UNLEASH: the Potential of Crowdsourcing
With an entrepreneurial background and an undergraduate in economics followed by my postgraduate work experience in London’s VC and startup-scene, I am the kind of person that after identifying a problem takes corresponsive action to provide a solution. Typically to issues of societal importance and/or personal significance. Fortunately, in my case, the two criteria tend to align. So prior to learning about UNLEASH I have been working to develop a local but similar platform tailored the 160,000 university-level students of the Greater Copenhagen area.
Personally recognising the need for diverse expertise in generating wholesome solutions to multifaceted problems, I became one of the founding volunteers recruited to realise the idea behind the Student & Innovation House: a $10M+ funded, student-driven project with a societal agenda to unite and enable aspiring students to drive change through interdisciplinary innovation. My role as Team Lead for the Impact Lab division, meant that I, after recruiting the team, would work with partners in building a local platform to foster young change-makers and facilitate the empowerment of innovative minds. And it was during this time earlier in the year that I, while attending the Sustainable Innovation Summit hosted by the British Chamber of Commerce in Denmark, came to learn about the equally pioneering and even more ambitious, global platform of UNLEASH.
Having used the 17 Sustainable Development Goals to serve as a mere source of inspiration for our work in the Student and Innovation House and indeed Impact Lab, I was intrigued by the energy and determination behind the UNLEASH Innovation Lab. The idea of sourcing talent from around the globe to tackle the UN SDGs head-on is both inspiring and bold. Informed of the scope and depth of the initiative, I knew that UNLEASH as the first of its kind would also come to serve as a global benchmark for future endeavours seeking to leverage collective intelligence in developing viable solutions to the challenges of our time. Thus, I was presented with the chance to live out the potential of what I was working to facilitate for future students. So in hope of taking part in this, I quickly decided to put a few of my ideas into writing as proposals for submission on how to hit the targets of the SDGs.
Soon after, chosen from a pool of 20 to 35-year-old leader applicants in the thousands, the SDG talents selected for the Founding Class representing over 100+ countries with expertise and backgrounds in various academic disciplines and professions, were invited to gather in Copenhagen. And so, on the 13th of August, the first UNLEASH Innovation Lab will kick-off an immersive 9-day ideation and developing journey structured to design, develop and mentor pathbreaking ideas that will translate sustainable development goals into sustainably implemented actions. In that collective effort, I am happy to announce that I will be partaking as a Founding Fellow of the UNLEASH 2017 Class in Denmark.
My studies across Asia, Europe and North America have lead to that I, as a 24-year-old master student currently studying a double degree in the management of innovation and technology in Copenhagen, have chosen to channel my efforts on the SDG of Education and ICT. My reasoning behind said choice is from a perspective of personal limitations in work scope as I cannot work on all seven themes chosen for this year’s event. From a logical management standpoint, however, if I help solve the challenge of educating present and future problem-solvers, then I will indirectly have ensured the capabilities necessary for tackling the remaining challenges. Therefore, the optimal use of my time is to go upstream and improve the educative means and use of information and communication technologies.
Specifically, I believe better use of existing technology can more effectively educate the minds of all ages. This requires applying a deeper understanding of use-cases and personal user-preferences. In these regards, I also find there to be a huge untapped potential in new combinations of existing IT infrastructures for much more efficient leveraging of collective intelligence through open, innovative crowdsourcing methods. The same applies to the use of emerging technologies, where VR/AR, machine learning and personal AIs could serve a variety of educative purposes, not to mention the immense spectre of gains within IoT and peer-to-peer systems such as the blockchain.
Despite my ongoing appropriation of knowledge and engagement in academia through traditional, institutional channels, I have much more faith in the unconventional methods of individual teaching. This includes both the physical and digital programs and emerging outlets of information, i.e. custom-made curriculums and means of the internet. Rather than centralised sources of expertise in the form of physical schools, I believe a bigger part of a learning experience tailored the individual with benefit could come from decentralised networks of knowledge, especially considering the cost perspective of education. Practical experimentation and playful learning should with benefit (still) be at the heart of teaching by putting much more emphasis on the “why” and basing modes of teaching on scientific drawings from research, i.e. gamification techniques.
I am looking forward to the co-creation process of working on scalable solutions to the Sustainable Development Goals alongside my cohort of SDG talents. Excited to be assisted by leading experts and company partners serving as mentors and peers to test the preliminary solutions during our week of prototyping, I feel confident that many of the innovations unleashed during the event will unfold to disrupt the preconceptions of what can be accomplished from crowdsourcing combined efforts. To that extent I cannot wait to pitch and hear the pitches of the projects thought out by my Founding Fellows and I, all to be presented to the judges of peers, experts, investors and partners from the world of business, government, NGO’s and foundations. So stay tuned for the global UNLEASH movement this summer.
