In today’s complex and dynamic world, leaders require a solid understanding of the key issues affecting global, regional and industry agendas, the range, scale and potential impact of the key global risks that they face and how these various issues may interconnect. 

For its industry agenda, the World Economic Forum brings business leaders and industries together to form industry communities which, through high-level and trust-based interaction, explore these various challenges. Industry communities also use the Forum’s powerful regional, constituent and expert networks to draw in the perspectives and expertise of other key stakeholders. Through the power of such multistakeholder collaboration, the Forum helps business leaders and industry communities to generate insight and trigger action on a wide variety of issues. This multistakeholder process involving industry is expressed as an Industry Initiative. 

World Economic Forum Industry initiatives can take three forms: a strategic dialogue; an agenda-shaping activity; or a partnership for catalysing impact. They can be sector-focused or involve various industries. The Forum also has a small group of Institutional Initiatives, which can be anchored within a Forum industry community or within a thematic team. 

These Institutional Initiatives examine themes of clear and current relevance that reach across the global, regional and industry agendas, and that cut across all of the Forum’s industry, regional and constituent communities. The themes of climate change, trade, food security, water security, and infrastructure form the current group of World Economic Forum Global Initiatives.

Institutional reports such as the Global Competitiveness Report, the Global Risk Report and others help to provide crosscutting insight to all the Industry Initiatives. At each stage of the various types of Industry Initiative interaction, World Economic Forum Industry Partners and Members deepen their community engagement by bonding (through a dialogue), binding (through shaping an agenda) or building (by achieving impact (on a particular theme). 

This can often take the form of an evolutionary process, as engagement in an issue commonly deepens over time, strengthening the sense of common understanding and cooperation as participants shift from a community of interest to purpose and then to achievement as the goal is reached and the initiative is exited. During 2014 the Global Agenda Platform will be introduced as a subset of the Forum’s TopLink system. This will help top policy-makers, business and civil society executives and experts engage in thematic discussions relevant to the Forum’s initiatives. 

It is by bringing together industry leaders to address common goals and by facilitating such multistakeholder activity from dialogue through to action that the World Economic Forum seeks, both physically and virtually, to create lasting value for its Industry Partners and Members, enabling them to work with other industries, governments, civil society and academia to actively improve the state of the world. 

The full portfolio of the Forum’s existing Industry and Instituional Initiatives is listed in this brochure for the Annual Meeting 2014 in Davos. They draw on four decades of World Economic Forum experience in building communities and initiatives to help Industry Partners and Members both adapt to changing contexts and withstand sudden shocks while still pursuing critical goals, and simultaneously creating new visions to transform key issues: “The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business” in action. 

For this brochure, the various Industry Initiatives and institutional reports are grouped into five themes: 

• Competitiveness, Innovation and Economic Growth 
• Resource Resilience and Sustainable Growth 
• Hyperconnected World 
• Business and Society 
• Financial System Strengthening