Global Shapers Hub Launches Projects in Kharkiv

Serhii PROKOPENKO, Chief Innovation Officer, Global Shapers Kharkiv Hub, kharkivobserver.com

An initiative, backed by the World Economic Forum, entitled Global Shapers Community, is a network of 7,000 participants in 156 countries, comprising 376 city hubs, primarily for younger citizens between the ages of 20 and 30, who are exceptional in their potential and drive to make a difference in their communities.

Hubs sync between remote and ongoing events to discuss global challenges with a targeted approach to local needs. Just recently, 60 Shapers from different hubs first time have led a panel at the WTO Public Forum 2018.

One of the hubs is located in Kharkiv. At that moment, it is expanding and launching new projects. Among them are MoreInfo project, catalyzing urban mobility and local tourism, scaling in Ukraine and other countries, VR Marathon, promoting modernization of product variations via innovative media-technologies, initiative for developing entrepreneurial spirit of youth, ecological initiatives and human rights initiatives, equality and accessibility, supporting and creating cultural bridges for artists between cities.

Been part of a WEF community is a strong advantage. Each year, a variety of offline events within the World Economic Forum framework is taking place. Accordingly, we can better understand global challenges and communicate with them locally, having access to Young Global Leaders and WEF Community, better prepare the local business for international business, public policy, media and cultural activities in scale and compete globally.

In particular, we offer to create shared value together with local stakeholders, delivering unique strategic insights and interest to grow our capacity as an expertise center of the 4th Industrial Revolution, having access to transformation maps analytical datasets of World Economic Forum. We can use state of the art knowledge and interaction tools, which could access and aid the development of protocols for the governance from WEF for local organizations.

We could carry out public diplomacy [JB emphasis], inviting other Shapers to Ukraine, promoting regional by way of visits and experience that we organize for other Shapers. We try to think positively. However, we are occasionally faced with failures, relating to a weakness of local understanding of global context. One of them was our idea to invite Shapers all over the world to Kharkiv for an international forum to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the first skyscraper complex in Europe, Derzhprom, to promote the region. Unfortunately, we were not supported by the city administration and officials and such a potentially prominent event was lost. Hopefully, this sort of mistake is not going to be commonplace.

In the latest plans, the hub is going to organize series of live stream activities of World Economic Forum events, crowd-design and conduct policy research on city readiness to undergo the 4th Industrial Revolution, grow Shapers projects and search for new members.

At this stage of hub development, we are interested in collaboration with international organizations and the local community to accelerate hub projects and help clusters, associations and regional representatives, ensuring both get more visibility in a network of Global Shapers and on the scene of the World Economic Forum.

We need more insights about the impact of the 4th Industrial Revolution to all of us, and Kharkiv Hub could be a mediator for this.

We invite all stakeholders to discuss future opportunities and possibilities with us.