 Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to a session on social innovation here at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It is such a pleasure for many reasons to get to help facilitate this session. I'm Raj Kumar. I'm the President, Editor-in-Chief of DEV-X, and when we started DEV-X in the very early days, this is now more than 20 years ago, as a news organization covering issues of global development and humanitarianism, we used the term social enterprise. And then we quickly dispensed with it because no one knew what it meant. And it has been so gratifying to come to this annual meeting over the last decade or so and just see year after year the interest and the action really on social innovation grow. And that is certainly not just happenstance. That is due to some real effort. And there's a community of people, many of you are in this room, who have been working very hard and put your shoulder to this wheel for many years, and we are starting to see real progress. And as we will get into today, there are concrete actions being taken by some of the largest corporations in the world and some of the most innovative social entrepreneurs in the world, and it's starting to have a real impact. So it is a real delight to get to be with all of you for this session. And I want to ask for some opening comments from a person who has been a reason why we've had all this progress on this issue, the chair and the co-founder of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, Hilda Schwab. Thank you, Raj, for this very nice introduction. It's a pleasure to welcome you all to this session today at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. For a quarter century, the Schwab Foundation has brought the work of social entrepreneurs to the attention of the business world. Its community includes now over 470 social innovators, and our impact report shows that their organizations have improved the lives of over 890 million people in 190 countries. During this annual meeting, we will also publish new data on the state of social entrepreneurship, which suggests that there are over 10 million social enterprises worldwide generating around two million US dollars in annual revenues and creating over 200 million jobs. Still, despite their work, we face an increasingly divided world. We need to build new bridges, find new solutions and create new partnerships. This is why the Schwab Foundation has initiated the Global Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship, a partnership through which to reach the most remote communities with essential services and products and also to foster women empowerment through innovative technologies. The Global Alliance has grown to over 110 members, corporations, foundations and other organizations and is supported by many organizations who are represented here at the World Economic Forum. It mobilizes commitments from the private sector for social innovation. It engages policymakers in creating policies in support of social enterprises and it sets the agenda for the social entrepreneur sector around emerging topics such as artificial intelligence, climate adaptation and innovative finance. Their leadership is an inspiration to create positive impact but also to address key business challenges such as sustainable supply chains, resilience and innovation. I hope you will join the Global Alliance and our social innovators to help building a more inclusive, equitable and sustainable economy. One of these social innovators is Ajay Tashaa, founder of Frontier Markets. She has received the Schwab Foundation Award this year for her work in South Asia to connect women entrepreneurs to their customers through technology. In this session you will hear about the progress of the Global Alliance about new corporate commitments to social innovations, the latest global data on social entrepreneurship, research about private sector partnerships with social innovators and about individual success stories from business leaders like yourself. I am pleased to see so many of you joining this session with our esteemed panelists, executives who are already driving social innovations within their companies. Sabrina Susan at SWF, Julia White at SAP, Jeff Marta at Metronik and Anna Marks at Deloitte. But now we want to hear from Ajay Taa. Congratulations to you and please tell us more about your work. The floor is yours. I just want to also just reinforce the overwhelming appreciation I have right now for the Schwab Foundation just because this is an incredible platform and this topic and initiative is so important. So I'll start, I'm going to set the stage of how I'm going to do my remarks. I'll tell you a little bit about what Frontier Markets does. But I'll also talk about what I believe is examples of how corporate social innovation can actually get translated to business and purpose. And the most important thing of what my entire belief of Frontier Markets is, is that we unlock the potential of women and rural markets. So that's why I created Frontier Markets. I really wanted to make that happen. Now let me give you the context of this in India. So India has 700,000 villages and 800 million people out of the 1.43 billion people live there. And today those 800 million people are still not accessing quality products and services that help them address their life challenges to really improve who they are and where they live. So we at Frontier Markets solve that by investing in women and technology and actually wanting to become the bridge that actually connects the right