Filed under: Borrow this, Digital culture, Emergent media, Future of Media, Future of Work, Futures, Google, Innovation, Innovative stimulus, Looking for insights, Macro trends, Social media, Thinking, Trends stuff, creativity, open source | Tags: Advertising, Clay shirky, Google, Here comes everybody, insights manager, Lynette web, Russell Davies, the future of media, THe power of organising without organisations, typepad, UK
Another good piece of innovation stimulus from the lovely Lynette Webb, Insights Manager at Google who created a Flickr site called “Interesting Snippets”. I’ve profiled her before and this is the latest image to her collection. It comes to us with a great quote from Russell Davies’ blog entry about Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody.
For those of you who haven’t heard about it, Clay’s book is about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures. When the traditional obstacles are broken down and we can all connect, engage and speak freely. What does this mean for the way we interact? For the way media publishers direct content? What happens when our unrestricted right to access, to connect and to speak is not only realised, but assumed?
It’s worth checking out Russell’s post on the book here
And if you haven’t read Clay’s blog you should definitely wet your whistle with a little of this
Filed under: Future of Work, Futures, Gen Research, Gen Y, Macro trends, Oz research, Oz stats, Uncategorized | Tags: bernard salt, demographic trends, generation y, Global Skills Convergence report, global skills shortage, kpmg, skilled and unskilled labour, social trends, trends
For those of you data nerds who love a good bit of research, Bernard Salt and the smarties at KPMG have just released another ripping report titled ‘The Global Skills Convergence’.
‘In the report KPMG presents the thought-provoking notion that growth in the supply of skilled and unskilled labor in the developed world may slow in the next decade as Baby Boomers exit the workforce. More people exiting then entering the workforce leads to what author Bernard Salt describes as a ‘demographic faultline’.
Interestingly, one of the common themes emerging from the interviews in this study was the challenge of recruiting and retaining 20-somethings otherwise known as Generation Y.. here is a generation that requires – perhaps even demands– transparency of leadership and the development of individually tailored career plans.’
You can download the report from KPMG here
Filed under: Advertising, Agency structure, Future of Work, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative co., Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Looking for insights, Macro trends, Research Methods, Thinking, Trends stuff, Work Futures | Tags: feeder, ideas, Innovation, innovation feeder, innovation research, innovative, ivy ross, jody turner, Macro trends, old navy, social trends, trends, trendspotter, Work Futures
Whether you work in advertising, marketing, innovation or new product development, one of the most difficult things is having to come up with new ideas & perspectives all the time. There’s often a mad scramble to find innovation examples, social commentary or macro trends when we have pitches on or a presentation due, but the reality is that this kind of information is most useful & valuable when it’s applied consistently throughout the entire working process.
When we’re exposed to a bunch of different points of view, different modes of thinking & different models of expressing that thinking, we approach things differently from the start. We interrogate the client’s brief in more detail, we set the boundaries for the strategy more decisively, we look for creative & strategic stimulus in places others may not necessarily have thought of & think outside the intellectual systems & structures that we would normally fall back on when we just ‘use what we have’ or even worse, ‘what we’ve done before’.
So why don’t companies take this kind of role more seriously? My guess is because it seems like a role that anyone could do & everyone should do. And they’re right. Except that nobody does. The reality is that every advertising planner or innovation strategist can read ten blogs a day, keep up to date on general social trends & emergent media & keep abreast of what the trendy trendspotters like to call ‘contemporary cultural zeitgeist’ but they don’t. It’s human nature to get bogged down in the projects piling up on our desk & the whoosh of the deadlines as they go rushing past. To jump from one mindset to another in normal day-to-day work is extraordinarily difficult. Of course it can be done, by any smartie pants in fact, the difference is that the state of mind needed to write clearly defined project presentations, manage clients & the creative process is quite different to the open-ended permanently curious & steadily expanding mindset of the researcher or the information geek. It’s almost as if one mindset is about connecting the dots (those who have a
formal planning or strategy role), whereas the other is about drawing new dots, which take a while to be connected, sometimes if at all.
The definition of a “Feeder” is one who stimulates people’s minds with a constant supply of new trends & ideas. At least that’s how the big cheeses at Business Week define it. So how can you get around this in your own company?
Filed under: Borrow this, Digital culture, Emergent media, Future of Media, Futures, Geek stuff, Gen M, Gen Y, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Macro trends, Social, Social media, Trends stuff, Work Futures, content communities, creativity | Tags: business week, experience the message, online consumer trends, online stats, online trends, US online internet usage
I tend to take in information best with my peepers, I’m not great at listening [although I try very hard] and I really like to see things mapped out rather than a huge truckload of words. Which is why I love a good model, a good graph, schematic display – anything which represents information in a stimulating visual way. So here’s another one. This one comes courtesy of Business Week, spotted by one of Max’s colleagues & posted on his blog Experience The Message in the middle of last year. It’s a stormer for presentations & workshop stimulus so eat up friend.
You can check out Max’s original post here
The original Business Week article can be found here
Filed under: Brand, Community, Digital culture, Emergent media, FMCG innovation, Future of Media, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative marketing, Lifestyle trends, Macro trends, Nice Design, Social, Social media, Thinking, Work Futures, beta, content communities, creativity, geek, neophiliac, new product | Tags: beta, Beta-culture, Facebook, Forrester Consumer Forum, Google, Innovation, MySpace, Radiohead, social networking, trends, Twitter
The idea of being in beta has become a broad cultural phenomenon. Many new products never make it beyond trial stage, and the trial and error beta-approach that helps Google and other alpha innovators to out-fail and thereby out-innovate the competition, is as much an attribute of successful organizations as it is a sign of our time.
But it’s not only analysts and conference organizers who are switching instantly from micro to macro, picking up nascent trends and elevating them to a must-deal-with core competence that transcends the current fad (just see all the Facebook conferences that are mushrooming right now). What I find even more interesting is how the media and blogosphere deal with it. If everything’s in beta, the public doesn’t have the patience anymore to wait for the alpha. As the media are increasingly forced to immediately widen the scope and view every innovation in a larger context as it occurs, the boundaries between reporters and commentators, bloggers and industry analysts are fading.
Some examples: Not too long ago, Twitter was all the rage, and it was stunning to see that just shortly after the initial coverage during SXSW in March, reporters were already elaborating on the concept of micro-blogging, wondering what the new “radical transparency” meant for business. Nowadays, there is a great chance that you will stumble upon a Facebook story when you open just about any publication: It’s Facebook vs. MySpace, the implications of social networking on the borders between work and personal life, reflections on the “Facebook economy,” Facebook vs. iTunes, and maybe a philosophical piece on Facebook “as a post-modern book” or the future of social networking, which, for TIME, equals the future of the Internet. It is only a small step from MySpace to the “MySpace generation,” and from Facebook to the “Facebook generation” and then to the “Fakebook generation.” Similarly, the recent buzz around Radiohead’s “pay what you want” online release has instantly led to the coining of a “Radiohead Generation” and praise for the band “as a pioneer of the digital revolution.” And there are hundreds of articles discussing if Radiohead’s decision ushers in the definite end of the record industry. The stories about the radical distribution model appear to eclipse the actual music on the album–in this case, too, the reviews are in before the story is told.
Evidently, the media need to cope with the current while also putting forward a vision for the up and coming. The time between observation and conclusion, between description and prediction, however, has shrunk to almost zero. There are no more lapses between news, analysis, background story, industry trend story, and intellectual dissection; they have become one and the same, at the same time. Not only is beta the new alpha–beta has gone meta.
Filed under: Digital culture, Emergent media, Future of Media, Futures, Geek stuff, Gen M, Gen Y, Innovation, Innovative marketing, Lifestyle trends, Macro trends, Telco research, Thinking, Trends stuff, USA
Few would deny that media play a central role in the livs of today’s children and adolescents. Their homes, indeed their bedrooms, are saturated with media. Many young people carry miniaturized, portable media with them wherever they go. They comprise the primary audience for popular music;
they form important niche audiences for TV, movies, video games, and print media (each of these industries produces extensive content targeted primarily at kids); they typically are among the early adopters of personal computers (indeed, of most new media) and are a primary target of much of the content of the
World Wide Web. that connect to the Internet and do most of what any digital screen will do.
Here’s a great report on Generation M: media habits in the lives of 8 – 18 year olds
Filed under: Lifestyle trends, Macro trends, Trends stuff, Urban lifestyles
NEW YORK: It’s not so pleasant to live in New York in the hot days of August. The grime on the sidewalk has really begun to reek. The tourist hordes remind you how little room you have to yourself, and then there’s the noise, seemingly amplified by the heat.
The New York Post reported last week that complaints to the city’s Department of Environmental Protection rose 81 percent over the last year, following the introduction of a new noise code.
For those Manhattanites not fortunate enough to be in the Hamptons, the City That Never Sleeps loses its charm around now. “I don’t like the city better, the more I see it, but worse,” said the writer-philosopher Henry David Thoreau in 1843. And sometimes that seems about right.
Due to some of these frustrations, New York emptied out in the 1970s. Declining transport costs cut the advantage that New York City had long enjoyed because of its proximity to waterways. Its manufacturing heart hollowed out, and the middle class began to leave. As Edward Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University, points out, other technological advances contributed to the city’s decline – the car and the air conditioner, which made suburban living easier and helped push the population of the United States to the hotter South and West. As the Northeast emptied, cities like Dallas, Phoenix and Houston became the fastest growing in the United States. New York, on the other hand, lost 824,000 people in the 1970s.
