Ana Lopes, a Portuguese-Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist, was visiting the World Economic Forum Davos in 2015 when something unexpected happened.
“I was actually there with my husband,” she said of Don Tapscott, the well-known Canadian author, businessman and blockchain pioneer who was the official guest. “But spouses get access to almost all events — it’s not like we’re being sent to basket weaving classes or hanging out at the spa.”
For Ms. Lopes — former president of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health Foundation in Toronto — that access put her at a dinner party with a small group of experts in global mental health issues, one of her main philanthropic passions. Ms. Lopes was introduced to a young researcher who had recently developed a smartphone app to help patients access healthcare providers and manage their often complex treatment regimens.
“Back then, we didn’t really give adolescent patients access to phones,” she said of mental health. “They were experienced as disruptive.” But Ms. Lopes was impressed with the technology and recognized the potential to digitize treatment protocols and improve patient outcomes.
“I brought the research back to our team in Toronto,” she said. Within a few years, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health developed its own patient care app, modeled after the one Ms Lopes originally encountered in Davos.
“It really opened up a new world of possibilities for us,” said Ms. Lopes. “It was a big step to empower patients to manage their own disease and treatment.”
As the global elite gather for the first in-real-life version of the World Economic Forum in more than two years, Davos will once again be both praised for its far-reaching impact and claim it is little more than an alpine party path for politicians and plutocrats. . But for the likes of Ms. Lopes—academics, philanthropists, leaders of non-governmental organizations and policymakers—Davos is the rare forum whose critical mass of intellectual decision-makers offers unparalleled opportunities to drive change and get things done.
“Davos offers a level of proximity to like-minded thinkers that is truly unmatched,” said Ms. Lopes, who deliberately seeks health-focused panels and events there. “You know who people are, why they are there and how to find them, and this makes conversations not only easy, but also extremely powerful and effective.”
For veteran Davos participant Jen Wines — a former vice president of private wealth management at Fidelity and author of the financial approach and forthcoming book “Invisible Wealth” — those conversations are the foundation of what she calls “relationship capital.” And Davos is the capital of relationship capital – which Ms. Wines defines as “an intangible, super-good that forms the basis for all progress.” It is the value derived from the deliberate conversation and connection that anchors everything that goes on in Davos.
For Ms. Wines, Davos has traditionally served as a location to identify potential philanthropic efforts for implementation and activation at home. More recently, she helped create 100women@Davos, a group of female chief executives, leaders and change makers that leverage the long-term opportunities and relationship capital built on the forum to give women global visibility and decision-making power.
In either case, the benefits of Davos may not be immediately apparent and take time to develop. “It may take a while to peel off the layers and maximize the opportunities that exist in Davos,” said Ms Wines. “But the people you meet there really become part of your own ecosystem.”
This was the case with the New Development Bank, which was established by the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – to better utilize their economic resources for large-scale infrastructure and sustainable development projects. Although the bank was officially launched in 2015, the bank was initially founded in Davos in 2011 by initiators Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank; Lord Nicholas Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics (and another former chief economist at the World Bank); and former Ethiopian President and Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
The trio, Mr Stern said, had previously collaborated on a range of global development issues and were frustrated “by the really backward system that saw savings flow from poor countries to rich countries.”
Together, they drafted a proposal to create a new emerging markets-focused bank that would directly benefit the developing world. While the first working sessions preceded the World Economic Forum, “in Davos we really decided to go for it,” said Mr. Stern on the rapid evolution of the plan from concept to reality during the event in 2011.
Mr Stern admits that Davos may seem like a place where the pursuit of profit and closing deals in the private sector can be paramount. But Davos also has an underlying altruism where socially oriented efforts like the New Development Bank have their best chance of progress.
“We used our Davos contacts and international contacts to give our idea the necessary oxygen level,” continues Mr. stern. “At Davos you can make important decisions within 24 to 48 hours; everything at Davos can go very, very quickly.” Four years later, at an official BRICS summit in Shanghai, the bank made its long-awaited debut.
