She is a student at the university, studying business administration. Her job is to serve meals to the event’s staff, and she also caters to the participants in the lounge once the symposium starts. “I am just doing it for fun. I am enjoying myself, even with the long hours,” she explains.

“Seeing how many people are involved in organising the symposium I wanted to be part of it, too,” says Severin Schmugge, who studies business administration at St. Gallen. He is one of the 30 technical operators responsible for the construction of the symposium site, laying the carpets or placing the furniture. “We set 200 chairs in the entrance hall, and I measure the distance between each of them so it is exactly 45 centimetres.”

Wutcharapong Masantia is a cook in the University of St. Gallen cafeteria, and has been working there for five years. “The symposium makes my job easier, but I prefer it when it is busier, so I do not have to be standing still so much,” he says. During an average week, Masantia prepares around 90 meals a day, but during the symposium he only serves 50. “Many people participate in the symposium and decide to eat upstairs during this time,” he explains.

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SEVERIN RUOFF, 23

JUAN CABEZA CAMPOS, 44

Although Severin Ruoff is an international affairs major, during the symposium he is a volunteer on the Media Team. “I chose to participate because making videos is a hobby of mine,” he explains. Ruoff is making the video with highlights of the event that is shown on the web, Facebook and YouTube. This year, in just two days, internet users watched the video over 8,000 times.

Juan Cabeza Campos is the officer in charge of security at the symposium. He is responsible for 50 people. “My work is fun, but the biggest challenge is to stay on top of things while coordinating my staff,” he says. Cabeza Campos explains that the security situation has changed a lot in recent years, because of digitalisation. Security staffers scan the badges and photos of the participants and work up to ten hours a day. “Everyone who wants to enter the campus area has to pass through us,” he says.

TOBIAS TARLOY, 22 & KUGA SUBRAMANIYAM Tobias Tarloy is a student at the University of St. Gallen volunteering with the kitchen crew. “Cleaning the cups and the dishes is not the most glamorous job, but someone has to do it,” he says. Tarloy explains that the job he is doing now is used as a punishment sometimes. “If they catch you while drinking at the University, they will make you do this job,” he says. He helps there for an hour with workers like Kuga Subramaniyam, a kitchen assistant for Migros who has witnessed 15 symposia. “This event creates a lot of more work for us to do, but I like it. It is a good job, and the people are very friendly,” Subramaniyam says.

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#DISRUPTIONDILEMMA SOCIAL MEDIA â&#x20AC;&#x201C; COMPILED BY JULIA KRAMER

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SYMPOSIUM – Over 900 people submitted essays to the St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award competiton. The top six had the opportunity to present their ideas on stage and be grilled by experts; only three were invited back the next day to receive awards.

FROM GLOBAL HANSES TO EMPATHY VIA VIRTUAL REALITY, HERE ARE

3 TO WATCH

LILIA GEORGIEVA (TEXT) LUKAS RAPP (PHOTO)

Sigin Ojulu (SS/US), Master’s Candidate in Humanities, University of Southern California – 3rd place Sigin Ojulu´s project proposes the development of a virtual reality technology that interacts with real-world issues and aims to create empathy in people along the way. The idea came to mind after she noticed a colleague managed to acquire spatial orientation skills just by playing video games. Ojulu is studying for her second master’s degree in Film and Television Production at the University of Southern California. “I am originally from South Sudan and I want to have an impact in this country. I studied economics before and realised this is not the way to have an impact,” she says. “That’s why I went into film.” She wants to make a change through making movies and images and is experimenting with cutting-edge virtual and augmented reality technology.

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Nathaniel Ware (GB), PhD Candidate in Economics, University of Oxford – 1st place Nathaniel Ware is a social entrepreneur, economist, and international development specialist. He is the founder and CEO of 180 Degrees Consulting, the world’s largest volunteer consultancy with 81 branches across 33 countries and over 5,000 consultants. Ware asked himself how can we finance high-quality basic services, such as education, health, sanitation, and housing, for disadvantaged populations at scale. In his essay he proposed a new form of public-private partnership, whereby the government will collaborate with private investors to provide specific services to specific disadvantaged individuals.

Benjamin Hofmann (DE), PhD Candidate in International Affairs, University of St. Gallen – 2nd place Benjamin Hofmann is a Research Associate and PhD Candidate in International Affairs at the University of St. Gallen Institute of Political Science. In his opinion, liberalism is threatened and the cure is a new governance structure for globalisation called Global Hanses. He came up with the idea while observing the global political scene over the last year and feels that major cities like London or California would benefit from such a model. “For me the biggest disruption in the political sector would be to disrupt the scene in a peaceful manner,” Hofmann says. In the more immediate future, he sees a future for himself in academia or international politics, where he worked before joining the University of St. Gallen.

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IS THE ST. GALLEN SYMPOSIUM RIPE FOR DISRUPTION? SKIP THE TRIP – The symposium gathered brilliant minds from all around the globe to talk about the disruption in our world. We got them talking about how can we disrupt St. Gallen Symposium itself. LILIA GEORGIEVA (TEXT) LUKAS RAPP (PHOTO)

At the 47th St Gallen Symposium, “disruption” was the buzzword on everyone’s lips. After discussing disruption in the fields of business, politics, and technology, in the end it was inevitable to ask: How can we disrupt the symposium itself? Participants were more than happy to provide us with some answers. MENTORS “I would like to have a tool that connects the Leader of Today with the Leaders of Tomorrow to enable proper one-on-one discussions,” says Jason Basel from start up EduOne. Basel’s not the only young man who is thinking in the direction of mentoring: Many others consider the symposium an amazing platform for discussing and connecting with other people. But sometimes you just cannot seem to find the person who would be perfect to discuss your problem with. A mentoring system would allow young entrepreneurs to meet face-to-face with business executives and foster even more relationships between established businesses and newly emergent ones.