products and services to both rural entrepreneurs as well as rural communities. So what has happened is we created women entrepreneurs as the nexus of data collectors and creators. Why? Because as we're talking about trust and as we're talking about data and contextual AI, women are very, very good at getting insights about other people because they are trusted. They enter rooms, they know people, they know gossip. Let's be clear, they're influencers, they're trust makers. So when you bring in women and you give them the right power of technology to help them understand how to collect data, to help us understand how to better design and innovate solutions, it's game changing. So at Frontier Markets we have 20,000 of these digital women entrepreneurs who've been using our technology that was designed by the way, by them, for them, with them, vernacular, AI enabled, et cetera, that has helped them connect one million plus families to over 100 million solutions that are focused on high impact levels. But we were able to then bring in 46 companies to help design those solutions. What are these solutions? What are these areas? And this is the nexus between I think impact and market. Healthcare, agriculture, clean energy, financial services, and most importantly, digital systems of services. And the examples that I'm about to share is in one second, but just to kind of look at 100 million solutions to a million rural families. In India, where you're talking about 800 million people, it is a massive market, it is a huge opportunity, the numbers are daunting. Today, the rural market of India represents 7.7 trillion dollars in consumption. By 2025, we're talking about that going to 22 trillion dollars. This is real money, and it's a missed opportunity when companies will understand how to collaborate. What is normally the challenge for big companies to collaborate? It's too expensive to reach the last mile. We don't understand who the rural customer is. We don't know what the product market fit looks like, but when you partner with social innovators, we can make it really easy. You just take data points that you know you can collect through your trust builders, and you can actually design better, build better, and also unlock markets. So the two or three examples I'm about to give, before I say the last piece in, which I love is my favorite, is that it's not just about us helping companies reach the last mile. It's a beautiful market linkage. It's a marketplace, right? Because we're also helping people get access to the services that they truly need and truly want in a real way, but the women in between are earning real money. So our 20,000 Sahilis have learned over $30 million of income to unlock $100 million of impact. And ultimately, it's also helped social businesses and companies unlock access to markets. So the two or three examples I can give you, many of you might or might not be familiar with Jubilant, which is a, Jubilant Parthia Group is a big company in India that focuses on Agri. And their question was, how might we better design Agri inputs for women farmers? And our question to them was, do you know who a women farmer is? And you can't take generic data on who a women farmer is. So we basically use our Sahilis to then unlock 25,000 rural women farmers to understand what their needs were in terms of climate, as well as their Agri solutions. We then brought in Jubilant. We brought in Dehath, which is another massive big company in India. And we brought in an Agri finance company to bundle services for these women and then delivered that through a platform. 25,000 rural women farmers got exactly what they needed when they needed it. Those Sahilis, my rock stars, were able to get $5 million of working capital because they were able to demonstrate the need of a market. And guess what? Those big giants finally understood a new way to get access to market, but then also celebrate impact. And my last favorite example is gonna be the one that we recently launched with MasterCard and with Airtel Payments Bank, which is ultimately about how do we unlock the potential of small women businesses by getting them to become a multi-service provider? So think about it. There are 15.7 million women businesses that no one understands in India who currently are selling CPG products or some random Agri solutions or a cosmetic store. But if you actually digitize them and get them to become the assisted commerce platform, you get them to then provide digital banking services, get them to provide FMCG goods, cosmetics, lingerie. So all of a sudden businesses are going, I need to get to my new market. I need to make things happen. And so what I encourage all of us and this amazing panel and why this is so exciting as an opportunity is that when we launched this initiative, what it took to make this happen? How do you operationalize all of this? You do need blended capital. You do need access to de-risking capital that allows you to then design and experiment and deliver. But at the same time demonstrate what will be massive scale and unlock massive potential. So we launched the Sheeley's Podet initiative last year. We've now launched the Sheeley's Impact Fund thanks to the Schwab Group and this award which ultimately is unlocking the potential of one million women entrepreneurs to impact the lives of 100 million people just in India. And also Sheeley's X, which is this can be replicated globally. So I hope this helps this amazing group get excited. And also at the same time, thank you for your work and your leadership. And again, thank