This year’s Clinton Global Initiative takes place from 22 – 25 September 2009, where heads of state, government and business leaders, scholars, and NGO directors work together to analyze, discuss, and debate possible solutions to urgent global issues. Each participant is then asked to take action on one or more issues by making a Commitment to Action.

The Economist calls the meeting ‘an important part of the global elite’s calendar’, so join online and watch the live webcast!

As noted in our post on Girls Count: The Girl Effect, one of the major themes this year is Investing in Girls and Women. The four focus areas are Innovation, Human Capital, Infrastructure, and Equitable Futures.

Investing in Girls and Women:

CGI’s 2009 Annual Meeting will provide a forum for those interested in working on projects involving the various stages of a woman’s life – from infancy to adulthood – to come together to collectively address challenges and solutions. Proposed discussion topics include:

Reproductive, maternal, and newborn health

Access to health care and education for adolescent girls

Opportunities for women to obtain higher education, professional training, and capital

Innovation

I was particularly interested in their Innovation stream – forget tinkering, they are ready to change the world!

Challenges of poverty, unequal access to education and healthcare, as well as protecting the environment call for innovation on an unprecedented scale. To date, most change has focused on incremental greening strategies like eco-efficiency, corporate social responsibility, or treating the symptoms rather than root causes of global health problems. While well-intentioned, it is doubtful that such incremental strategies will be sufficient.

Organizations need to develop breakthrough strategies… that resolve social and environmental problems. In this regard, clean technology and Base of the Pyramid initiatives have burst onto the scene, each providing pieces to the sustainable development puzzle: next generation technologies with dramatically lower environmental impact, and bottom-up business strategies with a more inclusive reach. However, these strategies come with baggage and blind spots. If narrowly construed, they still position companies as outsiders, foreign to both the cultures and ecosystems within which they do business. Becoming indigenous or locally embedded, then, is another innovation challenge.

Companies can find the right balance of profitability, environmental sustainability, and local legitimacy by learning to co-develop technologies, products, and businesses with local communities and their stakeholders. This session will examine these emerging innovation strategies as vehicles for addressing the global challenges of poverty, climate change, health, and education.

Break-out Session Topics:

Driving Disruptive Innovation from the Base of the Pyramid

Becoming Embedded: Co-Creating Business with the Community

Enterprise-Based Strategies for Health and Education

Check out their reading materials on Innovation here