VIRTUAL REALITY SYMPOSIUM Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are improving every day and it won't take long before our bodies can sit comfortably on our sofas at home while our minds participate in an online symposium. “Try to imagine a virtual room where every participant would have a hologram that represents him,” says Fredrik Gundelsweiler, lead consultant at Zühlke Group. “The avatars will look like you, move like you and have the same facial expressions.” This would allow us to cut costs, save time, be environmentally friendly and allow more guests to join. Sounds amazing, right? This is the moment we need to ask ourselves what makes the St. Gallen Symposium so unique: Is it only the content? Or is it also the personal connection we get from the experience of being there? Depending on the answer, we may consider some disruptions unnecessary. LET´S CHALLENGE THE SYMPOSIUM! The symposium is full of brilliant minds. Why don’t we put them to work? Andrew

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Bastawrous, CEO and co-founder of Peek Vision, proposes an on-site challenge for participants. “If we could all put our minds to solving a problem there is no way we will not come up with a solution,” he says. After a session discussing the pros and cons of starting your own country (Liberland, for example) participants can get together for a case study where they work on a “country model” which would be innovative and sustainable. Or, after a session about how to survive disruption, participants could develop action steps for sensing disruption and handling it. This is a perfect way to put the conference outcomes in writing and present a feasible document to the rest of the world. “FIGHT” ON STAGE “We have a great variety of participants here, but some panels are not really diverse,” says Tamsin Nickolson, a student at the University of Glasgow. “If we could hear from people with totally different ideas on stage, like, for example, someone in favour of Trump, this would bring a greater diversity to the symposium.” Some participants at the symposium said more contradictory opinions, brought together in the form of a guided argument, would help. LEADERS OF TODAY MARKETPLACE During the St. Gallen Symposium, the presence of the Leaders of Today is felt as they fill up the discussion rooms and plenary halls. “But they don’t really get the chance to present themselves,” says Han Jin, CEO and co-founder of Lucid. He proposes a marketplace where selected company representatives would talk about their work: Perhaps an open space where different organisations could set up stands and explain their occupation and future projects. “This would contribute to a greater visibility of the Leaders of Today,” Jin says, “and allow the rest of us to get to know them better.” u

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SPEAKERS

Omar Abbosh Chief Strategy Officer, Accenture Samuel Agutu Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, Changamka Microhealth Ltd Sami Atiya President, Robotics and Motion division Member of the Group Executive Committee, ABB Ltd Anat Bar Gera Chairwoman, Cyverse AG Andrew Bastawrous Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Peek Vision

Each year, a distinguished faculty of eminent international personalities explores and develops its views on present and long-term issues in business, politics and society with a focus on economic processes within their relevant environments. This year, the following speakers joined the symposium:

Roland Busch Chief Technology Officer & Member of the Managing Board, Siemens AG Santiago Calatrava Architect & Artist

Christoph Franz Chairman, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd

Tim Carter Co-Director & Chief Operating Officer, Peek Vision

J. Erik Fyrwald Chief Executive Officer, Syngenta

Stephan Chambers Director, The Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship, London School of Economics

Prof. Joshua S. Gans Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Rotman School of Management

Neal Cross Social Entrepreneur and Chief Innovation Officer, DBS Bank

Prof. Timothy Garton Ash Historian, Author and Commentator

Hubertus von Baumbach Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors, Boehringer Ingelheim

John Dacey Group Chief Strategy Officer, Swiss Re

Swan Gin Beh Chairman, Singapore Economic Development Board

Denis Duverne Chairman of the Board of Directors, AXA

Heike Bingmann EMG, Management & Organizational Development, ZF Group

Kacem El Ghazzali Co-Scientific Director, Raif Badawi Foundation for Freedom

Martin Blessing President Personal & Corporate Banking and President UBS Switzerland, UBS Group AG David Blitzer Managing Director & Chairman of the Index Committee, S&P Dow Jones Indices, S&P Global Rob Bradley Vice President, Digital Commercial Strategy and Revenue, CNN

Roberta Francis Co-Founder, The Lucy Foundation and Leader of Tomorrow

Marcela Escobari Visiting Fellow, The Brookings Institution Francisco Fernandez Chief Executive Officer, Avaloq Warren Fernandez Editor, The Straits Times John Flint Group Managing Director & Chief Executive RBWM, HSBC Holdings plc

Mario Greco Group Chief Executive Officer, Zurich Insurance Group Ltd Neil Harbisson Cyborg and contemporary artist Mehdi Hasan Presenter Head to Head and UpFront, Al Jazeera English Rachel Haurwitz President & Chief Executive Officer, Caribou Biosciences, Inc. Beat Hess Statutory Chairman, LafargeHolcim Ltd. Charles O. Holliday Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell plc Thebe Ikalafeng Founder & Chairman, Brand Leadership Group Ltd Kuniko Inoguchi Member, House of Councillors, National Diet of Japan

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Lance James Chief Scientist, Flashpoint Vít Jedlička President of the Free Republic of Liberland Prof. Takaaki Kajita Nobel Laureate in Physics, University of Tokyo Kersti Kaljulaid President of Estonia Shira Kaplan Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Cyverse AG Prof. Michal Kosinski Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford University Ekaterina Kotenko Vice President of Business Development, Astro Digital James Kuffner Chief Technology Officer, Toyota Research Insitute (TRI) Ong Ye Kung Minister for Education of Singapore Leslie Maasdorp Chief Financial Officer, New Development Bank Prof. Miriam Meckel Publisher, WirtschaftsWoche Robyn Meredith Executive Director, Goldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C. Evgeny Morozov Author & Columnist Robert Nemlander Founder, Entocube

Leda Cecilia Samin Master Student of Business Administration, Hitotsubashi University and Leader of Tomorrow Paul Nunes Managing Director, Accenture Research Stephan Rietiker Chief Executive Officer, LifeWatch John B. Rogers, Jr. Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Local Motors Alec Ross Author & Technology Policy Expert Prof. Deb Roy Director, Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), MIT Media Lab and Chief Media Scientist, Twitter William Ruh Senior Vice President & Chief Digital Officer, General Electric Company Susanne Ruoff Chief Executive Officer, Swiss Post Anders Samuelsen Minister for Foreign Affairs of Denmark Symone D. Sanders Former National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders and Leader of Tomorrow Sir John Scarlett Former Head of MI6 and Vice Chairman, Royal United Services Institute for Defence & Security Studies (RUSI) Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber Scientific Director, Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA), University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland

Johann N. Schneider-Ammann Federal Councillor of the Swiss Confederation Tony Schwartz Ghostwriter of Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal and Chief Executive Officer, The Energy Project Richard Shinn Founder and Chief Executive Officer, AIBrain, Inc Dan Wagner Serial Tech Entrepreneur Martin Wolf Chief Economics Commentator, The Financial Times