you so much, Hilda. Thank you, Ajeta. Thank you so much. That's a great way to get us started because I think a misconception is that social entrepreneurs are really small-scale businesses and there's these huge corporates and why would they connect? And when you think about a social enterprise that has customer-based potential market of 800 million people, right? These are intermediaries potentially in very large markets and Julia White is sitting here to my left and you're the chief marketing and solutions officer at SAP, a very large corporation. You remember the executive committee there. And as I understand it, Ajeta was an early social entrepreneur that you engaged with but you've come much further than just engaging with one or two social enterprise. Give us a sense of where you stand now and why the involvement of social innovation in your business matters to you. Absolutely and congratulations. So the story is back in 2015, SAP sponsored a data test and congratulations to come to our Impact Accelerator, came to Palo Alto and kind of got resources and perspective and now fast forward almost a decade to see the success. To me, there's no better story why does SAP Investing in an Area care about this area? So this is our new best showcase. So congratulations again and thank you for being that leader on that front. But why does it matter? SAP, why are we staying committed? Two big reasons. First, it's aligned with our purpose and we're a very values-based organization, our purpose of helping the world run better and improve people's lives. It turns out as you heard the numbers from Hildin others that it's a huge part of our economy, it's a huge part of how the world runs and so participating in that matters to us and we wanna be active in that area. So from that perspective. But second, it's also very much aligned with our core business and the cliche of win-win, it's actually really true here just to make it real for a second. We provide financial and non-financial support but SAP runs the world's largest B2B network. About $5 trillion of commerce goes through this network, buyers and suppliers trying to find each other and now in the network, we can actually have it so social, innovators social enterprises to use your term can identify themselves as such. So trading partners can both find a different set of innovators but also meet sustainability goals that they have stated and are still yet to meet and actively working on it in their, just the course of their business helps the innovators be discovered, the buyers diversify and meet sustainability goals and it helps us and our core business. So comes together on that piece of it. But then we know the other challenge is a lot of the social enterprise aren't quite big enough yet to scale some of these big suppliers. And so the other way we've contributed is in focus our contribution is around pro bono. We have a pro bono consulting process for all 110,000 employees around the globe where they can volunteer and help give that insight of what does enterprise need, what kind of scale, what does it look like? And we've had over 3,000 employees across 50 countries participate and be able to help give that insight to help them grow beyond that as well. So I think if we were really cynical, Julia, we'd say, hey, you've got this secret comparative advantage. You know how to work with social innovators. Why encourage other corporations to do the same thing? Why try to help build the space? You actually co-chair the corporate council for the Global Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship and maybe you can take us through the thinking behind why does one company want to help build this whole space? Why does that matter? Well, you start to see the impact in the scale of that and it turns out it's not hard and there's clear ways to be able to do it and codify that and here are the practices other companies can use and unlock that potential further, right? And then all of us in business, when we have a stable growing thriving economy, it helps all of us thrive as well. So it has a bigger macroeconomic effect too and that's part of the announcement. I think JPC is gonna, in terms of what we're doing there. Yeah, I'm glad you're teasing that because it would not be a WEF special session if we didn't have something exciting to bring to you and we have an announcement. Maybe you want to share a little bit about? Sure, when we start. And then we've got a special guest who's gonna come up and talk a little bit more. Okay, perfect. So announcing today we're excited and our next step as a member of the Global Social Alliance is partnership co-led with Microsoft is our Rise Ahead pledge, which really codifies what are the best ways for organizations from financial and non-financial support to support social entrepreneurs and asking, you know, stepping up and doing it ourselves. We can't ask others to do it if we're not doing it and then ask others to join and I'm excited to have others joining already and then growing from here and then also to further put our money where our mouth is also taking a next step for SAP to invest in the working capital investment fund, impact fund. So, and I know Dan is here. I thought maybe I'd let you speak to it for a minute in terms of what exactly that looks like. Thanks, Julia. Hi everyone, I'm Dan. I'm a proud member of the Schwab Social Entrepreneurship community and a partner in the working capital innovation fund which is an early stage venture fund seeking to build technologies and tools that will deliver supply