The New Development Bank is one of several large-scale global initiatives that are debuting in Davos and maximizing its power to instantly communicate causes to critical stakeholders and end users around the world. Another example is Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which was launched on the forum in 2000.
Like the World Health Organization, Gavi is a far-reaching partnership between vaccine manufacturers, governments, donor agencies, philanthropists and researchers to develop and implement large-scale immunization and vaccination programs in developing countries. With all these partners already present in Davos, the launch of Gavi immediately made sense, both logistically and logically.
Since its inception, “Gavi has protected more than 900 million children and prevented more than 15 million future deaths,” said Dr. Seth Berkley, Gavi’s director in an email. In the years following Gavi’s initial launch, Davos also served as the backdrop for additional Gavi-related milestones, including the founding of Covax, a global initiative to provide fair access to Covid-19 vaccines, of which Dr. Berkeley said it was conceived in Davos. in the year 2020.
The urge to “do good” may belie Davos’ public image, it can encourage the kind of radical thinking that can test even the very idea of wealth itself. Take the Patriotic Millionaires organization, a group of wealthy people trying to reduce economic inequality.
Earlier this year, along with January’s more modest “virtual Davos,” the organization released a letter signed by more than 100 global millionaires and billionaires demanding that the super-rich pay more in taxes.
Patriotic millionaires, the international director, Rebecca Gowland, said, wants to ensure that wealth is taxed more fairly around the world so that all countries develop truly fair tax systems.
“We want to set minimum global standards for taxing wealth, just as we do for corporations,” explains Ms. Gowland, whose organization includes heiress Abigail Disney, an outspoken critic of extreme wealth accumulation.
While many in attendance in Davos may have objected to the organization’s creed “tax the rich,” Ms Gowland said its launch at the World Economic Forum was a conscious, if not obvious, choice.
“Wealthy people at the highest levels tend to be quite isolated, so opportunities to interact with them are very limited,” she said. “But we knew there was a community of other rich people out there — and these were the people we wanted to target.”
Since the Davos 2022 Call to Action — which built on a similar plea at Davos in 2020 — Ms. Gowland said the membership of the patriotic millionaires had expanded. There are over 200 members in the United States and a growing base in Britain. and around the world, which she attributed in part to “the Davos network.” Most importantly, while global tax reform remains a long-term perspective, the association with Davos “propels an agenda into the future and keeps it current,” Ms Gowland said.
Ultimately, as Davos watchers like Ms. Wines and Ms. Gowland suggest, the World Economic Forum offers the greatest opportunity for organizations and initiatives with big ideas whose impact will be felt for decades to come.
It’s not that “Davos men” and “Davos women” lack shorter processing powers. Rather, no global gathering can compete with Davos for its sheer concentration of influential, exceptionally connected power brokers with the ability to turn “eureka” moments into tangible, actionable long-term policies that really impact everyday life.
“Davos is probably the world’s most interesting global institution,” said Canadian author, entrepreneur and blockchain pioneer Mr. Tapscott, Mrs. Lopes’ husband. He said the forum was “ahead of its time” when it came to raising issues surrounding cryptocurrencies. “Davos represents the forefront of a fundamentally new paradigm of how we approach global problems.”
Mr. Tapscott, the co-founder and executive chairman of the Blockchain Research Institute, has witnessed this paradigm shift firsthand. In 2020, he was part of a World Economic Forum working group that launched the ‘Presidio Principles’, more commonly described as a ‘Blockchain Bill of Rights’.
The principles, Mr Tapscott said, started as a working group in Davos and evolved into a call to action aimed at standardizing safeguards for corporate and individual blockchain users.
“Davos was where people from all over the world gathered to draft, rewrite and discuss the language of the bill and finally get it published,” said Mr. Tapscott. “Because Davos is about multi-stakeholder collaboration.”
“Certainly there are many rich and famous people there,” continued Mr. Tapscott, “but what really happens in Davos may be very different from what many people imagine.”