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TOPIC LEADERS Dagogo Altraide Founder, ColdFusion Studios Scott D. Anthony Managing Partner, Innosight Prof. Omid Aschari Managing Director, Master in Strategy and International Management, University of St. Gallen Priscila Bala Conférencière, 47th St. Gallen Symposium Fabian Buder Author Global Perspectives Barometer, GfK Verein Stephan Chambers Director, The Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship, London School of Economics Prof. James Davis Director, Institute for Political Science, University of St. Gallen Peter Day Global Business Correspondent, BBC News Veit Dengler Chief Executive Officer, NZZ Media Group Aiko Doden Senior Commentator, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)

Topic Leaders act as ambassadors of the St. Gallen Symposium and through their presence and role promote dialogue between the generations. In doing so, they bring together the Leaders of Today and the Leaders of Tomorrow. This year, the following Topic Leaders joined the symposium:

Prof. Elgar Fleisch Director, Institute of Technology Management, University of St. Gallen Prof. Christoph Frei Associate Professor, School of Economics and Political Science, University of St. Gallen Omkar Goswami Chairman, CERG Advisory Private Limited Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach Goldman Sachs International

Prof. em. Günter Müller-Stewens Professor Emeritus of Management, University of St. Gallen Andreas Neus Head of Future and University Programs, GfK Verein Annalisa Piras Co-founder and Director, The Wake Up Foundation Prof. Uriel Reichman President & Founder, IDC Herzliya

Mehdi Hasan Presenter Head to Head and UpFront, Al Jazeera English

Prof. Winfried Ruigrok Dean, Executive School of Management, Technology & Law, University of St. Gallen

Deborah Henderson Founder/Managing Director, Centre for Inspired Leadership

Stephen Sackur Presenter HARDtalk, BBC News

Andrew Hill Management Editor & Columnist, The Financial Times

Viswa Sadasivan Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Moves

Arthur Honegger Journalist & Author

Nina dos Santos London Anchor, CNNMoney View, CNN International

Riz Khan International Journalist Prof. Georg F. von Krogh Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation, ETH Zurich Leslie Maasdorp Chief Financial Officer, New Development Bank

Prof. Simon Evenett Director, Swiss Institute for International Economics, University of St. Gallen

Prof. Miriam Meckel Publisher, WirtschaftsWoche

Warren Fernandez Editor, The Straits Times

Robyn Meredith Executive Director, Goldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C.

Prof. Christoph M. Schmidt Chairman, The German Council of Economic Experts Pranjal Sharma Consulting Editor, Business World Peter Vogel Director of Custom Programmes and Business Development, Executive School of Management, Technology and Law, University of St. Gallen Prof. Klaus W. Wellershoff Chairman of the board and Partner, Wellershoff & Partners Ltd. Felix Wenger Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company, Inc. Switzerland

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PLENARY SESSIONS

On both days of the symposium, Plenary Sessions were held in which prominent speakers introduced the major topics, discussed controversial issues and provided impetus for the upcoming sessions. The sessions were moderated by the Topic Leader to ensure the participants were constantly involved in the discussion.

THURSDAY "THE DILEMMA OF DISRUPTION" Three personal disruption stories.

WELCOME Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (GB), Goldman Sachs International

WELCOME THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT Johann N. Schneider-Ammann (CH), Federal Councillor of the Swiss Confederation

PANEL: POLITICS IN A DISRUPTED WORLD Ong Ye Kung (SG), Minister for Education of Singapore Anders Samuelsen (DK), Minister for Foreign Affairs of Denmark Johann N. Schneider-Ammann (CH), Federal Councillor of the Swiss Confederation Topic Leader: Mehdi Hasan (GB), Presenter Head to Head and UpFront, Al Jazeera English

PANEL: INDUSTRIAL SECTOR – DISRUPT OR GET DISRUPTED Beat Hess (CH), Statutory Chairman, LafargeHolcim Ltd. Charles O. Holliday (US), Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell plc Topic Leader: Nina dos Santos (GB), London Anchor, CNNMoney View, CNN International

PANEL: FINANCE SECTOR – DISRUPT OR GET DISRUPTED Martin Blessing (DE), President Personal & Corporate Banking and President UBS Switzerland, UBS Group AG Denis Duverne (FR), Chairman of the Board of Directors, AXA John Flint (US), Group Managing Director & Chief Executive RBWM, HSBC Holdings plc Topic Leader: Nina dos Santos (GB), London Anchor, CNNMoney View, CNN International

ONE-ON-ONE Vít Jedlička (LL), President of the Free Republic of Liberland Topic Leader: Stephen Sackur (GB), Presenter HARDtalk, BBC News

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THURSDAY KEYNOTE: MAX SCHMIDHEINY LECTURE – FREE SPEECH AND THE CHALLENGE OF POPULISM Prof. Timothy Garton Ash (GB), Historian, Author and Commentator Followed by a conversation Topic Leader: Prof. Christoph Frei (CH), Associate Professor, School of Economics and Political Science, University of St. Gallen

ST. GALLEN WINGS OF EXCELLENCE AWARD: SIX DISRUPTIVE IDEAS PUT TO THE TEST The top six contributors to the St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award pitch their ideas to an Expert Panel. Stephan Chambers (GB), Director, The Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship, London School of Economics Thebe Ikalafeng (ZA), Founder & Chairman, Brand Leadership Group Ltd Robyn Meredith (US), Executive Director, Goldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C. Topic Leader: Riz Khan (GB), International Journalist The three winners were selected by the Award Jury and announced on Friday, 5 May 2017.

WRAP-UP THURSDAY Priscila Bala (BR), Conférencière of the 47th St. Gallen Symposium

A CONVERSATION WITH SANTIAGO CALATRAVA Santiago Calatrava (CH/ES), Architect & Artist Topic Leader: Nina dos Santos (GB), London Anchor, CNNMoney View, CNN International

BACKGROUND SESSION DIVERSE EQUALITY – IS A GLOBAL STANDARD POSSIBLE? Marcela Escobari (US), Visiting Fellow, The Brookings Institution Roberta Francis (NZ), Co-Founder, The Lucy Foundation and Leader of Tomorrow Kuniko Inoguchi (JP), Member, House of Councillors, National Diet of Japan Topic Leader: Stephan Chambers (GB), Director, The Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship, London School of Economics

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FRIDAY ST. GALLEN WINGS OF EXCELLENCE AWARD CEREMONY 2017 Presentation of the St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award 2017 by Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (GB), Goldman Sachs International (Symposium Chairman), and Prof. Georg F. von Krogh (NO), Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation, ETH Zurich (President Award Jury).

