Innovation, technology and purpose can build a sustainable world. Web3 is the technology that will change how people interact interpersonally and commercially to shift the world to a sustainable one.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution’s digital transformation will render every business a technology company. Adaptation is necessary; collaboration is the new corporate currency.
Ann Rosenberg is the Senior Vice President for Sustainability Solutions at Wood plc, after completing a 20-year tenure at SAP as the SVP for UN Partnerships. She is a Co-founder of SDG Ambition through the United Nations Global Compact, as well as an Executive Sustainability Tech and Board Advisor, author, and an influential panellist and speaker. Ann also supports several non-profit organisations and United Nations Initiatives, including the World Economic Forum’s Governance Initiative.
She began her web3 journey in 2017 and was quickly rated 13th of the top 50 Female Blockchain Influencers by Onalytica in the same year. Ann works on making web3 a more responsible world through Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and the Metaverse. She is often sought by startups as a consultant to support web3 companies advance or transition in a more sustainable way, and to support web2 companies in their transition to sustainable web3 enterprises. Ann was recently enlisted as an advisor to Chainlink Labs, the leading provider of secure and reliable open-source blockchain oracle solutions and an accelerator for smart contract innovation and adoption more broadly. Here she hopes to leverage her expertise in sustainability to facilitate the application of blockchain and other Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies to develop solutions for environmental challenges.
Sustainability is an intrinsic element of Danish culture. Denmark is ranked first on the Environmental Performance Index. As a Dane, Ann is a pioneer in promoting sustainability, weaving her career from Europe to Silicon Valley to New York, and finally to Los Angeles.
“In Silicon Valley, I learned of the abundance of technologies and the idea of collaboration in public-private partnerships in operating businesses with kindness and sustainability,” said Ann. “Technology can build amazing things when done in collaboration. Technology is more than just building cool things; it is the platform that enables the building of solutions for the future of a better world for everybody.”
She’s a science fiction author (Science Fiction: A Starship for Enterprise Innovation), but not in the traditional sense. Science fiction as a genre is a futurist’s perspective of the world. It is also a map of innovation. “With science fiction’s proven track record of predicting future technological developments, science fiction thinking can serve as a wellspring for disruptive innovation and an enterprise’s ongoing transformation into an intelligent enterprise.”
For Ann, it isn’t about cool technologies but perspective and purpose. If society genuinely wants to drive an impactful world and make sure the planet becomes net-zero, then people, companies, industries, and politicians must ensure that everything we move, touch, and do is sustainable. Suppose business leaders and CEOs were to adopt science f iction thinkers’ mindsets, with exponential technologies at their disposal, and use them with purpose. Under this framework, Ann believes that society can create solutions to make the world sustainable. Ann works on the UN Global Goals’ World’s To-Do List, unlocking solutions to our most critical challenges. Blockchain technology enables her to advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and business’ Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives and transition them through innovation. Scalable, affordable, accessible: Ann’s three guiding principles for building a more sustainable world. “Web3 will redefine every business, every go-to-market approach, and the very way we engage as people,” said Ann. “There’s no doubt that web3 and the Metaverse provide limitless opportunities, including opportunities beyond our imagination at this point. I encourage the business world to activate their science fiction mindsets.”
“Web3 has created a new, parallel economy that provides everyone with new opportunities. Web3 is the evolution of communication: the speed and sophistication of how we engage with our environments. Using web3 tools, we can transition to a better world. All ideas must be scalable, affordable, and accessible to make an impact; these are sustainability’s digital transformation building blocks. By employing web3 to empower companies’ sustainability journeys, solutions can be accelerated for the benefit of all.”
The powerful shift in Ann’s career occurred in 2015 when she was part of the exponential technology movement in Silicon Valley, bridging to New York, where she launched a remarkable innovation space for SAP in collaboration with the UN. The focus of that shift was to design solutions to support the UN’s 17 Global Goals. It was clear to Ann from the beginning that blockchain, with its distributed ledger and smart contracts, would be a valuable tool use cases in support of the UN agenda.
She believes the most significant obstacle will be ensuring that the web2 world is supported in its transition to web3. “If we look at the web3 world, it’s already a very dynamic community with many internal commercial opportunities. We must ensure we don’t leave the web2 community behind.”
Ann is pairing innovation and technology with purpose to create worldwide innovation networks capable of enabling mass adoption of web3 and blockchain to advance SDG strategies and implements for a sustainable world.
