Davos day four

Saturday at Davos is always a bit weird because, well it’s Saturday and people start heading off and so there is much less hussle and bussle in the convention centre. I went to sessions today on Carbon, Global Economic Update, Gordon Brown’s Q&A with Christiane Amanpour and then a great session on Leveraging Mass Innovation led by Jeff Jarvis.

I had hoped that someone would have uploaded Gordon’s speech but it’s not there yet. He is remarkably at ease here and on his game and the big hall was absolutely silent as he gave his review of where the world is financially and economically. There can be no global leader more literate on these matters and to his credit, much of what he said was, to my ears, a repeat of what he said this time last year. Compare that to most economists knocking around who are swift to tell us where all this is heading now, but are a little more reticient when asked about what they were predicting a year ago. Gordon’s call now for reform of the global financial inistututions is received wisdom, but it was seen as vaguely esoteric when he made the same claims last year.

Probably the most uplifting session of my time here was Jeff Jarvis’s session on Leveraging Mass Innovation. Admittedly, for someone who has just published a book callled Crowd Surfing it would indeed be odd if I didn’t enjoy this. Smart, smart people in the room from alll walks of life and I was particularly impressed with the Mozilla and Google attendees. Jeff had us design new companies with harnessing of the crowd as the organising principle. My group designed a new bank which I suspect Jeff will blog about it so I won’t go into it here other than to say it is based on total transparency. It felt like solutions were actually possible. I bet his classes are fun.