WELCOME Priscila Bala (BR), Conférencière of the 47th St. Gallen Symposium

PANEL: 100 DAYS OF PRESIDENT TRUMP Evgeny Morozov (BY), Author & Columnist Symone D. Sanders (US), Former National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders and Leader of Tomorrow Tony Schwartz (US), Ghostwriter of Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal and Founder & Chief Executive Officer, The Energy Project Topic Leader: Prof. James Davis (US), Director, Institute for Political Science, University of St. Gallen

PANEL: EUROPE – CAPITALISM, POPULISM, DEMOCRACY Mehdi Hasan (GB), Presenter Head to Head and UpFront, Al Jazeera English Prof. Miriam Meckel (DE), Publisher, WirtschaftsWoche Martin Wolf (GB), Chief Economics Commentator, The Financial Times Topic Leader: Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (GB), Goldman Sachs International

PANEL: DIGITAL WARFARE – THE POWER OF 1 AND 0 Lance James (US), Chief Scientist, Flashpoint Shira Kaplan (IL), Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Cyverse AG Sir John Scarlett (GB), Former Head of MI6 and Vice Chairman, Royal United Services Institute for Defence & Security Studies (RUSI) Topic Leader: Andrew Hill (GB), Management Editor & Columnist, The Financial Times

ONE-ON-ONE Neil Harbisson (GB), Cyborg and contemporary artist Topic Leader: Stephen Sackur (GB), Presenter HARDtalk, BBC News

PANEL: THE TECHNOLOGY OUTLOOK – NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF? Rachel Haurwitz (US), President & Chief Executive Officer, Caribou Biosciences, Inc. James Kuffner (US), Chief Technology Officer, Toyota Research Institute (TRI) John B. Rogers, Jr. (US), Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Local Motors Alec Ross (US), Author & Technology Policy Expert Topic Leader: Pranjal Sharma (IN), Consulting Editor, Business World

PANEL: THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC OUTLOOK – NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF? David Blitzer (US), Managing Director & Chairman of the Index Committee, S&P Dow Jones Indices, S&P Global Christoph Franz (DE), Chairman, F. Hofmann-La Roche Ltd Mario Greco (IT), Group Chief Executive Officer, Zurich Insurance Group Ltd Leslie Maasdorp (ZA), Chief Financial Officer, New Development Bank Topic Leader: Prof. Klaus W. Wellershoff (CH), Chairman of the board and Partner, Wellershoff & Partners Ltd.

WRAP-UP FRIDAY & PRESENTATION OF THE ISC TEAM Priscila Bala (BR), Conférencière of the 47th St. Gallen Symposium

BACKGROUND SESSION PREDICTING PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAITS FROM DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS Prof. Michal Kosinski (PL), Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour, Stanford University Prof. Deb Roy (CA), Director, Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), MIT Media Lab and Chief Media Scientist, Twitter Topic Leader: Prof. Miriam Meckel (DE), Publisher, WirtschaftsWoche

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WORK SESSIONS

The Work Sessions are the core element of the St. Gallen Symposium. They complement and expand on the Plenary Sessions and allow participants to directly exchange their opinions and experiences. In groups of about thirty participants, the Work Sessions provide the opportunity to take part in intense debates.

Living in the era of disruption: reacting to the new Omar Abbosh (GB), Chief Strategy Officer, Accenture Topic Leader: Prof. em. Günter Müller-Stewens (CH/DE), Professor Emeritus of Management, University of St. Gallen

Disruption in the pharmaceutical industry Hubertus von Baumbach (DE), Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors, Boehringer Ingelheim Topic Leader: Peter Day (GB), Global Business Correspondent, BBC News

The role of content and data in the digital world of today and tomorrow Rob Bradley (GB), Vice President,Digital Commercial Strategy and Revenue, CNN Topic Leader: Nina dos Santos (GB), London Anchor, CNNMoney View, CNN International

Using innovative technology to bring insurance to the underserved in emerging markets Denis Duverne (FR), Chairman of the Board of Directors, AXA Topic Leader: Omkar Goswami (IN), Chairman, CERG Advisory Private Limited

The global financial system – some inconvenient truths John Flint (US), Group Managing Director & Chief Executive RBWM, HSBC Holdings plc Topic Leader: Leslie Maasdorp (ZA), Chief Financial Officer, New Development Bank

Disruption in the age of AI Prof. Joshua S. Gans (AU), Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Rotman School of Management Topic Leader: Scott D. Anthony (US), Managing Partner, Innosight

CRISPR gene editing: hacking the genome Rachel Haurwitz (US), President & Chief Executive Officer, Caribou Biosciences, Inc. Topic Leader: Pranjal Sharma (IN), Consulting Editor, Businessworld

A sustainable focus on climate change in the age of disruption Charles O. Holliday (US), Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell plc Topic Leader: Stephen Sackur (GB), Presenter HARDtalk, BBC News

Transforming higher education: a start-up mind-set Ong Ye Kung (SG), Minister for Education of Singapore Topic Leader: Prof. Uriel Reichman (IL), President & Founder, IDC Herzliya

100 days of President Trump: disruption or healthy process? Stephan Rietiker (CH/US), Chief Executive Officer, LifeWatch Topic Leader: Arthur Honegger (CH), Journalist & Author

Becoming digital industrial William Ruh (US), Senior Vice President & Chief Digital Officer, General Electric Company Topic Leader: Prof. Elgar Fleisch (CH/AT), Director, Institute of Technology Management, University of St. Gallen

How Swiss Post sees its role in the smart cities of tomorrow Susanne Ruoff (CH), Chief Executive Officer, Swiss Post Topic Leader: Prof. Omid Aschari (CH), Managing Director, Master in Strategy and International Management, University of St. Gallen

Diplomacy in a disrupted world Anders Samuelsen (DK), Minister for Foreign Affairs of Denmark Topic Leader: Annalisa Piras (IT), Co-founder and Director, The Wake Up Foundation

Is the life you’re living worth the price you’re paying to live it? Tony Schwartz (US), Ghostwriter of Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal and Founder & Chief Executive Officer, The Energy Project Topic Leader: Deborah Henderson (CA), Founder/Managing Director, Centre for Inspired Leadership

