The 2008 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum was focused on The Power of Collaborative Innovation, which crisply sums up what has been our focus for some time. I believe that our ability to successfully harness technical and human networks to help us collaborate - across geographical regions, cultures, and job roles - will unleash a new wave of social inclusion,
productivity, and economic growth, the impact of which will rival or even dwarf what we experienced in the first phase of the Internet. It is no longer about one-to-one interactions, but rather about many-to-many. Societies and economies are rapidly changing; and the power of
“us” has become far more important than the power of “you”. If technology has the ability to help an individual doctor treat cancer more effectively, imagine the impact thousands of doctors collaborating globally could make on curing it.

I believe this second great phase of the Internet will be focused on empowering collaboration -groups of individuals working together toward a common goal. First developed and embraced by consumers, as they harnessed the Internet for innovative new activities such as social networking, this wave of collaborative technologies and behaviors is now moving into business and government. They are beginning to transform not only our social interactions, but also our business and political ones.

Here is just one example in the medical community. A Nobel Prize–winning doctor, Alfred Gilman, is leading a radical effort to build a “virtual cell” that would allow drug tests and experiments to be conducted online – virtually - from anywhere in the world. Instead of working within a small, closed group of researchers, he has opened his medical research up to hundreds of colleagues
from around the world. This work has the potential to shorten the pre-clinical trial review process
from years to months to even days, with the goal of bringing new life-saving drugs to market much faster than before. This is the power of collaboration—the power of us.

Harnessing this potential will require much more than technology changes - more than in the first phase of the Internet, this phase will require significant changes in human behavior. Business and government leaders will need to lead from a “collaboration and teamwork” mentality as opposed to the traditional “command and control” perspective. As we adopt this collaboration mentality in our personal lives, we are beginning to carry similar expectations into our work lives, fueling demand for collaborative technologies and behaviors at work. Encouraging this collaborative behavior will also require us to teach students and employees how to work well together and to make good collective decisions - and then reward them for reaching collective goals, not only individual ones.

We are at one of the great inflection points of our time. Our opportunity is to build a globally connected human network capable of working collectively to address the significant social, economic, and political issues of our time. As leaders, it is our responsibility to lead by collaborative example, encourage and reward these behaviors, and welcome the innovations that will enable a world that is more connected than ever before.

I believe the combination of education, an innovative environment, supportive government, and broadband infrastructure are the ingredients for global competitiveness. And, in particular, education and the Internet are global equalizers for individuals. Thus it is our responsibility
to work toward universal broadband access, so we can provide groups and individuals the necessary platform for collaborating effectively on a global basis. We are not limited by technology, but only by our own imagination and our willingness to adapt and embrace this exciting new era.