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As Summer Davos Debates Innovation, Purpose Is the Bigger Story

As leaders convene at Summer Davos in Dalian, the debate centers on how to scale innovation amid geopolitical volatility, economic uncertainty and rapid A.I. adoption. But the organizations best positioned to innovate at scale are those with the clearest sense of why they exist.

In January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed Davos and said what many business leaders were already feeling but hadn’t yet named. “Let me be direct,” he told the room. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” He called it the end of a pleasant fiction—decades of deepening global integration built on the assumption of mutual benefit—and the beginning of something harsher, less predictable and significantly more consequential.

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This week, as leaders gather again for Summer Davos in Dalian, China, under the theme “Innovating at Scale,” Carney’s framing has only sharpened in relevance. The agenda reflects a world being redrawn in real time: shifting trade and industrial realities, energy markets unsettled by conflict in the Middle East, A.I. restructuring the nature of knowledge work faster than organizations can adapt. The question being asked across those sessions—how do you build and scale in an environment this volatile?—is one most leaders are answering with the wrong tools.

The instinct in rupture is to reach for more: more scenario planning, more technology, more agility frameworks. What gets overlooked, consistently, is the one thing that makes all of that actually........

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