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A Fab Lab at the United Nations

The GENEVA FORUM is a creative and collaborative space at the heart of the United Nations' System See detailled presentation

A Fab Lab at the United Nations

The GENEVA FORUM is a creative and collaborative space at the heart of the United Nations' System See detailled presentation

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The GENEVA FORUM is not a service provided by the UN . It is an event created and kept up by the NGO, Objectif Sciences International, which takes place every year at the headquarters of the UN in Geneva. This platform fulfils its purpose throughout the whole year, based on the one physical meeting per year.

The new forms of incubation and intervention, independent and corporate co-working spaces, fab labs, maker spaces, hacker spaces, and open spaces all have key features that can be found at the GENEVA FORUM, and these, since 2001, the year when the first Geneva Forum was tested, although it didn’t then become the GENEVA FORUM as we know it today.

These varied characteristics make the GENEVA FORUM a veritable Fab Lab set in the heart of the UN system, to serve all the participants who wish to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as we know them today.

Entrepreneurship of Solutions for the Future

The UN Sustainable Development Goals have been widely taken up and they were already taken in hand by all those active in the domain who circle around, gravitate to, and join the GENEVA FORUM.

We are seeing the superpostion of the inter-aid logistics in the entrepreneurial support, as well as the logic of vertical expertise which has been in effect for a long time. Entrepreneurs, scientists proposing solutions, financiers, and members of the UN system (whether their project be related or not) are managed "community" style. Donations and return donations, and a collective dynamic are, therefore, main features of the process of development of solutions for peace and SDGs.

The presence of expertise and of transmission become meaningless as soon as understanding of industrial structure becomes almost instantaneously obsolete from one year to the next in a world that values permanent innovation, disruption and cash. The entrepreneurial process itself becomes a collective creation of ideas and co-creation.

A meeting of SDG co-operators

Different sustainable development operators, the true sustainable development (sustainable evolution), come together every year with their co-competitors and collaborators at the GENEVA FORUM, the same platform that propels their projects.

Today entrepreneurial practices are declining into multiple forms of overlapping variables (inclusive and complimentary): pitches, co-working, crowdfunding, design thinking, open knowledge, working on the move, DIY; all this can be seen in FabLabs and during the hackathons which are organized by Objectif Sciences International every year with their different local groups.

An incredible atmosphere

Every year we see a terrific atmosphere at the GENEVA FORUM: the creation of a truly shared feeling and enjoyment go together. When they are also linked to co-generation of solutions to fulfil (achieve) sustainable development goals (SDGs), then they even appear at the heart of entrepreneurial, scientific and even ethical financial processes.

At the same time, the GENEVA FORUM can be thought of as being a third-place for entrepreneurship and innovation, typically in the format of FabLabs and Open Spaces, even though it has become the official site for several international annual conferences in partnership with UN services or other large NGOs. Here, large groups, universities, engineering schools, polytechnics, administrations, large projects will find a platform that is particularly stimulating for them, to help them fulfil the changes that they hope to make.

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