Collaboration
HP Continues Living Progress Exchange Discussions Online and at #SB14London

During the bustling lunch hour on Tuesday in the Activation Hub at SB ’14 London, HP hosted a Living Progress Exchange (LPX) session that was going on concurrently online via a Convetit ThinkTank.

**HP’**s Ann Ewasechko hosted the session, GlobeScan’s Eric Whan moderated on the ground, and Convetit’s Bill Baue moderated the online discussion.

The panelists were:

• Caitlin Bristol, Global Manager of Social Innovation at eBay Inc.
• Witold Henisz, Professor of Management at the Wharton School of Business
• Peter Knight, Chairman of Context Group
• Thomas Kolster, author of Goodvertising and founder of Projector
• Karen Little, Director of Development at Kiva
• Maria Moraes Robinson, co-author of Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter

HP’s Living Progress is the company’s new integrated approach to business that drives goals in the areas of human, economic and environmental progress.

eBay's Caitlin Bristol on business as a force for social good

During the session the panelists considered questions including:

• How should companies promote local business?
• Should business be involved in philanthropy?
• How can large companies work with governments and other stakeholders to drive progress?
• How can we use collaboration to scale up creativity and innovation - beyond a one-to-few basis to a more crowd-oriented basis?
• How can we best use Big Data to solve sustainability challenges while addressing thorny questions of who owns and has access to the data?
• How do we get more large companies to fully integrate sustainability into core business strategy?

The discussion touched many key points, such as the need to improve access to education in developing countries, to unify the massive offer of social and technological platforms aiming to improve development, and the need to provide free Internet access to Africa.

The common base of the debate was that only through a real and effective collaboration and transparent data access can organizations and their stakeholders achieve truly sustainable development.