The elea Way - Preview

elea’s FOUNDATION AND OPER ATING MODEL

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three years of deep reflection, as well as debates within the family and with friends. The three main motivations for creating elea were,

1. gratitude for being born and raised in one of the wealthiest, most beautiful, and safest countries on earth, Switzerland, and for the possibility of having a successful professional career; 2. passion for poverty and development economics that was already nurtured as an economics student while at university; and 3. capacity in terms of both life energy and financial means (his family’s long-term financial needs were covered, and there was still a mean- ingful surplus of money available for investment), given that he was able to enjoy an accelerated executive career at a young age. The main intention behind the creation of elea was to provide access to globalization opportunities to those individuals who have not been able to benefit from them. More specifically, its purpose is to fight absolute poverty with entrepreneurial means in order to contribute to the world’s greatest challenge; namely, “to end poverty in all its forms” (according to SDG1). 3 .1.1 Access to globalization oppor tunities As mentioned above, the key initial idea that led to elea’s creation was related to globalization, which has been (and still is) the most powerful megatrend of our generation, as its full name “elea Foundation for Ethics in Globalization” indicates. It offers many benefits, but also many chal- lenges, all of which have become much more apparent in recent years as compared to the time when elea was created. Globalization is understood as the process by which the fragmented world view of the 1970s, with its three-tier structure, 2 has transformed into a perception of the world as one entity that is characterized by huge international flows of goods, services, people, capital, and information, as well as by intense and mul- tifaceted cross-border interconnectedness across different geographies, societal sectors, and types of organizations. It has enabled massive benefits, such as lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, primarily in China and India. Furthermore, it has created universal awareness about the great challenges that our planet faces. Persistent absolute poverty and