DTU Skylab was full of excitement on Monday, October 28, as the Tech Bazar & reception opened this year’s Next Generation summit. The event welcomed more than 130 participants, all gathered around the mission to empower young students, innovators and entrepreneurs to address urgent global challenges through digitalization and sustainable technology.
Since 2018, DTU has facilitated a link between students and young entrepreneurs and international conferences on green transformation hosted in Denmark, including conferences on water and sustainable cities, among others. This year, DTU partnered with the Digital Tech Summit to introduce a Next Generation Digital Action initiative. The initiative focused on youth-led innovation projects that explore how digitalization and emerging technologies can support the creation of sustainable, inclusive societies. This year’s theme brought focus to pressing areas like education, energy, health, water, environment, and migration.
“At Danida Fellowship Centre, we strongly believe that addressing both the large and small challenges of the world requires global, cross-sector collaboration, innovative thinking, and an entrepreneurial mind-set”, said Ulla Tørnæs, former Minister of Education and Development and current chairperson of Danida Fellowship Centre since 2023.
This year, Danida Fellowship Centre supported Next Generation Digital Action initiative with 66 young participants, including students, university representatives, startups, and delegates from Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and India, helping them build connections across sectors, countries, and continents. They worked together with participants from Denmark, Colombia, Mexico and South Korea on finding solutions to in all 6 challenges posed by different partners. Danida funded Strategic Sector Programmes contributed with three of this year’s six challenges, focusing on Statistics, Environment, and Water. Partners in Strategic Sector Programmes from Ghana, India, and South Africa travelled to Denmark to provide feed-back to the students and young entrepreneurs.
In her welcome remarks, Ulla Tørnæs further emphasized the strong commitment to knowledge exchange and collaboration between Denmark and other counties in order to find solutions to common challenges. The Next Generation Digital Action program, she emphasized, is ideally suited to support this vision, creating a platform for global exchange and fostering innovation and entrepreneurship among young leaders.
“We see great value in North-South cooperation as a catalyst for new ideas,” she said.
“The way you are tapping into global challenges through your solutions is an inspiring example of mutual learning.”
The Next Generation Digital Action program culminated at the Digital Tech Summit on 30-31 October 2024, a notable platform for reimagining leadership in sustainable technology.
