The specific function of the new World Centre is to focus directly on new ideas and new possibilities.

• The Centre acts as a platform and channel to make visible new thinking from any source. Indeed, governments might well want to make use of the Centre to put forward new ideas in order to gauge the reaction to such ideas.
• The Centre also acts as an organizing focus to set up task forces, round tables and conferences to collect and generate ideas around defined issues.
• The Centre provides creative facilitation for conflict and other negotiations.
• The Centre arranges or provides for training in the formal methods of creative thinking known as “lateral thinking”.

Once an idea is thought it cannot be unthought. The idea may be rejected or ignored. The idea may be adopted or modified. The idea may lead to other different areas. The idea may influence current thinking.

New thinking is an essential ingredient of “designing the way forward”. The World Centre provides the new thinking that is not available from other sources which provide analysis, judgement and argument.

The Centre was set up in the small and neutral island of Malta in the Mediterranean. The oldest man made structure in the world is a prehistoric Stone Age temple in Malta. So from the island with, possibly, the oldest complex civilization in the world comes the newest contribution to civilization.