The Sponsor of this Paper and some context for the discussion

• Jon Shell is Managing Director and Partner of Social Capital Partners (SCP), a Canadian non-profit founded in 2001 by entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Young. With a team largely drawn from the private sector, SCP's goal is to introduce scalable market-based initiatives to address social challenges. Jon joined SCP in 2017 after a 20-year career in the private sector. A life-long entrepreneur, he has founded and grown successful (non-tech) companies in both Canada and Australia. In between ventures Jon was a consultant with both McKinsey & Company and Monitor. He received a BA from Queen's University and an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University.
• A reasonable person reading this might ask: why is a non-tech person with an employment and training background hosting a table on technology and society? Great question! Here, briefly, is why we're preoccupied with this:
• With our traditional focus on employment and training, we're very concerned about how we'll adapt as a society as work changes
• We mapped the employment and training system and found a lot of promising enterprises and projects that would help people as work changes. But they are small and disconnected and lack a digital platform and infrastructure to connect them and make them useful to clients.
• At the same time, due to our connections in government we knew that they were actively considering partnerships with for-profit companies with sub-optimal systems which would create massive data privacy and social efficacy challenges for years to come. I.e. partnerships between LinkedIn and provincial employment and training systems.
• We came to understand that government did not feel they had practical alternatives for modernizing the system, and felt pressure to act.
• We felt given the urgency of the issue it was worth trying to develop one
• Thinking through all the challenges government would face in building or funding an alternative approach, we framed the challenge similar to building the Space Station. A platform to address a problem common to many countries could be addressed with an ambitious cooperative approach like the International Space Station, where a very useful public good was created. The result of that exploration is the "International Space Station for Work" (ISSW) concept detailed on the next page.
• Briefly, the idea is for several countries to fund an independent non-profit company to build the infrastructure that would underpin and link a next-generation employment and training system. A system with open standards that would protect people's data while allowing the useful employment tools being built by entrepreneurs and governments to link to each other.
• We've had great response to this idea so far, and want to engage this table in an exploration of whether this approach to creating the ISSW applies to other social challenges.
• Your table host recognizes his limitations when it comes to technology. If all goes well, these general concepts can be informed through this group with real knowledge, and something good will come out the other end!