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Evidence based social impact: aligning income with impact Andrew Bastawrous (GB), Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Peek Vision and Tim Carter (GB), Co-Director & Chief Operating Officer, Peek Vision Topic Leader: Peter Day (GB), Global Business Correspondent, BBC News

Disruption – leadership matters! Heike Bingmann (DE), EMG, Management & Organizational Development, ZF Group Topic Leader: Deborah Henderson (CA), Founder/Managing Director, Centre for Inspired Leadership

Passive disruption David Blitzer (US), Managing Director & Chairman of the Index Committee, S&P Dow Jones Indices, S&P Global Topic Leader: Prof. Simon Evenett GB), Director, Swiss Institute for International Economics, University of St. Gallen

Technology turns disruption into opportunities Roland Busch (DE), Chief Technology Officer & Member of the Managing Board, Siemens AG Topic Leader: Prof. Christoph M. Schmidt (DE), Chairman, The German Council of Economic Experts

Disrupt yourself or get disrupted Francisco Fernandez (CH), Chief Executive Officer, Avaloq Topic Leader: Stephen Sackur (GB), Presenter HARDtalk, BBC News

Disruption, fake news, and the future of the media in democracies Warren Fernandez (SG), Editor, The Straits Times Topic Leader: Robyn Meredith (US), Executive Director, Goldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C.

What got us here may not get us there: why it’s true for food J. Erik Fyrwald (US), Chief Executive Officer, Syngenta Topic Leader: Prof. Omid Aschari (CH), Managing Director, Master in Strategy and International Management, University of St. Gallen

Is Europe disintegrating? Prof. Timothy Garton Ash (GB), Historian, Author and Commentator Topic Leader: Prof. Christoph Frei (CH), Associate Professor, School of Economics and Political Science, University of St. Gallen

Digital disruption – how can boards and executives lead a successful digital transformation of their organisation? Anat Bar Gera (IL), Chairwoman, Cyverse AG and Shira Kaplan (IL), Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Cyverse AG Topic Leader: Omkar Goswami (IN), Chairman, CERG Advisory Private Limited

Effective Leadership - A Few Casual Observations Beat Hess (CH), Statutory Chairman, LafargeHolcim Ltd. Topic Leader: Andrew Hill (GB), Management Editor & Columnist, The Financial Times

Demographic disruption as a source of social innovation Kuniko Inoguchi (JP), Member, House of Councillors, National Diet of Japan Topic Leader: Aiko Doden (JP), Senior Commentator, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)

Liberland state model for 21st century Vít Jedlička (LL), President of the Free Republic of Liberland Topic Leader: Mehdi Hasan (GB), Presenter Head to Head and UpFront, Al Jazeera English

The future of human – AI interactions Prof. Michal Kosinski (PL), Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford University Topic Leader: Prof. Christoph Frei (CH), Associate Professor, School of Economics and Political Science, University of St. Gallen

True Artificial Intelligence will change everything Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber (DE), Scientific Director, Swiss AI Lab IDSIA; Professor of AI, USI & SUPSI; President, NNAISENSE Topic Leader: Riz Khan (GB), International Journalist

Challenging how our Leaders of Tomorrow envision the future Kacem El Ghazzali (MA/CH), Co-Scientific Director, Raif Badawi, Foundation for Freedom and Leader of Tomorrow Ekaterina Kotenko (RU), Vice President of Business Development, Astro Digital and Leader of Tomorrow Robert Nemlander (FI), Founder, Entocube and Leader of Tomorrow Topic Leader: Dagogo Altraide (AU), Founder, ColdFusion Studios

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The transformational power of mobile phone technology and mobile money in healthcare delivery in Kenya Samuel Agutu (KE), Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, Changamka Microhealth Ltd Topic Leader: Pranjal Sharma (IN), Consulting Editor, Business World

Changing the Singapore economic development model Swan Gin Beh (SG), Chairman, Singapore Economic Development Board Topic Leader: Prof. Klaus W. Wellershoff (CH), Chairman of the board and Partner, Wellershoff & Partners Ltd.

Jungle innovation Neal Cross (GB), Social Entrepreneur and Chief Innovation Officer, DBS Bank Topic Leader: Viswa Sadasivan (SG), Chief Executive Officer, Strategic Moves

Managing the digital disruption in the healthcare industry with agility Christoph Franz (DE), Chairman, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd Topic Leader: Prof. Winfried Ruigrok (NL), Dean, Executive School of Management, Technology & Law, University of St. Gallen

Turning change into opportunity â&#x20AC;&#x201C; how customers transform the insurance industry Mario Greco (IT), Group Chief Executive Officer, Zurich Insurance Group Ltd Topic Leader: Felix Wenger (CH), Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company, Inc. Switzerland

The renaissance of our species Neil Harbisson (GB), Cyborg and contemporary artist Topic Leader: Riz Khan (GB), International Journalist

Disruption in science Prof. Takaaki Kajita (JP), Nobel Laureate in Physics, University of Tokyo Topic Leader: Aiko Doden (JP), Senior Commentator, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)

Cloud Robotics: intelligent machines in a cloud-connected world James Kuffner (US), Chief Technology Officer, Toyota Research Insitute (TRI) Topic Leader: Warren Fernandez (SG), Editor, The Straits Times

Will the struggle for data ownership be the defining political issue of the future? Evgeny Morozov (BY), Author & Columnist Topic Leader: Peter Day (GB), Global Business Correspondent, BBC News

The race to vehicle autonomy John B. Rogers, Jr. (US), Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Local Motors Topic Leader: Andrew Hill (GB), Management Editor & Columnist, The Financial Times

20th century: left versus right. 21st century: open versus closed Alec Ross (US), Author & Technology Policy Expert Topic Leader: Veit Dengler (AT), Chief Executive Officer, NZZ Media Group

Personal memories and lessons from the Cold War Sir John Scarlett (GB), Former Head of MI6 and Vice Chairman, Royal United Services Institute for Defence & Security Studies (RUSI) Topic Leader: Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (GB), Goldman Sachs International

Are you futurable? Gamify AI to build your better future Richard Shinn (KR), Founder and Chief Executive Officer, AIBrain, Inc Topic Leader: Scott D. Anthony (US), Managing Partner, Innosight

Being an Entrepreneur â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the challenges and dynamism of creating a new business Dan Wagner (GB), Serial Tech Entrepreneur Topic Leader: Peter Vogel (CH), Director of Custom Programmes and Business Development, Executive School of Management, Technology and Law, University of St. Gallen

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CIRCLE OF BENEFACTORS

The International Studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Committee is thankful to be able to count on the support of its Circle of Benefactors, which includes some 350 major companies around the world. The circle is of crucial importance to the financing of the St. Gallen Symposium and ensures the continuity of the initiative.

