Following the resounding success of its second Women’s Forum Brazil — which gathered 550 participants in São Paulo June 17-18 — the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society, the world’s leading forum for women’s voices, announce that its 9th annual Women’s Forum Global Meeting in Deauville, France, will take place October 16 through 18 and will focus on the theme The Open World: Compete, Cooperate, Create.
The line-up of speakers will include Abigail Disney, American philanthropist and documentary film-maker; Laurent Freixe, Executive Vice President and Zone Director, Europe for Nestlé; Ann M. Fudge, member of the Boards of General Electric, Novartis, and Unilever, and Chair of the US Programs Advisory Board for The Gates Foundation; Mary Goudie, Member of the British House of Lords and Chair of the Women Leaders’ Council to Fight Human Trafficking at the United Nations; Anne Lauvergeon, President of France’s Innovation 2030 Commission, and former CEO of energy conglomerate Areva; Fleur Pellerin, France’s Deputy Minister for Small and Medium Business, Innovation and the Digital Economy; Bertrand Piccard, initiator of the project Solar Impulse, a breakthrough solar airplane; and Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever.
The Women’s Forum Global Meeting, which expects some 1300 participants from 80 nationalities, will also feature a delegation of influential Russian women from a very broad range of sectors and professions, including Irina Prokhorova, Founder of the NLO publishing house and Director of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation, Natasha Khanjenkova, Managing Director, Russia for the EBRD; Maria Krayukhina, Managing Director of Ru.Net; and Elena Panfilova, Founder and Director of the Center for Anti-corruption Research and Initiative, Transparency International Russia. They will notably look at Russia’s crucial challenge to leap-frog from a focus on oil and gas to an innovation-driven consumer economy.
As the pace of globalization continues to increase, the 2013 Global Meeting’s „Open World“ theme will showcase multidisciplinary and multipartner approaches to collaboration that aim to revitalize economic growth, boost scientific and social innovation, and make art. They include such powerful trends as Big Data, co-operative platforms, crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding, co-creation, complementors and coopetition. Speakers at the three-day Global Meeting will also highlight competition and resource allocation as well as social issues like child trafficking and women’s rights worldwide.
The Global Meeting’s unique parallel forum, The Discovery, will celebrate multi-sector creativity with a complementary program that asks the question What does creativity mean to you? It will also introduce new spaces: the Creativity Lab, which will bring creative thinking and potential to life; DiscoveryFriendly Hubs for friendly, fun networking; and the Culture All Corner.
