First Davos and First Blog

This is my first time to the WEF at Davos. So it is the first time I am
taking the train ride from Zurich Airport to Davos. The first part of
the ride from Zurich to Landquart took about an hour and was routine.
But from Landquart to Davos, the train changed to a smaller one and the
ride was slow with many stops. The country side was completely covered
with snow; even the trees had snow on them. With the sun shining fully,
the train winding along the climb up to Davos along the snow covered
mountains, it was indeed spectacular. Davos itself is a town situated in
a valley against the backdrop of beautiful snow covered mountains.

The themes of this year's WEF are the emergence of China and India,
taking stock of the current landscape - economic, attitudes, job
scenario, and regional struggles and challenges, the leadership required
to face and solve some of the issues and designing the solutions using
creativity and innovation. Certainly, WEF brings together most of the
world's business leaders and some of the leaders from all the other
walks of life like government, NGO sector, arts, entertainment etc.
About 800 Chairmen and CEO's are participating this year. The world is
going through tremendous changes and these changes are taking place at a
faster pace. Technological changes enabled through computing,
connectivity and convergence allows us to look at these issues
differently and come up with new solutions. In the past whenever
tremendous development happened, only some people benefited from these.
Many people around the world were left behind during the agricultural
revolution and the industrial revolution. The current knowledge
revolution is happening when most of the world is open for economic
activity, when the world is a smaller place with air travel, television
and internet and when global corporations rather than nation states are
bringing people together for creating jobs and economic prosperity. In
this sense, the leaders present at WEF have a bigger role to play in
solving some of the problems faced by the world.

Given that the economic value is currently created using knowledge and
machine intelligence, it is appropriate that the forum focuses on
Innovation, Creativity and Design Strategy. It is important to revisit
some of the current assumptions and create new solutions leveraging
latest technical advances. Creativity is only the start. Once a solution
is designed, it has to be implemented. Change is always difficult,
especially when this change affects people's lives. When a generation or
two have to make sacrifices so that the future is better for our
children and grandchildren, leaders need to educate, cajole and
sometimes force change. Jobs are changing, jobs are moving to different
parts of the world, value added by countries are being redefined and all
these are difficult on the current generation.

In the evening after registration, there was a reception for newcomers
to Davos. The discussions with me centered around the role of India, the
amount of branding being done by India, the number of participants from
India etc. It is appropriate that India is getting this attention with
the GDP growth rate, growing consumer base and market for global
products in India, access to a vast talent pool and a government willing
to integrate the economy with the global economy. Many of the technology
innovations happening around the world, more and more, have
contributions from Indians and India. Many multinational organizations
have set up their R&D centers in India or are using services of others
to support their R&D efforts. Indians were always present in large
number at academic institutions around the world. As the day closes, my
thoughts are that we need to make sure that the reality of India is
closer to the vision.

Kris Gopalakrishnan
COO, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Comments

[mindskills]

Pretty sensible.
As a facilitator of creativity & innovation, I have found only scant interest in even top Indian corporates in this topic. Most of them talk about it but are not keen to invest in a facilitator-champion for this. I also devised probably the only assessment centre specifically on innovation behaviours, but could not get even infosys to give it a try.
Our guys want to listen only to Gary Hamels of the world, whereas China is using every help that comes their way.
I have now started my innovation blog ( www.indianmindskills.blogspot.com) to post some basics. Do look it up occasionally. My own site is www.mind-skills.com

[Page]

I agree with Raj!
This is a thought provoking blog.
We are from;

http://www.pagerank-prediction.com/

[Page]

I agree with you that we need to make sure that the reality of India is
closer to the vision.

[World business for sale]

This is a great post and lots of useful links from recent posts.
We would be honored if we could be added to this great blog. We are from http://www.worldbusinessforsale.com/

Good work keeps it up!

[Raj]

Kris,
Appreciate this blog. It is in line with the WEF06 agenda about India & China.

This is a thought provoking blog.