WATCH: "ViewChange: Unleashing Innovation"
From teeny-tiny sleeping bags ending infant mortality to soccer balls that produce electricity, a new documentary shows how fresh solutions to old problems can change the world.
Link TV's documentary "ViewChange: Unleashing Innovation" highlights the works of top social entrepreneurs tackling the world's toughest problems such as hunger, disease, clean water and security from surprising and inventive new angles.
The video marks the kickoff to the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship March 28-30 in Oxford, England.
"ViewChange: Unleashing Innovation" features the winners of McKinsey & Company's Social Innovation Video Contest, which received nearly 150 videos from 30 different countries. Hear from first-place winner Embrace, a San Francisco-based initiative ending infant mortality in the developing world with micro-sized sleeping bags. And find out more about second-place winner APOPO, a Tanzania-based venture that trains rats to save lives through measures such as sniffing out bombs and even Tuberculosis in human samples.
In addition to these social entrepreneurs, "ViewChange: Unleashing Innovation" also features those who are driving social change, including Bill Clinton, McKinsey & Company's Lynn Taliento, ONE chairman Tom Freston and top Obama counterinsurgency strategist Dave Kilcullen.
Lynn Taliento, partner at McKinsey & Company, highlights RED, TOMS and Kiva as some of the leaders in social innovation and says these initiatives inspire new areas of thinking that are yet untapped:
"If we're going to solve some of these increasingly complex social issues, we definitely need fresh thinking. We need unusual suspects, if you will," she remarks in the video. "We need people who haven't spent their lives necessarily thinking about social issues, but who have talents and capabilities in areas like gaming or design thinking or financial engineering to put their talents to work to solve these issues."
Freston explains social entrepreneurship has had a relatively short history and explains why it's caught on as a vocation for people who want to tackle problems in innovative ways:
"Ten years ago, if you got out of a good school, there's a good chance you were probably headed to Wall Street. 30 years ago, if you got out of a good school, there was a good chance you wanted to be an investigative journalist. I think a lot of the the bloom is off the rose on the Wall Street money-making culture -- not all of it, certainly -- but a lot of people are attracted to this realm because it combines their innate desire to do something good along with a possibility to tie it into something innovative in terms of technology or approach or so forth."
The Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship gathers 900 delegates from the social, finance, private and public sectors to meet at Oxford to share entrepreneurial approaches and innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing social issues. This year's speakers include Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post.
Check out "ViewChange: Unleashing Innovation" above and read more about the social entrepreneurs who were finalists in McKinsey's contest below:
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