As part of its Sixtieth Anniversary celebration, the Salzburg Seminar will convene young leaders from around the world at Schloss Leopoldskron in December 2007 to inaugurate Salzburg's first annual Young Leaders Summit. The purpose of the first summit, and of future summits, is to bring together the next generation of emerging leaders to envision how the world should look in 2030 and to develop cooperatively a global agenda that will begin working towards that goal. The group will be composed of young women and men (approximately twenty to thirty years old) representing all regions of the world and coming from a broad range of professional areas including business, government, science, culture, media, ngos, philanthropy, and academia. This dynamic combination of exceptional young leaders is intended to catalyze innovative thinking, global networking, and imaginative problem-solving.
The summit will be structured around scenario-building exercises in which the participants work together to suggest various scenarios for 2030. They will identify and discuss the major driving forces of the next two decades - taking into account identified probabilities and acknowledged uncertainties - and rank them. With a set of possible futures in hand, the leaders will then consider desirable scenarios for 2030 and identify strategies that need to be implemented in the next few years in order to move the world in the desired direction.