Solveathon Workshops: Meeting Innovators with Solutions on Youth, Skills, and the Workforce of the Future

Automation of today’s workforce has left worrisome doomsday-like predictions for tomorrow’s global job market. Technology has in many ways made our lives easier, but it has also left employment opportunities in jeopardy. You might have read about how half of the world’s jobs—around 2 billion—are at risk of becoming obsolete, and although these changes will affect everyone, disadvantaged youth are likely to be hit the hardest.

At Solve, we believe it doesn’t have to be that way. We just launched a challenge on Youth, Skills, and the Workforce of the Future. We're asking for solutions from innovators and entrepreneurs. And now, we're hosting Solveathon workshops at locations across the world to help local innovators get excited about the challenge and work together on designing solutions. 

Two weeks ago, at our Beijing Solveathon, hosted in collaboration with Project Pengyou, we saw how socially-minded entrepreneurs in China envision open, technological innovation as the key to unlocking quality learning opportunities for all.

Participants at the Solveathon were eager to share insights about how to scale up existing technologies for social impact in China by leveraging platforms like WeChat—the ubiquitous social media platform from Tencent that integrates instant messaging, e-commerce, and mobile payment services into one user-friendly app—to cut down on the time required to connect at-risk communities to the resources they need. One Solveathon team suggested creating a data-driven software application, integrated with users’ WeChat profiles, that would serve as an education dashboard for students in overcrowded classrooms to measure their daily and weekly learning outcomes.

Over the next two weeks, we look forward to discovering how innovators in the Indo-Pacific region are also thinking about the challenge of Youth, Skills, and the Workforce of the Future. Following the success of our Beijing Solveathon, we will be joining forces with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Atlassian Foundation to facilitate Solveathon workshops in Australia, Cambodia, Fiji, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, and Vietnam.

Join us in one of the following locations to ideate, collaborate, and create human-centered solutions.

• July 2: Phnom Penh, Cambodia

• July 3: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

• July 4: Hanoi, Vietnam

• July 7: Manila, Philippines

• July 7: Sydney, Australia

• July 11: Suva, Fiji

• July 15: Yangon, Myanmar

• July 15: Jakarta, Indonesia

• July 21: Hyderabad, India

Can’t make it to any of the above dates or locations? You can still be part of the movement by hosting a Solveathon, submitting a solution to one of Solve’s four 2017 Global Challenges by August 1^st, or lending a hand to our Solver teams by applying to be a Solve member.