chains that are equitable, that are resilient, and that are transparent. And today to recognize SAP's leadership not only in the Rise Ahead pledge and the Global Alliance but also to note a very specific manifestation of that leadership, an investment of $5 million that will enable us at the working capital fund to catalyze a new fund extending our impact. What does this mean? The fundamentally supply chains at this point are for the most part opaque, invisible, not generally saw a scene as sources of social value, very transactional and sometimes even exploitative. And what we do with investment like that from SAP in our new fund will be to put tools in the hands of communities and workers and producers so that they can improve their own livelihoods and very well tools in the hands of businesses as well that can illuminate the hidden parts of supply chains and help generate sustainable and responsible sources of supply. We very much see this as the start, obviously within the Rise Ahead pledge as well but within our fund and a commitment from us to collaborate with others in the private sector in the impact investing world as well as in civil society and social entrepreneurs. So grateful to you, Julia, and thanks everybody. Thank you so much, Zana. Maybe we can bring JP Kochwa to the stage. Are you ready to say a few words? Yeah, I think we have a microphone for you. People know clearly Coachwa but they may not know you joined Microsoft when it was a pretty small company. It was a startup company almost 40 years ago. Now it's the largest company in the world, I think, as of this week or so. So yeah, just a few words. I'm delighted to be here with all of you and of course privileged to work alongside SAP and others on co-chairing again this both the corporate business leadership council and launch this pledge. And to me, it's very personal as well. Some people may know me in a room. It's not just about Microsoft, the way I spend my time with social entrepreneurs. To me, there are two sets of change makers in the world who can bring real solutions to the problems of the people on the planet. They're using, you know, cutting mayor, famous cuts, profitable solution to the problems of people on the planet. There are social entrepreneurs who've been around for 40 years doing amazing things across the world and scaling more and more but needing more capacity and tech capacity. And you've got a new wave of impact tech startups that are building out of the cloud and AI, a lot of great innovative solution to meet one or few of the 70 energy goals. So the pledge is for all of you and how many corporates you have in the room. Raise your hands, just to have a quick. We don't have enough. Come on, we have a lot of entrepreneurs. Okay, please, don't be shy. We're cutting on you. And so we want to have a lot more corporates to join forces, to establish some structured relationship with social entrepreneurs and impact entrepreneurs. And to me, the benefits are pretty obvious when you leave that relationship. It's about a few things. One, it's about your people and talents. I can tell you. I mean, like LSEP and others, we build some leadership initiative and our best talents in the company who are going to take the job of Satya in a few years are becoming the coach of our social entrepreneurs. So it's about retaining your talents. It's about designing your product services with social environmental innovation at the core of the fabrics when you start. It's about moving from basically CSR, which is great and philanthropy. I love that too, to ESG. And I know ESG might be viewed differently in different continents as well. So I'm not going to go into politics, but to real, real solutions to environmental social issues across the world. Finally, it's also about, by the way, funding. I don't want to spoil some of the data. It'll be shared later, but a panel. But there's a need today for at least $1.3 trillion of funding to scale those impacts entrepreneurs. So that's all I'm supposed to say because I know there's a lot more to be shared, but I can see I'm very excited and looking for entrepreneurs, many of the corporates in the world, whatever is your business, in Asia, in Middle East, in Africa, in the US globally. I mean, impact entrepreneurs need you and they need you to actually get us better as a corporate community to really have that social environmental innovation at the core of everything we do. So thanks a lot and wonderful panel. Looking forward to it. Thank you, JP. Often when there's something exciting happening in the social impact space, JP's fingerprints are all over it. Not surprised. But it's not just SAP and Microsoft that have signed this pledge. Other signatories include Adeco Group's Innovation Foundation, Bayer Foundation, EY, Ikea Social Entrepreneurship, Kale Group, Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation, Melita, Sanofi's Foundation S, SK Group's Center for Social Value Enhancement Studies, and one more, Suez. So let me ask Sabrina Sosan, who was with us last year. We were on the stage, I think, in the same room, having this conversation and you were, I think, relatively new in the role and saying you're learning a lot about this space and beginning to make a commitment. Here we are a year later and you've signed on to a pledge and this is a bigger part of your focus as a CEO of one of the world's largest companies working in the water sector. Tell us why and what have you found in that year since we last met? Hi everyone and happy to be here again this year and this is a very important topic