TIANJIN - I'm spending the next three days at the Summer Davos Forum, called the Annual Meeting of New Champions, in Tianjin.  The first annual meeting kicked off last year in Dalian and moved to Tianjin this year.  It features the world's top 500 growth companies.

This year's meeting is at the Binhai Convention Center, a sprawling complex in Tianjin's Binhai New Area:

...this forum will occupy 80% of the first floor, one report hall, eight middle-sized meeting rooms, 11 small meeting rooms, one multifunctional meeting room, one sharing space and several other offices. The new hall on the first floor will be equipped with a large screen in the middle for the large banquets and evening parties.

Besides the provision of venue, BICEC will also provide other services in the venue. Si Zhi said, “We will add the number of existing staff by four or five times in order to ensure the successful 2008 Summer Davos.”

I am actually employed by the Davos Forum, so I'm unable to write too much here (sadly).  So let me just provide a couple of notes:

• This is interesting, and well worth the cost for participants.  The range of panelists here go from Russian President Dmitri Medvedev's Deputy Chief of Staff to Alibaba.com President Jack Ma.  Great people to hear talk about their experience and ideas.
• I attended a session today called Strategy to Reality, which focused on the only 60% success rate from developing strategies to implementation.  Excellent insight from the panelists on improving that success rate.
• Over the next few days, I will also attend sessions focusing on market opportunities and political challenges in Russia and Africa, as well as a forum on urbanization.
  
• Security in TEDA (Tianjin Economic Development Area - about one hour outside of downtown Tianjin) is tight, and reminds me of the Olympics in Beijing.  It's almost impossible to get near the convention center.
• The blue skies also remind me of the Olympics in Beijing.  Were the factories in Tianjin shut down for Davos?

I genuinely wish I could write more that comes out of these sessions, as I find much of it fascinating. 

I was told that Davos visited 4 or 5 cities in China when looking for a host city, and selected Dalian last year as the best candidate.  While the original plan was to move the forum around the country, it plans to return to Dalian next year (and Dalian has a stunning convention facility with an equally stunning natural backdrop).  It's also interesting to see which Chinese cities were able to pony up the cash for exhibit space here:  Shenzhen, Dalian, and Hangzhou.  Oddly, Lehman Brothers has a booth here too.  Ooops.  They paid their money, I'm told, so they get a spot.  Wonder if they couldn't have used that money elsewhere.

If you're interested in reading more about the Meeting of New Champions in Tianjin, you can visit the website here.