Our approach is deep collaboration. Life is a team sport - we always work in partnership.

Innovation is accelerating as a direct result of expanding connectivity among people, machines, tools, code, and data. Yet too often, whole sectors operate as if little has changed. There is an urgent need to upgrade now.

We team up with local / national / global business, venture, philanthropy, civil society, public institutions, and entrepreneurs, including youth, to tackle our hardest challenges.

Economic Uplift

Tech Jobs Tour, created by Leanne Pittsford, brings together a broad range of non-traditional talent with companies who need their skills the most; connecting current and next generation innovation talent. In 2017, America had over 600,000 open tech jobs -- this number grew to over 1 million by 2020. At the same time over 60% of all new coders, engineers, and data scientists have been emerging from bootcamps and industry-current vocational schools.

Visibility & Belonging

Ground-breaking research in recent years analyzing hundreds of films has shown the starkness of the problem of representation. It’s time to tell the whole story – all people are now and have always been central characters. Upgrading what we see on screen is critical for changing society’s understanding of everyone’s fundamental capacity in life, including changing each individual’s expectations of and confidence in their own capabilities. Methods with examples shared for upgrading workplaces, media, algorithms to create more belonging and drive for expanded creative confidence.

Thriving Ecologies

We began by collaborating with Navajo and Lakota Sioux colleagues. Many Native American communities have unemployment rates that are among the highest in the country, and are working to build local economies that are self-sustaining, and not heavily dependent on extractive industries. Culturally cognizant, creative, patient enterprise development support is needed to accelerate transformation, led by solution-makers from the communities. Thriving ecology teamwork has further expanded into environmental data science projects, data storytelling, and youth empowerment collaborations.

Solution Making

The United Nations Solutions Summit was co-created in 2015 by shift7 co-founders Megan Smith and Puneet Ahira, with the United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service (UN-NGLS) then led by Susan Alzner, and the United Nations Foundation. The first UN Solutions Summit immediately followed the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals by all UN Member States, demonstrating that people already have extraordinary solutions in progress to our most complex challenges. For 5 years the summit brought talented innovations to the annual UN General Assembly (UNGA). The 5th Annual Solutions Summit took place at UN General Assembly High Level week in September 2019. Today the vast majority of those 65+ solution makes showcased across 5-years are active. This ‘scout & scale’ acceleration approach can more rapidly help us all solve some of our greatest challenges.

Explore Archive / Media & Collected Works

Let’s unlock collective genius and generate efficiency to transform geographies, reinvigorate industries, empower talent, and leverage a broad set of business models. shift7 means solution making through inclusion. 8+ billion people, 7 continents… let’s go.