for all of us and for Suez. So when I joined the company two years ago, Suez was already quite mature in terms of social innovation. A lot of things has already been done and especially rebond insertion, so our inclusion business is 20-year-old. So it's in our DNA. And over the past year, we have made some achievements, so I have something new to say and it's about facts. So what we did, we included also some commitments in our sustainability roadmap. And one of them is to increase the number of people who goes into our inclusion process or inclusion company and going from 2,300 today per year to 5,000 in 2027. So that's a commitment and that's something also important for us. I will come back to this and I'm proud that we are one of the 10 signatories of the pledge, very proud. And why is social innovation so important for us? First of all, it's in our DNA and we are provider of essential services which impact the lives of millions of people. So that's in our DNA to do social innovation. Then second, it's a key success factor why? Because technological innovation is not enough. And we need social innovation and the combination is very powerful. Why? Because social innovation enables you to be more agile, enables you also to have a time to market which is a little bit faster than innovation as everybody says. And also the level of risk is low compared to technology where you have always a level of risk. So the combination is very powerful and a key success factor. So I'm convinced that this is a business enabler which creates social and environmental value for our customers, but also for our employees. And this is also a attractiveness of the company. We have a purpose, an additional purpose with social innovation. It is about two things, commercial differentiation and performance. And I want to give you some example. It's always better to give some example. And the first one is in the UK, for example. In the Greater Manchester area, we launched a 5,000 square meter reuse center. It's in our waste business. And in two years, we have sold 200,000 second hand products. So circular economy, instead of throwing away, you reuse, you recycle. And we have raised also one million pounds for good causes with this area. And our teams have used the social value assessment tool. And I think that's interesting also for you where we demonstrated that every one pound invested generate two pounds for our customers in terms of social, environmental and economic impacts. And the second topic is human resources. As you all know, we have tension in some areas of our activities. For example, drivers for our trucks for waste collection. And here we work with refugees. And we integrate refugees. We train them and we have a program and we plan to train 50 refugees and then give them employment every year. And the other example is about inclusion. And I would like the initiator and the one who initiated, not only initiated, but also continue to develop our social innovation, Benoit Bonnello, to tell about this one example. Thank you Sabrina. Hello to everybody. Very happy to be here. I'm also a Schwab Fellow, Schwab Foundation Fellow. So thank you for the Schwab Foundation. Just a word on rebond assertion, which is a social business created by SWAS 20 years ago, but which is growing quite fast. Reborn Assertion is a social enterprise then, working on the waste management services, providing waste management services and employing only vulnerable people. So we employ 800 vulnerable people per year. So it can be long-term unemployed people, refugees, disabled people, et cetera. And we help them within 24 months to find a sustainable job or a qualifying training. And so in 22 years of existence, Reborn Assertion helped more than 11,000 people. And it makes today per year around 18 million turnover. So it's really a sustainable social business and working 80% for SWAS. So we will continue to grow it in the future, I hope. Thank you Benoit. So one additional data point. Our customers, their request in our offer, especially the municipal customer, social innovation. And in 2023, the value of the contract that we won where social innovation was inside in France amounted to 350 million euros. So it's quite a lot. And I will finish to share with you what I think are the key success factors for social innovation. There are four of them. The first is trust. And it's the main topic of this forum, but trust and time. Finding the right social entrepreneurs take time. And we need to take this time. We need it here. But trust and time are important together. And the second topic is shared interest. It needs to be a win-win situation for us as big corporations, but also for social innovators. Act locally. That's the third one. It's local. It's everything about local. You cannot manage this from Paris in my case. No, it's local. And last but not least, the right people. You need the right people who are bilingual, not in languages, but who understand business world and the social innovation world. Thank you. Thank you Sabrina. Thank you so much Sabrina. And I can just start to sketch out my own mind why a company like yours would be so focused on these issues. You think about how the climate, the changing climate is going to impact people. For most of us, it's through water. We're going to either have too much water, floods or too little. Droughts and companies like Suez are so key to this. And you have to work with those end consumers. End consumers that are sometimes very numerous in large populations, in large country, all over the world. And without