Financial Times on Mark Turrell at the World Economic Forum 2009

Pressing Issues

January 27, 2009—By Emiliya Mychasuk and Emiko Terazono

Corporate titans may have dropped out of the Davos guest list faster than the field in an alpine marathon, but one chief executive still finding the time and cash to attend is Mark Turrell, boss of technology outfit Imaginatik. Mr Turrell boasts of his attendance and sent a release to the Stock Exchange, as he did last year, to say how delighted he was to return to Davos "to once again be attending this fantastic event, which sees some of the world's most prominent figures gather to discuss pressing issues of the day". He may be forgiven the excursion by investors in the £8.3m company, as the shares for the first time have risen above the 6p they were at a year ago when he first went to Davos, when Pfizer took a stake. The recent fillip was from a 2p low.

Expanding the Brand: New Networks Multiply

January 26, 2009—By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

Davos has outgrown its mountain top. While nothing quite matches the Olympian aura of the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Switzerland, Klaus Schwab’s organisation now pursues its mission of improving the state of the world at events throughout the year, from Cancún to Cape Town.

A dizzying list of regional meetings, summits, alliances, initiatives, programmes, communities, taskforces, roundtables and other forums have sprung from the WEF’s Swiss headquarters in recent years, creating a community many times larger than the 2,000-odd people that gathers once a year in Davos.

The desire to expand the Davos elite, to foster more regular contact between its members and to group them into more focused communities of shared interests has spawned potent networks.

Groups such as the “young global leaders” and “technology pioneers” meet, pursue their own initiatives and produce reports throughout the year.

Regional forums drill down into the issues most pressing in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, east Asia, Europe and central Asia; Russian CEOs have their own roundtable in June; and New Delhi hosted a special economic summit for India in November.

For two years – first in Dalian, then in Tianjin – China has hosted an event for “the new champions”, focusing on growth companies and developing economies.

The scale of the WEF’s main event is now such that the organisation added a “summit on the global agenda” to its calendar last November, bringing experts together in Dubai to help hammer out the programme for Davos.

Yet the WEF is far from turning into a routine, if not-for-profit, conference organiser. “There are rival conferences all over the place,” says one close follower of the various WEF events, citing events such as the Ted and Google Zeitgeist gatherings in the technology industry alone. “But no organisation in the world can bring to the table the kinds of expertise and network-creating abilities the WEF can. It really is in a class by itself.”

The events and networks that have grown up around Davos are only going to get bigger as the popularity of Davos itself makes it harder to get into, predicts Mark Turrell, chief executive of Imaginatik, a software company focusing on collaborative problem solving.

John Rossant, executive chairman of PublicisLive, which has a seven-year contract to manage the WEF’s events, says that, despite the economic downturn, “Davos is bigger and stronger than ever” this year. The WEF has continued to add new events to its calendar and seems so far to have had no trouble filling them.

However, as the global crisis draws the most senior policymakers and business people to the annual meeting, others wondering whether they will be squeezed out are looking instead to its more specialist gatherings.

About 40 of his fellow technology pioneers were invited to last year’s annual meeting, Mr Turrell says, but pressing economic matters on the Davos agenda meant this year there was room for only 10.

“I think Davos will become increasingly difficult for the non-Bill Gateses of this world to get into,” he says. “There’s a sense there’s no space left on the mountain.”

Mr Turrell, a member of the WEF’s Innovation 100 group who has attended the New Champions conference in Tianjin and the Dubai planning meeting, says these smaller events may not attract as many heads of state but have almost been better for relationship building than the annual meeting.

“The Davos experience is of 17-hour days, four days on the trot, and you’ve probably had a couple of glasses of wine at some point,” he says. “Tianjin is two days of uninterrupted time with these people. It’s much more deep and personal.”

Before attending last year’s inaugural global agenda summit in Dubai, “most of us didn’t know what to expect,” says Angel Cabrera, president of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona and a “young global leader”.

The big difference between Davos and the summit’s councils – such as one he chaired on promoting entrepreneurship – was that “in Davos networking probably trumps content, and in Dubai the balance was the other way”.

The networking remained impressive, however. “I’ve developed relationships, friendships and access to people that would be very difficult were it not for these events,” Dr Cabrera says. A Thunderbird scheme to train women entrepreneurs in Afghanistan stemmed directly from such contacts, he adds.

The WEF has tried to extend such networking into the virtual world, with a social network called Welcom, meant to replicate the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn for its audience. So far, however, this appears to have made much less impact than its face-to-face events.

According to Mr Turrell, the WEF has some work to do to ensure “the spirit of Davos”, with its wide agenda of social, cultural and political issues, infuses its other events. “One thing about Davos is you become a human being as well as a global influencer,” he notes.