Klaus Schwab Quotes

“According to the innovation charity Nesta in the UK, the five cities that are globally best placed in terms of having the most effective policy environment to foster innovation are: New York, London, Helsinki, Barcelona and Amsterdam.”

“An estimated 90% of the world’s data has been created in the past two years, and the amount of information created by businesses is doubling every 1.2 years.”

“As media strategist Tom Goodwin wrote in a TechCrunch article in March 2015: 'Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”

“Boundaries between sectors and professions are artificial and are proving to be increasingly counterproductive. More than ever, it is essential to dissolve these barriers by engaging the power of networks to forge effective partnerships.”

“In all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.”

“In the automotive realm, a car is now a computer on wheels, with electronics representing roughly 40% of the cost of a car.”

“Increasing inequalities might emerge between tech-savvy individuals, who understand and control these technologies, and less knowledgeable individuals, who are passive users of a technology they do not understand.”

“It may be too soon to tell, but extrapolating from current trends indicates that mobility will play an ever more important role in society and economics in the future than today.”

“New technologies will dramatically change the nature of work across all industries and occupations.”

“Productivity is the most important determinant of long-term growth and rising living standards so its absence, if maintained throughout the forth industrial revolution, means that we will have less of each.”

“Strategies which primarily focus on reducing costs will be less effective than those which are based on offering products and services in more innovative ways.”

“The cost of storing information is approaching zero (storing 1GB costs an average of less than $0.03 a year today, compared to more than $10,000 20 years ago).”

“The fact that a unit of wealth is created today with much fewer workers compared to 10 or 15 years ago is possible because digital businesses have marginal costs that tend towards zero.”

“The more we think about how to harness the technology revolution, the more we will examine ourselves and the underlying social models that these technologies embody and enable, and the more we will have an opportunity to shape the revolution in a manner that improves the state of the world.”

“The second industrial revolution has yet to be fully experienced by 17% of the world as nearly 1.3 billion people still lack access to electricity.”

“To a large extent, the millennial generation is setting consumer trends. We now live in an on-demand world where 30 billion WhatsApp messages are sent every day and where 87% of young people in the US say their smart phone never leaves their side and 44% use their camera function daily. This is a world which is much more about peer-to-peer sharing and user-generated content. It is a world of the now: a real-time world where traffic directions are instantly provided and groceries are delivered directly to your door. This 'now world' requires companies to respond in real time wherever they are or their customers or clients may be.”

“Today, a middle-class job no longer guarantees a middle-class lifestyle, and over the past 20 years, the four traditional attributes of middle-class status (education, health, pensions and house ownership) have performed worse than inflation.”

“We must develop a comprehensive and globally shared view of how technology is affecting our lives and reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments. There has never been a time of greater promise, or greater peril.”

“When two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on the table between them or in their peripheral vision changes both what they talk about and their degree of connectedness.”