social innovators like Ajeta who can connect you to those, you can see why social innovations matter so much. And in fact, bringing Anna Marks into the discussion, the global chair of Deloitte, I was just thinking as I walked in the room, the headline of this session is why social innovation matters for business with a question mark on the end. I think we can probably get rid of the question mark based on what we've heard so far. We know social innovation matters, but we just heard the outline, but Anna maybe you can take us through this a little bit more as you advise leaders and other corporations to how they should think about these issues and how they should get started. What do you tell them? You're absolutely right. And the case is proven, isn't it? And in fact, listening to all of the commentary just now, I'm just gonna rip up all my speaking notes because you have absolutely brought it to life. But maybe if I can just reflect very briefly on why it's important to me, why it's important to Deloitte. But what could we do about it as well? So if I just talk briefly to those. I mean, I started my career actually as a psychology graduate working within the field of learning disability in the social services sector in the UK. So very different to the role that I have privileged to have now. And that gives you a real insight, a sobering insight on the impact of inequality and social exclusion. And it's my belief and it's our belief at Deloitte that as a large organization, global scale, we have a responsibility to have a positive impact. We all do, we believe that, but it's more than that. As you were saying, it's not just having a CSR, it's about building something that's really part of our business. So what are the benefits and why are we doing it? I mean, we're investing, we've committed over a billion dollars to our sustainability environment and equity practice. I mean, these are large sums. Why are we doing it? What's the benefit? And I think there are three things that really draw out the benefit here. It's around innovation, it's around return, and it's around brand. And we shouldn't be afraid of talking about those things. Having spent some time with some of the innovators over the course of this week so far, when we talk about innovation, they definitely challenge us. We heard your story about how you access 800 million people. It's astronomical, access to new markets, innovative ways of thinking, keeping it local. That's what we learn from engaging and working with social entrepreneurs. The second is about the return. It's about financial return as well as social return. Why is that? These are real businesses. These are scalable, profitable, exciting businesses with a risk appetite that might be different from our own, so they challenge us there too. So it's about return. It's also about brand. You know, it's really important for us as a brand that Deloitte brand is all around trust. It's all around having an impact. For us, doing this work goes straight to who we are. It's right at the core of our purpose. And actually, when we think about the surveys we do, the human capital surveys about what millennials and Generation X want out of their employer, having those elements really caught your brand is really important. They want to work in organizations that have those values and beliefs. So it's really, really important to all of us and that's why I'm so grateful and we're so grateful at Deloitte for the work that the Foundation and the Forum Global Alliance is doing to bring us all together because whilst we could do some work on our own as Deloitte, doing it collaboratively across corporates, so powerful. But we need more corporates to get engaged and we need more innovators to come forward. And that leads you to the, what what? What am I going to do as a corporate who is interested and inspired? What activities am I going to do? Now, very proudly at the end of today, there'll be a report that's released in partnership with the Foundation and the Forum around the Corporate Social Innovation Compass and that's really trying to set out and articulate better what those benefits are and how you link them to what you can do. And what can we do? We can engage directly. Engaging directly is about looking into our own businesses, understanding our skills and capabilities. Ours are different from SAP. Therefore, if we combine together, wow. Ours are more in terms of the mentoring work that some of our teams do in terms of the financial advisory support, go to market. There are all sorts of advisory capacities we can support on, technology businesses giving technology support, legal businesses giving legal support. There's a whole range. So engage directly in something where it's within our skillsets as an organization and believe you me, it's a symbiotic relationship. The second is about really engaging with the wider ecosystem. And this is about using our connections, our relationships, the businesses that we work alongside to really come together. That's what we can do. That's what the foundation and this alliance has done so well. That's our mission here. And that's something we can all do as corporates. And the third element here is really all about embedding that strategy right into the heart of our organization. As we were saying earlier, it used to be the piece that we had on the side. Now it is our business. That creates a very, very different feel, a different level of impact. I think if we can do all of these things, if we can articulate it better, which the report that will be released this afternoon does, in my view, very, very well, distills it into practical examples, practical actions, the impact we can have would be tremendous. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm so glad you brought up the talent piece because I think that can appeal to almost any business. Even if they haven't yet seen how they fit into this ecosystem, they know that the very best talent in the world, they're looking for this. And they can sniff it out if it's just CSR, right? If it's just something on the side, as you say, it has to be core to the business. I do selfishly wanna ask you a follow-up question because I understand you have a report that you have helped to put together with the Global Alliance and the Schwab Foundation. And I, as somebody who was in this space 20 years ago, looking for data and numbers, actually I wrote a paper for McKinsey looking at the space and there was almost no data out there on what people were doing. Now there is real data. So tell us a little bit about this report and what you found. Well, I'm really excited about this report. It gives some real case studies, some examples of what a number of the Alliance members have been doing. So it brings it to life in practical, taking your story and giving more stories. And it's absolutely great from that respect. But what it attempts to do really in a very simple compass model, and we like simple models because we can all follow those, practical guidance that says, these are the benefits that you can have, you can gain from engaging in this community. If you do these actions, this is how you unlock those benefits. So it's creating a very practical guide which will hopefully inspire more corporates, more organizations, and more innovators and entrepreneurs to join us in delivering this mission. Fantastic. I want to bring Jeff Martha into the discussion. And Jeff, I was just listening to Anna say, how do we get more companies in? I have to say I'm already very impressed looking at the CEOs we have on the stage. Jeff Martha is the CEO of Metronic. I mean, it's tremendous to see how much this has grown. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you've done at Metronic. You've created Metronic Labs, which I understand also signed the Rise Ahead pledge, which is great. Tell us a little bit more about what is Metronic Labs, how did you come to the decision to create that and what does it mean for your business? Sure. So first of all, it's great to be here and just be part of all this energy around social innovation. It's really, you know, it's energizing, it's inspiring. So I'll do two things. One, tell you why it's important to Metronic, why I think it's important to, you know, corporates. And then Metronic Labs, one example, a very exciting example of social innovation that we've been a part of. So first of all, Metronic's been a very mission-driven company. Our mission to alleviate pain, restore health, extend life started in 1949 when the company was founded. And our founder, Earl Bakken, invented the first pacemaker, which was the first medical device, which has led to this $600 billion industry. And when most people think about Metronic, they think about creating new standards of care around the world in cardiology, neuroscience, surgery, diabetes, et cetera. But, you know, underpinned by technology and clinical science, and it's all good stuff. But our real secret sauce is this mission that was written in 1960, okay? And not a word has changed. Six tenants, the one everybody knows, leave you pain, restore health, extend life. That's just tenant number one. These other five tenants, again, I'll keep saying it. Written in 1960, not a word has changed. Tenant number five, I'm not gonna go through all, talks about personal worth of employees. Tenant number six, talks about corporate citizenship in 1960. That wasn't even a word in 1960. And we've been, this is part of our DNA. We talk about this mission every day. It's not just on a website or a brochure. It inspires us, it defines us, but it guides us. It guides our day-to-day, our strategy and our day-to-day activities. Our most important measurement is how many patients we help a year. And that's two patients every second. That's about 75 million patients a year. And that's the thing that's most exciting to us. I'm gonna come back to that in a second. But getting back to another, so it's part of our DNA. And one key aspect that she was just talking about, I was just talking about, was talent. I do think, especially in today's day and age, people come to work for organizations based on the values of that organization. And so to be quite selfishly, even though it's part of our mission, our DNA, this is helping us attract the best talent, and particularly tech talent. We're an innovation company, despite all the AI you're hearing about, innovation is still a people-driven business. We need the best people. This is important to them. It's important to our shareholders for that reason. You know, getting back to Medtronic Labs, what the heck is that? We'll talk about the last mile and how difficult it was. So first of all, that two patients every second, 75 million patients a year. We're excited about that, but the world is 10 times bigger than that. And so we've been, you know, for the last 12 years, in particular when my predecessor came to Medtronic, Omar Isharak, we really started to talk about how do you get to that other, you know, 8 billion people that we're not touching? How do you get to that last mile? And we literally could take, I'll keep that pacemaker example. We