Main Partners

is an official main partner of the St. Gallen Symposium

is the official technology consultant of the St. Gallen Symposium

is an official transport services partner of the St. Gallen Symposium

is an official information technology partner of the St. Gallen Symposium

is the official financial services supplier of the St. Gallen Symposium

is the official document services provider of the St. Gallen Symposium

Main Partners Leaders of Tomorrow

is an official partner of the Leaders of Tomorrow

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123 2Xideas 360 Treasury Systems AG A ABACUS Research AG ABB Ltd Abraxas Informatik AG Accenture (Schweiz) AG Dr Josef Ackermann a-connect (group) ag Actieninvest AG ACXIT Capital Partners Adecco Management & Consulting S.A. ADM International Adveq Management AG Aebi Schmidt Holding AG Aepli Metallbau AG Akris AG Albers & Co AG Alfred Müller AG ALID Finanz AG Allen & Overy Allgemeines Treuunternehmen Allholding Beteiligungsverwaltungs GmbH Alpha PetroVision Group Alu Menziken Extrusion AG Alwys Holding AG AMANN & Söhne GmbH & Co KG Ameropa Holding AG AMS Österreich ANA Holdings Inc. Arbonia AG Arcron AG Argon Asset Management ARRI AG Audemars Piguet Autoneum Holding AG Avaloq Group AG B B.Grimm Holding & Co., Ltd. Baker & McKenzie Zurich Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. Banque de Commerce et de Placements S.A. Banque de Luxembourg S.A. Banque Internationale à Luxembourg S.A. Bär & Karrer AG Barandun von Graffenried AG Barclays Bank PLC Barry Callebaut AG BASF SE Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wirtschaft und Medien, Energie und Technologie BB Biotech BDO AG BearingPoint

Beekeeper AG Beiersdorf AG Beisheim Holding GmbH Belimo Holding AG Bellevue Asset Management AG Berenberg Bank (Schweiz) AG Bewital Holding GmbH & Co. KG Bilfinger SE BKW AG Blasto AG BlueOrchard Finance Ltd. BMW (Schweiz) AG BNP Paribas (Suisse) SA Boston Consulting Group BRAINFORCE AG Bratschi Wiederkehr & Buob AG Brauerei Locher AG bta first travel ag b-to-v Partners Bucher Industries AG Bühler Management AGnt AG C Capgemini Schweiz AG Capvis Equity Partners AG Careerplus AG Cargolux Airlines International S.A. Cat Aviation AG CEWE Stiftung & Co. KGaA CF&C Finance Suisse SA Jenny Chiam China Construction Bank Clariant International AG Cofra Holding AG Conova Consulting AG Dr Philipp Cottier Credence Partners Pte Ltd Crédit Agricole Indosuez Wealth Management (Switzerland) SA Credit Suisse Group AG Crypto AG CSL Behring AG D Danzer AG Dätwyler Holding AG DBAY Advisors de Sede AG Deloitte AG Deutsche Apotheker- & Ärztebank eG DMG MORI AG Dr. Bjørn Johansson Associates AG DvH Medien GmbHAG E E. Gutzwiller & Cie. Banquiers EBP Ecolab Europe GmbH

Dr Pierre Edelmann Edelweiss Air AG Egon Zehnder Elcotherm AG elea Foundation for Ethics in Globalization ElringKlinger AG Emil Capital Partners Emil Frey AG Energie 360° AG EQT Partners AG Ermenegildo Zegna Group Ernst & Young AG Esselte Leitz GmbH & Co. KG EurAsia Competence Switzerland eventDATA-services AG Eversheds Sutherland F Falcon Private Bank Falke KGaA Farner Consulting AG FEI Capital Partners Inc. Ferring Pharmaceuticals SA Festo AG & Co. KG Finyon Consulting AG Fis Organisation AG Flughafen Zürich AG Fondazione Fidinam Forbes Marshall Private Limited Forma Futura Invest AG Forol Holding AG Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA furrerhugi. ag G Gallus Holding AG Christoph Gautier GCA Altium AG Geberit AG Gebrüder Weiss GmbH Generali CEE Holding B.V. Georg Fischer AG GfK Verein Givaudan SA Glatz AG Glen Fahrn Glencore International AG Global Law Office Goba AG Goh Swee Chen Goldbell Corporation Pte Ltd Goldman Sachs International Golien Ltd Graubündner Kantonalbank Greenhill & Co. Europe LLP GRENKE AG Growthpoint Properties Groz-Beckert KG

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Guldborg International Gurit Services AG Toyoo Gyohten H Habib Bank AG Zurich Halcyon Agri Corporation Limited Halfmoon Bay Capital Limited Hälg & Co. AG Hathon Holding AS Haufe-umantis AG HAWE Hydraulik SE Haws Switzerland AG HBM Partners AG Heidrick & Struggles Helbling Holding AG Helsinn Healthcare S.A. Helvetia Holding AG Heraeus Holding GmbH Hesta Services AG Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hewlett-Packard (Schweiz) GmbH Hexagon AB HIAG Immobilien High Meadows Foundation Hilcona AG HILTI AG Homburger AG HOPI HOLDING a.s. HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA HSG Alumni Nick Huber Huber + Suhner AG Hublot SA Hyposwiss Private Bank Genève SA I IBM Schweiz AG IKEA Foundation IMD Industriellenvereinigung Wien Infosys Consulting AG ING-DiBa AG innogy Česká republika a.s. Innosight Asia-Pacific InterGlobe Aviation Limited (IndiGo) J Japan Tobacco Inc. Jaquet Partners AG Jebsen & Co. Ltd. JENOPTIK AG Johnson & Johnson JT International S.A. Jung Technologies Holding AG Jura Elektroapparate AG

