NextNow Network and NextNow Collaboratory

Claudia Welss

June, 2011

Founder and executive director of NextNow Collaboratory, co-founder of NextNowNetwork, and author of this blog at CWELSS(AT)NEXTNOW(DOT)ORG.

Claudia Welss worked for 10 years at the intersection of business + sustainability and now another 10 at the intersection of sustainability + consciousness.

2000- 2010 Sustainability + Consciousness:  Claudia’s a board member of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution focusing on social synergy, is on the Steering Committee and Director of Strategic Partnerships of the Global Coherence Initiative, and external research faculty member at the Institute of Noetic Sciences since 2004. She is founder/ED of NextNow Collaboratory (NNC) and launched the Digital Earth/Digital Mind initiative at the 5th Int’l Symposium on Digital Earth, a project of NNC; is a founding director, Mobile Input Device and Systems innovating a one–handed input device for mobile computing (an originator of iPhone App, “TipTapSpeech”); advises the Plastic Pollution Coalition; and is a co-producer of 3 consciousness-raising films.

1990-2000 Business + Sustainability:  For 6 years Claudia was director of the Center for Executive Development at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, developing and delivering programs on strategy for client corporations from over 30 countries and received the Dean’s Distinguished Service Award for programmatic innovations that led to exponential growth and a number-one rating for the Center’s flagship program.  Her personal goal was to establish the need for corporate social responsibility (CSR), and her favorite opportunity was in month-long programs exploring strategy at the nexus of business, economics, technology, politics, and the natural and socio-cultural environments using scenario planning methodologies.

“My passion was to help usher in a new paradigm of business as catalyst of positive social change and environmental restoration using a scenario-planning and strategy development process with Peter Schwartz (Global Business Network) and Paul Schoemaker (Wharton). This process allowed for testing usually untested assumptions about the business of wealth-creation (like, ‘what IS wealth?’), and raised awareness of the implications for business and the society and environment on which business depends. I brought into the university environment emerging concepts such as the Cultural Creatives subculture, green economies, and new quality of life indicators as potential harbingers of the reality in which corporate leaders would be asked to lead their organizations, and tools such as new global reference currenciesheart-brain entrainment,Natural Logic’s environmental dashboard and the Natural Step as examples of emergent support. My goal was to help transform industry by creating educational opportunities to explicitly consider the role of business as social innovator, encouraging holistic views and practices promoting both commercial success and restored personal, social and environmental vitality.”

Claudia was also part of a 5–year international inquiry committee sponsored by the Fetzer Institute for the United Nations reporting on the peace–building potential of global business. Prior to Berkeley she was with Business for Social Responsiblity in San Francisco.