could fly a plane to India, give away thousands of pacemakers, and it's still unlikely that they would get to those patients, even if we gave them away for free. So we need to look at things differently. And so we created Medtronic Labs about a decade ago. And it's really a social business that's bringing what we think is meaningful healthcare solutions to the base of the pyramid, to the underserved. And the key here in a way that's sustainable and scalable. And one of the frustrations I've had with social innovation in the last decade is a lot of these social entrepreneurs come and go. And the reason that is, it's not for effort, lack of effort or sense of purpose, it's hard. It's really hard to have meaningful healthcare solutions for the underserved that are scalable and sustainable. It is so hard, okay? So that's why, so we've engaged with a bunch of social innovators with mixed results. We decided we're gonna create our own social business. We launched Medtronic Labs. We really focused our foundation money into this and put in tens of millions of dollars. And out of this over this past decade, it took a while, we had a couple false starts. We had our failures. We now have a platform, a digital health platform for early detection of disease and continuous support or continuous disease management for what it'd be, communicable diseases like HIV or malaria or NCDs like hypertension or diabetes and even maternal health. That's what this platform, we've open sourced this. And over the last couple of years, we've improved the lives from this platform of almost two million patients, but we're hitting this inflection point now. And I'll let somebody else talk about that inflection point and it's very exciting. Yeah, we did sign the pledge. We've committed to another 50 million of funding into Medtronic Labs. And in addition to that, because it is an independent organization, social business, in terms of returns, our return right now is the pride that it gives our employees and other stakeholders that wanna engage with us, including US health systems. We're bringing this into the US. This isn't just for Kenya and Ghana and India. We're bringing this into the state of New Jersey and the US and Camden for those of you know that part of it. So our healthcare, our customers are engaging with us. It's attracting employees. And I'm just asking Medtronic Labs to some point get the cashflow positive or your cashflow neutral, we'll reinvest. We're also bringing in partners. We've got other foundations that are contributing. It was a little bit of a hurdle to say, why do I need to give Medtronic money? Well, it's Medtronic Labs. Medtronic's putting a lot of money into this. And it's open sourced the platform and we're getting other big names to put money to support this. And it's super exciting. So I've probably said more than I should. I'd like to introduce Richika, who's the president of Medtronic Labs, who received one of the Social Innovation Awards from the Schwab Foundation yesterday. She's done fantastic work. And I talk about social innovation being hard. You know, you need to have that sense of purpose. There's multiple things you need. I'll highlight three, that sense of purpose. You know, skill sets to innovate and network. But also just an incredible amount of perseverance. It's an incredible amount of perseverance. And Richika embodies all those things. I'm really proud to work alongside her and introduce you to... So Richika, come on up and tell us a little bit more about Medtronic Labs. The one thing I was gonna add that is absolutely crucial for corporate social innovation to work is leadership commitment. And thank you really to all of you. I mean, really Jeff, I think we've been working together on this for 12 years and Omar, and your personal involvement and commitment is so crucial because there are people like me in every major organization, but we just don't get the visibility and support. And that's absolutely essential. On the lab side, I'll just say, we are just getting started. And the goal really is to reimagine how healthcare is delivered at the last mile. We know there's never gonna be enough doctors, enough clinics at the last mile. And technology is how we can bridge that gap. How do we go from acute care to actually prevention and wellness? And that's where technology forms those solutions. And we're starting to see those proof points in the countries we're working in. Even as Medtronic, we can do that alone. So my request and call for everyone here is let's join forces because we can do pilots and fragmented efforts. We need to scale this work at national levels and really take this for that step change in how healthcare is delivered and the time for that is now. We have been at it for a while, but we have something now that's coming together. There's other partners we're working with and really looking for all of us to come together. So that's all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you so much. I feel like next year we're gonna need more chairs on this stage. We are just getting more and more committed. It is so exciting to see the maturation of this work and the team here at the Schwab Foundation and the Global Alliance, they're part of that perseverance that Jeff talked about. It has not been easy to get to this point, but you are seeing now the work of Francois and Daniel and so many others where we are now. And watch this space. I think we'll be back here next year. We're gonna see this market just continue to grow. Thank you so much for being a part of it. Thank you.