For the 49th St Gallen Symposium we have introduced our new format – the Interactive Sessions – to foster more interaction and ideation space among our participants. Each session focussed on a central issue related to this year’s symposium topic…

Camila Crescimbeni National Director of Youth InclusionArgentina Ministry of Social Development Translating a country’s economic growth into social and economic development is important. “Therefore, as a government we encourage all types of capital – which generally serve their own interest…

Over the past few years, many banks have committed themselves to Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR. While making a profit, they also claim to take social and environmental issues into account. Critics have argued that for a profit-oriented institution like…

Zoë CondliffeCEO of She’s A Crowd She’s A Crowd is a platform where women can report gender-based violence, like sexual assault, anonymously. The problem The issue comes down to patriarchal society, Condliffe says. “Men have more power than women, and…

Rewind a few decades, to Vienna In the mid-1990s. At the time, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) was just beginning to make waves as an anti-foreigner movement. Marie Ringler, then a political science and gender studies student at the University…

In 2015, Anastasia Hronis, a Sydney-based psychologist and accomplished pianist, started posting videos on Instagram of herself playing the piano. As she posted video after video, she amassed followers. Today, her page boasts an impressive 38,000 of them – all…

Five years ago, just before her first appearance on Ukrainian television, Margo Gontar asked herself some hard questions. “Would I be shot in the head? Would somebody come find me?”, Margo Gontar recalls thinking. “I needed to decide whether to…

How does a circular economy differ from a linear one? Professor Simon Evenett, Director of the Swiss Institute for International Economics and Applied Economic Research at the University of St. Gallen, has a simple explanation. “If you think about making…

Technological innovations are contributing to the fight against global inequality – in healthcare, education, agriculture and finance. Globalisation has now increased access to technology all over the world. The increased access to tech tools is opening endless possibilities for social…

In 2012, the Global Impact Investing Network’s (GIIN) Impact Investor Survey reported that USD 8 billion was invested in companies and projects designed to have a social or environmental return – a category often referred to as “impact investing.” In…