Annual Ideagen Silicon Valley Tech for Good Summit 2017
April 21, 2017 /3BL Media/ - On March 27 & 28, we held our Annual Ideagen Silicon Valley Tech for Good Summit hosted by Capgemini and the following day hosted by Vodafone Americas Foundation. World’s leading companies, start-ups, NGO’s and public sectors joined together to innovate and collaborate via cross-sector innovation. During the summit we focused on focusing on SDG’s 9, 12, and 17 where we look to build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive sustainable industrialization, foster innovation and ensure sustainable production patterns.
“You’re in the heart of where change is happening”. - Kim Smith
Attendees were welcomed on the first day of the summit by Kim Smith, CDO & EVP of Capgemini, Leif Ackerman, CEO of Ideagen, Chantal-Line Carpentier, Chief of United Nations Conference on Trade & Development, Sidhant Gupta, Research Scientist of Medical Devices, Microsoft Research.
Chantal-Line says, “It is impossible for the United Nation or the Unites States or any company or NGO’s to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals alone. We can only achieve these as we work together and even then working together is not going to be easy and we’re going to have to be disruptive, we’re going to have to be creative to achieve those”.
After Chantal-Line spoke about why cross-sector collaboration is critical for disruptive innovation to achieve SDG’s, Sidhant Gupta responded, “I did not know anything about the SDG’s when I first joined Ideagen, and that is one of the problems...How do we as individuals go about it? What I want us to do is figure out what problem that we need to go after - that’s going to become our mission, we’re going to be surgical about it and we’re going to play the part for the world to follow”.
Sandra Notardonato, Vice President of Gartner spoke about ‘The Future of Sustainable Innovation’ where she said, "We are seeing signs of what may be a new, more robust business cycle and corporate enterprises are increasingly focused on their digital transformation initiatives—which is highly dependent upon sustainable innovation in order to prevent disruption to their business, generate new streams of revenue and increase competitive advantage".
"There is not been a better time for collaboration, 1+1 > 2". - Sandra Notardonato
Panel 1 revolved around SDG 9 which is to Build Resilient Infrastructure, Promote Inclusive and Sustainable Industrialization and Foster Innovation. The first panel was moderated by Mel Larkins, Head of Sustainability at Capgemini and included panelists: Laurel Hanscom, Director & Research Scientist of Global Footprint Network, Shashank Saggar, Senior Strategist of Adobe Digital Innovation, Brian Sathianathan, Co-Founder & Chief Digital Officer of Iterate Studio and Apple Executive, Mahama Nyankamawu, CEO of Volta Power Company. The whole audience was excited when Laurel Hanscom said, “We are releasing for the first time, all the data we have”. This data can be found: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/. She also says that innovation has to happen now, and at a much faster pace than what we are thinking. Shashank Saggar believes that many organizations already have the DNA to start innovation and collaboration. They just need to realize it.
The second panel focused on SDG 12 which is to Ensure Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns. It was moderated by Ben Gilchriest, Innovation Leader of Capgemini with panelists Kevin Schaff, Founder & CEO of Twyst, Sidhant Gupta, Research Scientist of Medical Devices, Microsoft, Simon Bland, Director of United Nations Global Health, Mitra Ardron, Founder of Lumeter. Kevin Schaff states that “Technology does not make it downstream fast, unfortunately it sometimes takes a long time”. Surprisingly, Sidhant Gupta mentions that sustainability started small with Microsoft, he says, “We started recycling cups, plates and paper goods to create an impact”.
“125 years ago, life was simple and short. Everything was local, now everything is remote”. Guido Jouret, Chief Digital Officer of ABB spoke about Sustainable Innovation In Action. Did you know that 50% of US homes could be self-sufficient in water if they captured rainwater from their roofs?
All the attendees then broke out into different groups, depending on which SDG they were more passionate about. There they came up with some solutions, and one of the attendees was already actively working on solutions for SDG 12 more specifically, to do with food waste. Since last November, Louie Shapiro, Market Director of Human Resources at The Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco realized that the hotel was wasting a lot of food. To combat this problem, they have been donating the excess food to Food Runners in San Francisco (read more about them here: http://www.foodrunners.org/about/). Imagine the impact if all hotels in the San Francisco area would do this - the hotels will be wasting less food, but also those who are hungry are able to satisfy their stomachs.
The next topic was ‘Fueling Disruption Through Dexterity’ with Duncan Logan, CEO of RocketSpace. He says the first or second round companies are often not the successful ones, it is often the third or fourth that are able to innovate faster. Duncan Logan also points out that the solutions usually come from the local people because they are the people that are living in the problem.
Megan Bettilyon, Senior Manager of Policy and Research of Global Good joined with Leif Ackerman, CEO of Ideagen to announce the Ideagen Global Challenge. More information about this can be found on our website listed below.
We wanted to thank Lanny Cohen, Group Chief Technology Officer of Capgemini and Joe Boggio, Vice President of Capgemini AIE for wrapping up the summit by giving us a better overview of Capgemini AIE.
The second day of the summit kicked off with a panel that discussed “Innovation and Corporate Partnerships” moderated by June Sugiyama, Director of Vodafone Americas Foundation with panelists Rebecca Nalder, Director of Corporate Responsibility of Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Kevin Kraver, Director of Business Development of Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, and Shannon Lucas, Senior Innovation Architect of Cisco. Shannon Lucas believes that we can no longer innovate in isolation. Companies must be comfortable with open innovation.
Josh Nesbit, COO of MedicMobile spoke about Innovation in Development. MedicMobile started with 1 laptop as a messaging hub and 100 cell phones in rural Africa.
“Now 60,000 students supported by 5000 mentors from 99 countries”. - Tara Chklovski
Tara Chklovski, CEO & Founder of Iridescent inspired girls to innovate. She is confident involving students with engineering challenges and practices creates a platform and infrastructure for the youth to continually work on challenges to create sustainability. It also builds confidence in the students.
An iGIANT Roundtable led by Dr. Saralyn Mark, President of SolaMed Solutions, LLC & iGIANT followed, where multiple attendees committed into educating people around them about gender specific design elements.
We’re happy to share that the Annual UN Empowering Women and Girls 2030 Global Summit will be held on July 20th, 2017.
Search for #Tech4Good on social media, to see our live posts during the summit!
For more information about Capgemini and Kim Smith visit:
https://twitter.com/KimSmithInov8
https://twitter.com/Capgemini
https://www.capgemini.com/
For more information about Vodafone Americas Foundation and June Sugiyama visit:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/june-sugiyama-b697479a/
https://twitter.com/VodafoneProject
http://vodafone-us.com/
For more information about Ideagen visit:
