During March 16th, 17th and 18th, Valeria Luna, Martin Siniawski, Agustín Izzo and I, attended the 13th Edition of the World Business Dialogue, an international business conference organized by students of the University of Cologne from Germany (Cologne, Germany).
The World Business Dialogue gathers 50 prominent leaders of different contexts together with 300 students from the entire world, selected through a contest of projects that have to be sent and presented (selected by the quality and creativity of their applications. In the past editions, leaders like Bill Gates and Michael Blomberg have delivered speeches.
The forum aims to boost international cooperation among the students, by means of debates, ideas and inappreciable lessons taught and learnt along the event days. Several characteristics and the spirit of this forum are common to those of the South American Business Forum (SABF), despite the European conference has a larger scale.
For the last edition, more than 1400 students sent their projects and, fortunately, nine Argentinean students were chosen; among them, six of those are students from ITBA (three are current SABF organizers, 2 were organizers in the past editions and 1 ex participant).
We felt honorable for having attended OFW and being able of representing our country and university at an amazing level context, along with people from all over the world where we had the opportunity of learning from other cultures and leaders, like, for example, Muhammad Yunus (Nobel Peace Prize, 2006), the CEO of Vodafone Germany and the Vice-President of the European Parliament, among others.
Aside from the experience of hearing, and, in other cases, speaking with this personalities, we had the opportunity of getting to know students from all the world, along with their different cultures, ideas, which in some cases, presented vast differences with ours, but we did have something, very important in common, which is the necessity of generating a positive change in each of the world’s different regions.
From SABF, we pretend to develop this relationship among the students as we believe it’s a way through which to improve our reality, by means of long term group work. Without any doubt, having attended the 13th Edition of the World Business Dialogue provided us with the sense of having contributed in favor of a better world. We strongly encourage all university students to take part of the future edition, for the year 2011.
