This week, world leaders, captains of industry, and international experts across every discipline will converge at Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting. The ultimate goal: improve the state of the world by bringing together those who have power to make change, achieve mutual understanding and push action forward.

The agenda covers a wide spectrum of impactful global and regional issues, ranging from economic instability and geo-security to the future of healthcare and climate change. One common theme that will surface across everything is the role digital disruption will play in transforming every aspect of global society.

The world will experience greater technological change over the next decade than the past 50 years, and many tech and scientific breakthroughs will be applied to decades-old global challenges. The rules for how the world addresses massive global challenges are being re-written in the digital age.

One example that will be showcased in Davos this week is Project 8, a global collaboration between the United Nations Foundation, the Demand Institute, Salesforce.org and Accenture, to help the world better anticipate the needs of 8 billion people (projected by 2024) and beyond.

As the population grows, the demand for basic human needs such as food, water and energy is rapidly changing as well. Yet our collective understanding of this demand is highly fragmented, variable and challenging to access. There is no centralized resource to fully understand how much energy will be needed in India, how much new housing will be required in Brazil, or how much food China will need to feed its population.

Project 8 is a new data collaboration platform built around sustainable development data. Powered by the Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud, it will provide greater, centralized visibility into relevant data and projections and serve as a global, digital community for public and private sector researchers to collaborate on sustainable development data.

After three years of discovery, design and development, the first prototype of the Project 8 platform was just unveiled last September, and initially made available to a small but diverse group of food and agriculture researchers and practitioners. Over the next year, Project 8 will continue to scale its testing across the UN system, the NGO community, civil society, academia and the private sector.

Project 8’s potential is limitless. A global research community across every sector, working and sharing data on sustainable development, could unearth entirely new insights on the interconnectedness of human needs -- improving long-term planning, sustaining natural resources across every corner of our planet. And this is just one of many examples of how Davos will spotlight tech innovation as a means to address major global challenges.

For more information about Project 8, check out this video conversation with The Demand Institute’s Nic Covey and Accenture’s Najam Mohiuddin.