WSA Insights: Blogpost by WSA Expert Carolina Rossi
What World Summit Award can -proudly- teach us all…
This week World Summit Award announced its 40 Winners of 2018: A selective group of global solutions in eight different categories from 26 different nations.
As World Summit Award National Expert for Chile, this year I was invited to be part of an exclusive group of 16 Global Jury members at “WSA Innovation Days & Grand Jury Meeting” in Accra, Ghana during this November.
It was an outstanding opportunity to join and have a role as a jury, but more importantly, to be able to experience a high professional process with a global, multicultural group which flew from places such as Australia, Mexico, United States, Kuwait, Indonesia, India, Austria, Germany, Israel and seven other countries.
Since I returned to Chile, I have thought on what makes this process so unique. As an entrepreneur I have been to many global conferences, I have had the chance to judge in different initiatives as Start-Up Chile, Parallel 18, StartUpWeekend, and many others. But, this experience was different.
I guess my first lesson learned in this point is that the more than ten years of experience managing global selection process that WSA has is something to take into account in today world…where we have innovative challenges open every single day from Paris to Sao Paulo, from New York to New Delhi.
Therefore, I thought about three outstanding points that WSA can prove & teach us all:
1. World Summit Award proves the world that digital transformation is happening everywhere
During the first day, when we all gathered in a room to understand the methodology of evaluation, you could quickly identify that this was a very diverse group and that all of us were aiming for one same goal: Select 40 winners between a Short List of exciting initiatives.
On day two, when we to began evaluating each project, I remembered reading how in Mexico, an app called Supercivicos encourages citizen participation and engagement with humor. While in Finland a group of architects uses AI to achieve a similar goal with data thanks to their platform called: Chaos.
Digital transformation is now happening in every city and we are all call to be the ones leading its significant changes thanks to technology.
2. World Summit Award proves that today -more than ever- the power of collaboration is a must in any new challenge:
We need doers and business that can leverage a community to make things happen:
I will take as an example one of the winners: World Clean Up Day.
Today, they are present in more than 150 countries, and their systems work 100% through collaboration with volunteers. They are a global bottom-up civic movement born ten years ago in Estonia which today continues to recall the attention of many who want to take more care of our planet Earth. Collaboration is the word.
3. World Summit Award proves that content is a real tool to generate impact.
One of the things that call my attention is the importance that WSA gives to the constant generation of high-quality content with use of technology. It was imperative to understand and be able to evaluate projects that thanks to the excellent use of content were generating an impact on society.
In this specific case, and example is Afrocomix — a winner from Ghana — they were able to build a “content hub for all Afrocentric creative work made by Africans…to provide a one-stop shop for people all over the world who love African content”, a real example of a content tool to generate impact in the whole continent.
Finally, as a journalist, I know that paper can argue in favor of any thesis, but moreover what really proves the thesis is experience: that's why doers generate the most prominent changes during these times of digital transformation. I say this because is important for us to understand that social impact is measured not only by the technology we use but in how it connects with the reality of its society. This is fundamental.
WSA demonstrates that you can build a real network of high-quality professionals, compromised with a unique cause: to selected initiatives that can help to make our world a better place — YES, I know- this sounds like a cliche, but it isn’t. It is, until now, 100% true.
I Congratulate all 40 winners and encourage all other future participants to apply with their respective National Experts. Moreover, for Chile, congratulations, let’s continue on the right path!
WSA CHILE NATIONAL EXPERT