From the Social Innovation Summit 2016 to the DSI Fair 2017

Last Saturday we attended the Social Innovation  Summit 2016 a cutting edge conference on entrepreneurship and social innovation that took place in Zurich at the Bananereiferei. Participants with diverse backgrounds from all over Europe gathered together to share experiences, critical discuss and develop ideas about methods and business models helping to address environmental and social innovation challenges.

The programme has offered a rich variety of presentations, workshops, interactive and co-creative sessions to explore challenges and opportunities drawing on stories and experiences in several fields: from fair trade to gamification for social solutions, from design thinking to storytelling for social impact, from science and sustainability to plastic free Oceans, from world class education for refugees to brave new worlds arts projects, and more.

The 4 Keynote presentations have been a major highlight with top-notch inspirational presentations. Yuri van Geest, the founder of the Singularity University, has discussed about “Exponential Technologies and Organizations” as means to tackle some of the world’s most pressing social challenges. Ben Moore, professor of astrophysics at the University of Zurich, has offered the audience with an amazing insight view on “Ten bilion new worlds” existing out there around planet earth. Joana Breidenbach, founder of betterplace.org the largest donation platform for social projects, shared the experience learned from restructuring betterplace.org as a self-organising and fully collaborative team. Katherine Milligan, Head of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship (SFSE) at World Economic Forum,  presented the initiatives within the SFSE dedicated to advance social entrepreneurship and foster social entrepreneurship as an important catalyst for societal innovation and progress.

The pitching event over the lunch break has also been an extremely interesting session: 4 different social entreprenerus,  supported by the UBS Social Innovators funding programme, were given the opportunity to present their start-ups: the Chobachoba chocolate revolution, the Projekt Interim for use of avacant real estate, the Velafrica initiative giving old bycicles a second life in Africa and the Carbon Delta equity research firm specialised in identifying and analyzing the climate change resilience of publicly traded companies.

Martel has established many contacts to the Social Innovation Summit organizers, speakers and participants, discussing future opportunities of further discussions and collaborations within the CAPS context. In particular, this has been the opportunity for Martel to invite the broad audience at SISummit 2016 to stay tuned to the latest CAPS developments and more specifically to participate to the Digital Social Innovation Fair 2017 that will take place in Rome (Italy) on the 1-2 February 2017.