HR executives, says the study, are especially concerned over the current and projected shortage of great leaders. These future leaders, writes IBM, will have new leadership skills: Working more effectively with outside partners, serve as role models and mentors to increasingly dispersed individuals; and provide guidance to employees with different cultural backgrounds and levels of experience.

To overcome this shortage, companies will obviously have to invest a lot in leadership development within the organization. But this won’t be enough: “Organizations will need to seek out new and innovative approaches to managing talent”, says IBM – and they have to focus especially on attracting new talents from the outside, which today still ranks low on the priority scale of the interviewed executives.

At Sandbox, we’re focusing on identifying and bringing together young talents from all over the world that just might become those new leaders that are so urgently needed. We strongly believe that it is not enough to simply create a recruiting platform to match the talents to possible employers. Only when the talents can connect among themselves on global level will their true potential be unlocked.