#WEF2014: Launch of Forum Academy – DIY business education now available free and worldwide

Day One of Davos brought the lion’s share of my commitment to our partner, CNBC Africa, with and hour and a half of live interviews. This was one of the most fascinating – and has potentially the widest impact. A total of 2 500 participants come to Davos annually to learn from the word’s best – and each other. During the rest of the year, the WEF itself invests heavily in researching what’s happening around the world, teasing out solutions and exposing new ideas. Much of that hard work is now going to be made available to anyone with an internet connection through Forum Academy, launched here today. It is massively empowering. Exactly the kind of thing that will help those in Africa and other underdeveloped regions leapfrog their global competitors. – AH

ALEC HOGG:   Last night I went to a special ceremony and they gave me a little button, which I hope you can pick up on the camera; hopefully, Mandla can.  This is one of those things that you wear with great pride in Davos, because it means you’ve been coming for ten years.  Whom should I be talking to there, last night, but Jeremy Jurgens who is driving one of the major programs that the World Economic Forum is busy with at the moment.  Jeremy, we’ve been talking education the whole morning already.  I’m sure Davos 2014 is going to be quite focused on the subject, but you are doing something that is going to make a practical difference.

JEREMY JURGEN:  Yes, definitely.  Today we’re launching a special initiative called Forum Academy.  The objective here is to provide professional, continuous learning and updating for people around the world.  We’re taking advantage of the latest in online technologies, and digital technologies, to actually make all the wealth of information that’s here in Davos, available to students around the world.

ALEC HOGG:   Explain how it will work.

JEREMY JURGEN:  We are actually writing courses on critical level topics, maybe on transformations taking place in the automotive sector, the future of Africa, food security, and global climate change.  In each of those courses, we say ‘well, what’s really driving change in this dimension and who are the people who can speak most adequately to that?’  Sometimes it’s people from academia, but in many cases its policy makers, business leaders, civil society leaders, and so on.  We take those perspectives and integrate them from the most knowledgeable and expert leaders around the world, and have them pull together in a meaningful way for learners.

ALEC HOGG:   That’s the kind of stuff you’ve been doing for your members, for many years.  Why has it taken so long to make it public?

JEREMY JURGEN:  Well, the digital technology is just now coming of age.  Here we’re working with edX, a consortium between Harvard and MIT, and you’ve seen their digital platform.  It can take what happens in Davos and extend that digitally to learners around the world.

ALEC HOGG:   And from a practical perspective as well, for people to access…

JEREMY JURGEN:  Yes, you can access it through the Internet.  You can access it through a mobile device like a tablet.

ALEC HOGG:   The web address?

JEREMY JURGEN:  It’s forumacademy.weforum.org

ALEC HOGG:   Just to put it in a broader context: with this kind of information flow – and it is amazing, the material that you do provide here at the WEF – is it not going to be a threat perhaps to traditional business education organisations?

JEREMY JURGEN:  No, we find it very complementary.  Of course, you need a foundational learning model.  You would get a traditional undergraduate or graduate program.  Where WEF comes in, is actually to allow people to adapt to the complex changes that are taking place around us.  Take for example what’s happening in the Middle East with Iran, with Syria, and with energy developments.  How do you have the in depth knowledge on each of those core subjects that are relevant today?

ALEC HOGG:   Why are you doing it?

JEREMY JURGEN:  We’re doing it because we actually think it’s important to be able to extend what happens here to as many people as possible

ALEC HOGG:   And the partners that you selected: why did you go with MIT and Harvard?

JEREMY JURGEN:  We work with MIT and Harvard because they’re also non-profit, like the Forum is a non-profit foundation.  The benefit here is we’re not in this for a commercial interest.  We’re actually here to make sure that we can just cover the costs and make it available to all the learners out there.

ALEC HOGG:   I’m sure there are many people watching us and saying they’d love to be in Davos with us.  It’s lovely here, looking at the sunshine – and it’s not always like this as we well know – but just absorbing the enormous amount of information that one gets.  Is it that simple?  You go online, you go to the website, you log into an area of your interest, and you start teaching yourself?

JEREMY JURGEN:  Well, there are two ways here.  You can always come in, log into the website now at wefforum.org, and you can start watching the Plenary sessions live whether it’s leaders from Japan, Korea, Iran or other locations.  If you want to go beyond that first level, that discussion; that’s where the Forum Academy will come in.  It allows people to explore in-depth, understand, and provide a conceptual framework for how these issues are evolving and how they’re taking place.  That’s where the real learning will come in.

ALEC HOGG:   It’s the work you do outside this one week there’s so much attention on.

JEREMY JURGEN:  Definitely, and that’s why it’s important to have a continuous learning environment.  It’s not enough to only be updated when you come to a place like Davos.  You have to stay updated continually – all the time.

ALEC HOGG:   Are the Harvard/MIT partners going to be updating the information for you or does it get done by the WEF itself?

JEREMY JURGEN:  Well, they are providing the technology platform and the Forum works with all of our different constituents from business, government etc to actually inject the information and knowledge into the platform and tie it together.

ALEC HOGG:   Right, just so that I can understand it better…if I’m in the media business and media is transforming dramatically and continuously, how am I going to benefit and what would I need to do – practically – to make it happen?

JEREMY JURGEN:  Well, the first step is to say ‘what are these changes taking place?’  If you want to look at social media for example, how is Facebook evolving, or Twitter?  How our new actors coming out of places like China Mobile, Weibo, or TenCent reshaping the industry.  The advantage of the Forum here is that we can talk to those actors first hand.  We can talk to the professionals in those different sectors and have them share their experiences and make it available in a way that you couldn’t access otherwise.

ALEC HOGG:   So pretty much any industry: if you’re in fast foods, agriculture, or manufacturing of motor vehicles, it’s the same kind of opportunity.

JEREMY JURGEN:  Yes, in the next year we plan to cover 20 core industries and look at the strategic shifts within those industries.  A good example is automotive.  If we look at what’s taking place in automotive with electrical vehicles, new materials, and collaboration economy, it’s actually not possible to go to any single person and have them knowledgeable on all those changes.  It’s critical that we can pull from those different experiences.  It may be a scientist at MIT specialising in that, or maybe somebody who’s running a company that says ‘we have a model that you don’t have to own your own car.  You can actually just lease it’.  That will have significant changes for how that industry and how the world economy operates in the future.

ALEC HOGG:   So I guess there’s no excuse for not up-skilling yourself.

JEREMY JURGEN:  Here you have an opportunity to continuously up-skill your knowledge and your skills.

ALEC HOGG:  And you’d better do it because what I’m hearing in your sessions is ‘the machines are coming.  They’re taking over’.

JEREMY JURGEN:  Well, let’s hope it’s not too soon.

ALEC HOGG:   Jeremy, thank you for the contribution today.  It’s yet another fantastic facility that the World Economic Forum is bringing to the world.