NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

The Global Solutions Summit (GSS) is based on the premise that scientific research to find new or improved development solutions is a first small step in the very long journey from the lab to the last mile. The remaining steps entail the less-glamorous and more mundane issues of scaling up the deployment of these solutions so that they reach tens, if not hundreds of millions of people in developing countries.

GSS 2018 will showcase specific business models and financial mechanisms that NGOs, social enterprises, foundations and others are using to successfully deploy proven, cost-effective development solutions at scale. Speakers will be thoughtful doers — i.e., women and men who are actively working in the field to overcome these deployment challenges – who will explain what they have done, how they did it, what went right and what went wrong, where gaps or broken circuits exist in the deployment ecosystem, and what needs to be done to create a more effective and efficient ecosystem that can support the deployment of these innovations on the scale required to achieve the SDGs by 2030.