ABSTRACT
The aspirational premise of the United Nations 2030 global development agenda is rooted in the understanding that achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is only possible through partnerships among different stakeholders across society and at a global scale. Every year, UNLEASH, a global initiative first piloted in Denmark, gathers more than 1,000 young talents from all around the world in their Innovation Lab to think together about concrete solutions that can accelerate the success of the SDGs and reinforce innovation capacities everywhere. The core of this approach is to create an ecosystem that mixes young people from social entrepreneurship and the private sector, with committed academics as well as a network of experts and facilitators dedicated to these young talents. These UNLEASH Innovation Labs are not hackathons per se, but encounters that cultivate a collaborative state of mind, unleashing collective intelligence to create solutions to the enduring challenges of sustainable development.