K KAMAX Holding GmbH & Co. KG Kantonsspital St. Gallen KIND Hörgeräte GmbH & Co. KG Dr Karl-Heinz Kipp Dr Sonja Kiss Kontivia AG KPMG AG KUHN RIKON AG KUKA Aktiengesellschaft Kuoni Travel Holding Ltd. L LafargeHolcim Ltd. Landesbank Baden-Württemberg Landewyck Tobacco S.A. Leaders Solutions AG Leister AG Lenz & Staehelin Lenzing Aktiengesellschaft Leonteq Securities AG Lephatsi Investments (Pty) Ltd Lexzau, Scharbau GmbH & Co. KG LGT Group Foundation LIDL Schweiz Liebherr-International AG LifeWatch AG Lilienberg Unternehmerforum Lincoln International Linz Textil Holding AG Lombard Odier & Cie Lyreco Switzerland AG M Maerki Baumann & Co. AG Mammut Sports Group AG Mangrove Capital Partners MANN+HUMMEL International GmbH & Co KG. Manor AG Marcol Capital Europe S.A. Martel AG St. Gallen Max Schmidheiny-Stiftung Mazars S.A. McKinsey & Company medienwerkstatt ag Merifin Capital MEWA Textil-Service AG & Co. Management OHG Microsoft Schweiz GmbH Mikron Holding AG MLS Dr. Max Schnopp AG Mobiliar Versicherungen Müller-Möhl Foundation Mutschler-Gruppe My Drop in the Oceans

N Namics AG Nellen & Partner AG NEOPERL International AG Nespresso Suisse Neue Aargauer Bank AG Neue Zürcher Zeitung Neutrik AG Niederer Kraft & Frey AG Nikko Asset Management NIMO Holding AG Norddeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale Notenstein La Roche Privatbank AG Novartis AG Novozymes A/S O Odgers Berndtson Oel-Pool AG Oettinger Davidoff AG OMV Aktiengesellschaft Omya Management AG One North Capital Pte. Ltd. Orell Füssli Holding AG Orifarm A/S Otto (GmbH & Co. KG) P Papyrus Partners to Leaders Paul Hartmann AG Perella Weinberg Partners UK LLP Pictet & Cie Prager Dreifuss AG PRE Management Group PricewaterhouseCoopers AG Private Client Bank AG PRS Group, Mumbai PSP Group Services AG Pure Circle Limited Q Quadriga Capita Beteiligungsberatung GmbH Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP R Rahn+Bodmer Co. Raiffeisen Schweiz Richter + Frenzel Rieter Management AG Rivella International AG Robert Bosch AG Robert Bosch GmbH Roche AG Roland Berger AG

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Rolex SA Rosenbauer International AG Rothschild Bank AG Rotronic AG RP - Sanjiv Goenka Group RUAG Holding AG Russell Reynolds Associates S Sabinum AS SAP (Schweiz) AG Schaltag AG Schellenberg Wittmer AG, Rechtsanwälte Schenker Storen AG Andreas Schmid Schneeberger Holding AG Schöffel Schweiz AG Joachim Schoss Schroder & Co Bank AG Monika und Wolfgang Schürer Die Schweizerische Post SCOR Switzerland AG Scott Sports SA Scout24 Schweiz AG Securitas AG Sefar Holding AG SFS Holding AG Siegfried Holding AG Dr Gralf Sieghold Siemens AG Sika AG Silverhorn Investment Advisors Limited Sitag AG SIX Group Skyadvisory AG smARTec Sonova AG Sopra Steria GmbH Southern Capital Group Spectrum Value Management SpotMe SA St. Galler Kantonalbank St. Galler Tagblatt AG Stadt St. Gallen Staiger, Schwald & Partner AG Starrag Group Holding AG Steinfels Weinauktionen & Weinhandels AG Gertrud Stoll-Fein Sulzer Management Ltd Yuji Suzuki Swiss Krono Group Swiss Life AG Swiss Prime Site AG Swiss Re Swissmem

T Takeda Pharmaceuticals International AG Tamedia AG TCI Consult GmbH Telindus THI Investments GmbH Transformation Partner TRL Krosaki Refractories Limited TÜV SÜD AG U UAB koncernas "ACHEMOS GRUPĖ" u-blox AG UBS AG Umdasch Group AG Underberg AG Union Bancaire Privée United Managers Japan Inc. Universitätsspital Basel Universitätsspital Zürich upc cablecom GmbH USM U. Schärer Söhne AG V Valcambi sa Valora Holding AG Vetropack Holding AG Victorinox AG VISCHER AG Vita Vontobel Holding AG VP Bank AG W Weisse Arena Gruppe Philipp Weckherlin Wellershoff & Partners Ltd. Wenger Plattner Wicor Holding AG Willy Bogner GmbH & Co. KGaA Winton Capital Management Limited Eugene Wong Hin Sun Würth International AG Dr Peter A. Wuffli X Xavier University Bhubaneswar Xerox AG XL Catlin Y Ypsomed AG Z Zehnder Group International AG Zentis GmbH & Co. KG

ZF Friedrichshafen AG Dr Heinz Zimmer Zühlke Engineering AG Zumtobel AG Zürcher Kantonalbank

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PATRONS

123 2Xideas A ABACUS Research AG ABB Ltd Abraxas Informatik AG Accenture (Schweiz) AG Albers & Co AG Allgemeines Treuunternehmen AMS Österreich Autoneum Holding AG Avaloq Group AG B BDO AG BearingPoint Belimo Holding AG Bucher Industries AG Bühler Management AG C Cat Aviation AG Chemical Solutions, s.r.o. Credit Suisse Group AG D Dätwyler Holding AG De Pfyffer & Associés Deutsche AVIA Mineralöl-GmbH E EFG Bank AG elea Foundation for Ethics in Globalization Emil Capital Partners F Festo AG & Co. KG furrerhugi. ag

The Leaders of Tomorrow contribute to the success of the St. Gallen Symposium not only during the two days in May, but also in various initiatives through-out the year. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our Leaders of Tomorrow Patrons who enable the empowerment of the next generation.

G Geberit AG Georg Fischer AG Globus SB-Warenhaus Holding GmbH & Co. KG Graubündner Kantonalbank Gunvor SA H Helsinn Healthcare SA HIAG Immobilien Homburger AG Hupac S.A. J Jung Technologies Holding AG

P Peter und Luise Hager-Stiftung PSP Group Services AG R Raiffeisen Schweiz S SIX Group Straumann Holding AG Swiss Re U Union Bancaire Privée USM U. Schärer Söhne AG

K Kasikornbank Public Company Limited

V Valcambi sa Valora Holding AG Vita

L Landewyck Tobacco S.A. Leaders Solutions AG Lephatsi Investments (Pty) Ltd

W Würth International AG

M Manor AG Mobiliar Versicherungen Muhr und Bender KG Müller-Möhl Foundation Munksjö Oyj Mutschler-Gruppe N Notenstein La Roche Privatbank AG O Österreichische Nationalbank

X Xaxera GmbH XL Catlin Z ZF Friedrichshafen Zürcher Kantonalbank

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ST. GALLEN FOUNDATION FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

The activities of the International Students’ Committee are guided by the St. Gallen Foundation for International Studies. This combination of student responsibility and professional guidance is vital to the long term success of the St. Gallen Symposium.

