Yesterday I spent the day connecting around the topic of entrepreneurship with other delegates and corporate partners of AIESEC in a space we created called “Youth to Business Forum”. We spent the day in open space discussions, panels and workshops to evolve our understanding of entrepreneurship and develop the actions that we need to take to develop entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship in our organization and societies.

Together we asked questions such as how we could support the creation of more entrepreneurs, how we could create businesses with social impact, what our role could be in transforming education, technology and the world through new business ideas, and many more like that.

After all these discussions – our chair of the conference raised an important challenge. He pointed out that we often looked at these discussions in the strict context of AIESEC and AIESEC’s relevance. This is important, and it’s crucial that we see it from our organization’s perspective, however it’s not nearly enough. We need, especially as young people, to be able to tackle the big hairy questions – the questions about how we will create a radically better world, the questions about the revolutions we need and can create.

Although we need to start from individual, organizational and national perspectives we cannot find appropriate solutions unless we really dare to look at these issues from a global scale. This goes for both AIESEC and everyone else. We need to open the spaces in our family dinners, at our company lunches, throughout our conferences, meetings and seminars to discuss these issues. By not shying away from these issues we are taking the first steps to creating the actions needed to change our societies.

Being a proactive AIESECer (wink ;)) – I sat down att the end of the day and reflected on what this day actually meant to me and how I could bring these thoughts into practice. The commitment that came out of this was to use my role, as president of my AIESEC country (Sweden), to open these spaces both within our organization but also with partners – we will strive to arrange a similar forum in Sweden and to bring these discussions to businesses and youth in Sweden. Furthermore I will work with my team to increase the impact of the experience for our members who are leaving our organization (we call it “heading for the future”) so that they more clearly can see the connection between what they’ve been doing in AIESEC and the actions that they can take in the future to have a positive impact.

That being my commitment – I also want to you with the challenge of deciding how you could act in your company, organization or community to raise these discussions & create actions from these.

To follow AIESEC’s international congress and the questions we raise – check out our virtual presence at http://www.aiesec.org/AI/iclive.