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Until recently I had not heard of the Global Economic Symposium (GES), about to commence its second session in Ploen, in the north of Germany. It is a meeting held by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. It is one of the five institutes which formally advise the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the only one focused exclusively on global economic issues. Its ambitious Director, Dennis Snower, has formed the GES as a more proactive meeting of global bigwigs from commerce, finance, academia, government and policy-making; its thrust is solutions. This is in contrast with the more common fora whose output tends to be great quantities of hot air and western media-oriented photo shots. Ten of us will be there to throw social entrepreneurship into the pot. These include Sergio Arzeni from the OECD, Stephan Breidenbach from betterplace.org in Germany, Ray Fisman from Columbia University in New York, Nejira Nalic from Mi-BOSPO in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Samantha Morshed from Hathay Bunano in Bangladesh, Alex Nicholls from the Said Business School in Oxford, Max Schoen from DESERTEC in Germany, Bill Young from Social Capital Partners in Toronto and me. What is significant is that social entrepreneurship was not on the agenda last year and now it is playing a prominent role.

What explains the change—who can say for certain? I have two candidates. The first is that the practical orientation of the GES has forced its own hand. What I mean is that they have established a reputation as being solution-oriented; a very brave claim indeed. However, the solutions published following the last symposium were rather general. Given the focus on practical solutions to global problems it was inevitable that the GES should find its way to the social enterprise and investment movement. Where else to turn for solving social problems in the modern, fiscally-constrained world?

These fiscal constraints are my second candidate. When the panellists for GES 2008 were being identified back in 2007 we were in that blissful era preceding the explosion of the financial crisis and its significant fiscal fallout. Thus back then there might have been some expectation that government would be a substantial provider of funds to support solutions. These days are gone. Government still has many roles to play but as a funder it may have long arms, but it also has very short pockets. Social business, enterprise and finance have the possibility to plug this gap.

Preparation for the GES has been interesting. Normally one writes a speech or puts together a PowerPoint presentation—sometimes just a few days beforehand. For this conference they expect panellists to upload supportive documents, state the challenge to be addressed, propose solutions and then debate them in a virtual forum, assembled by the GES. The actual debate on the day is really a debate, not the more standard (and very dull) re-statement of existing positions—and the best solutions will be voted upon! This is quite a bit to demand of speakers, yet the GES has succeeded in securing an extraordinary number of CEOs, Nobel Laureates, senior government officials and the like. They have also put them all to work! Some might find this all to be absurdly ambitious—but is the world not in a bad enough state to warrant such a format? It is encouraging how many delegates are rising to the challenge.

I hope the ten of us do not let down the sector in our introduction to the GES audience! I also hope we are able to make our solutions as practical and “doable” as possible and that these might receive support from the GES community. If not, I hope we are able to contribute usefully to the broader debate by being practical and positive as well as social and entrepreneurial. Anyone wishing to know more about this strange but exciting new forum, please comment on this blog post or email me at rod@clearlyso.com.

Rodney Schwartz

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