Board of Trustees

Foundation Team

Special Advisors

Chairman Peter Voser (CH) ABB Ltd, Zurich

Chief Executive Officer ad interim Dominic Baumann (CH)

Singapore Alexander C. Melchers (CH/DE) C. Melchers GmbH & Co.

Vice Chairman Karin Keller-Sutter (CH) State Counselor Canton of St. Gallen, St. Gallen

Vice President Rolf Bachmann (CH) Vice President Claudia Rapp (DE)

Prof. Dr Thomas Bieger (CH) University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen

Relationship Manager Faculty Jeannine Bühler (CH)

Prof. em. Dr Peter Gomez (CH) University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen

Relationship Manager Faculty Stefano Saeger (DE/IT)

Bénédict G. F. Hentsch (CH)

Project Manager Innovation & Technology Fabian Karst (DE)

Walter Kielholz (CH) Swiss Re, Zurich Dr Christoph Loos (DE) Hilti AG, Schaan Dr Ralph Schmitz-Dräger (DE) Arcron AG, Zürich Dr Gerhard Schwarz (CH) Author and publisher, Zurich Honorary Chairman Dr Josef Ackermann (CH)

Project Manager Leaders of Tomorrow Eveline Leupi (CH) Project Manager Communication Tobias Rordorf (CH) Project Manager Barbara Wögerbauer (AT)

Japan Yuji Suzuki (JP) Credit Suisse Securities (Japan) Ltd. China Dr Jianzhong Yao (CH/CN) Asia Capital Reinsurance Group

From top left: Raphael Burger (CH) Lasse Balster (DE) Johannes Bernstorff (DE) Lia Hollenstein (CH) Sonam Bhuka (CH/DE)

Anastasija Bosshard (CH/RU) Daniil Bulat (CH/DE/RU) Johannes Kempf (CH) Elisabeth Burkhardt (CH/SE) Jannik Burth (DE) Lasse Dabbelstein (DE)

Doron Lande (CH) Julian Frings (DE) Guillaume Gauthier (CH/FR) Pia Goehringer (DE/MX) Kaspar Kรถchli (CH)

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ISC TEAM NELSON LOCHER (TEXT) TOBIAS SCHREINER (PHOTOS)

We are often asked by fellow students what it takes to organise an event such as the St. Gallen Symposium and why we do it in the first place. In my opinion, a picture is worth more than a thousand words and the following pictures – taken just before the symposium started, and the moment it was over – show the dedication the job took as well as the prevalent emotions at the end. As we were walking offstage, it slowly dawned on us what a fantastic crowd had honoured us with their presence and how we weren’t the International Students’ Committee but the International Students’ Family.

From top left: Xenia Huber (CH/DE) Michael Karadjian (DE) Nelson Locher (CH/SN) Florian MĂźnch (CH/DE) Selina Halusa (CH/DE)

Marc Hew (CH) Annika Hochstrasse (CH/DE) David Meier (CH) Joel Tinguely (CH) Yannick Weber (CH/DE) Sascha Stehrenberger (CH)

Daniel Stadelmann (CH/DE/PE) Sebastian Steger (CH) Anna Strohmeier (AT) Dan Sharell (DE/FR) Christian Sutter (CH) Vinzenz von Teufenstein (CH)

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Dear Magazine Team, Thank you so very much for making me sit alone in the newsroom so often. I did miss your company, because you are a fantastic group of talented journalists, photographers and illustrators. But because of your talents, I needed you to be out and about, reporting on the symposium. ElÃas, Ruben, Nahiara, Ricardo, Constanza, Sebastian, Lia, Maria, Tamilla, Elliot, Lukas, Tobias and Katie, your creativity, professionalism and team spirit was truly inspiring. Fortunately, Alexandra, Andrew, Manuel, Carla, Nelson, Tulu, and Michel were there to keep me company, which was essential for making this magazine happen. Thank you for your great ideas and critical notes. It was a privilege working with all of you. Best, Julia

TU LOAN HUYNH

ART DIRECTOR, SERGEANT AG (CH)

07:30

KATIE CHAPPELL ILLUSTRATIONS (SCO)

MANUEL HECKEL

MANAGING EDITOR (DE)

JULIA KRAMER

EDITOR IN CHIEF (NL)

ALEXANDRA STARK MANAGING EDITOR (CH)

CARLA BAUM

DIGITAL CONTENT MANAGER (DE)

ANDREW CURRY TEXT EDITOR (US)

NELSON LOCHER

MAGAZINE PROJECT MANAGER (CH/SN)

MAGAZINE TEAM

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MICHEL MUELLER

CREATIVE DIRECTOR, SERGEANT AG (CH)

ELLIOT GUNN

RICARDO DELLA COLETTA

EDITORIAL STAFF (CA)

LILIA GEORGIEVA

EDITORIAL STAFF (BR)

EDITORIAL STAFF (BG)

MARIA VAN LOOSDRECHT EDITORIAL STAFF (NL)

TAMILLA ZIYATDINOV

NAHIARA S. ALONSO EDITORIAL STAFF (ES)

EDITORIAL STAFF (NL)

SEBASTIAN BEUG EDITORIAL STAFF (DE)

RUBEN DIELEMAN

ELÍAS CAMHAJI

EDITORIAL STAFF (NL)

EDITORIAL STAFF (MX)

CONSTANZA LAMBERTUCCI LEGLER EDITORIAL STAFF (AR)

LUKAS RAPP

PHOTOGRAPHY (DE)

TOBIAS SCHREINER

Photo: Lukas Rapp

PHOTOGRAPHY (DE)

47th St. Gallen Symposium Magazine Publisher International Students' Committee (ISC) Print medienwerkstatt AG Steinackerstrasse 8 CH-8583 Sulgen Paper PlanoJet Offset, white FSC sponsored by Papyrus Copyright International Students' Committee (ISC)