Since then, something remarkable has happened. While parts of America’s Northeast are still depopulating, New York is not. Late last year, the city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, stood up to announce that he expected New York – current estimated population around 8.2 million – to add more than 1 million people over the next couple of decades, taking the population to more than 9 million by 2030. The city is growing again.
Why? Glaeser and some other economists have two answers – the first has to do with the triumph of cities as a whole in the age of globalization, and the second with consumer choice.
By next year, according to the United Nations, more than half the world’s population will for the first time live in towns and cities. As Lamia Kamal-Chaoui, author of a recent report on world cities at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, points out, New York’s population growth is not spectacular. It’s in line with the growth of London, which according to John Ross, director of economic and business policy for the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, is adding around 90,000 each year, 40,000 from natural expansion and a further 50,000 from inward migration. (The three biggest sources of immigration to the British capital are China, Africa, and then Poland, he says.)
But other cities have been growing far faster even than New York or London – Kamal-Chaoui points to Madrid, where the foreign population has multiplied four times in about six years, to six million people, chiefly due to foreign migrants from Latin America, and to Istanbul, where economic growth is sizzling and where the population has increased tenfold since 1950 and now, at 16 million, represents one-fifth of Turkey’s total population.
Yet growth has not occurred all over the world. The mirror image of London’s influx of Eastern Europeans looking for work is the emptying of villages and towns in rural Poland and Ukraine. Hungary and the Czech Republic have been losing population in urban areas.
In the United States, the death of distance – globalization – has contributed to the decline of Detroit, as it became less affordable to keep manufacturing in urban areas in expensive Western countries.
New York’s advantage has been to be competitive in the knowledge economy – particularly, in finance – where the city as an economic unit has a comparative advantage, with all its cross-fertilization of ideas.
“For many years, people thought that cities were awful places, hangovers from the Industrial Revolution,” said Michael Batty, a professor of urban planning at the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. “But it’s the place to be in a globalizing world. So many functions now depend on the proximity of people.” Strong evidence of this, says Batty, is the number of inventions and number of Web sites per head, which grow exponentially as the population of any city grows.
Cities may also be growing because individuals as consumers want to live there. In a discussion paper titled “Consumer City,” Glaeser and co-authors Jed Kolko and Albert Saiz call this “the demand for density.” People now want to live in dense areas because dense areas offer what people want to consume – opera, sports teams, art museums, varied cuisine. In France, for example, he and his fellow researchers found a robust correlation between the number of restaurants and the growth of cities.
“The sovereignty of the consumer is inescapable,” he says.
The number of these “consumer immigrants” – those moving back to the city seeking a better quality of life – is relatively small compared with the hundreds of thousands of poorer economic migrants who traditionally head to the inner city.
But the “consumer immigrants” have a special significance because they are rich. They are the wealthy, educated, creative types that Bloomberg wants to engage with in his PlaNYC, his initiative to ensure that the extra million souls he predicts will arrive by 2030 do not produce an unlivable crush in Manhattan.
He is pushing for a congestion charge to cut traffic and pollution, plans an all-hybrid taxi fleet, wants to plant one million new trees, and would like to make sure that every New Yorker lives within a 10-minute walk of a park. These are all innovations that the upper-middle classes increasingly take for granted.
In his reinvention of New York as a greener city, Bloomberg may have drawn comfort from the cover story of New York magazine this week. It showed that, despite the city’s grime and noise, New Yorkers are among the healthiest in the country.
Further improvement will take time, but in the meantime August will soon be past, and Manhattan’s finest season, autumn, will be upon us. With the onset of glorious, cooler, blue skies above the city, it will be easier to overlook the dirt and crowds, and see the beauty.
“The city is like poetry,” E.B. White wrote of Manhattan. “It compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.”
Article from the International Herald Tribune (http://www.iht.com)
Author :: Graham Bowley
Filed under: Future of Work, Lifestyle trends, Macro trends, Oz stats, Trends stuff, australia, creativity
The conventional wisdom says homeownership is a growth spur. This was especially the case in the fordist mass production economy, where long-term employment was the rule for many and home-buying prompted purchases of automobiles, appliances and consumer durables.
Now, maybe not so much. That is, according to new analysis by Joe Cortright which suggests that homeownership may actually dampen economic performance in this highly mobile creative age.
Initial commentary from here (Creative Class Group).
People tout homeownership as a marker of economic success. But high levels of home ownership seem to be strikingly correlated with deeply troubled metro areas. Whereas really vibrant, flourishing cities have lower levels – New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco are at the bottom in terms of home ownership.
There’s probably many things are at work here:
- New rental housing isn’t getting built in slow growth or declining metros.
- Prices are lower in declining metros, so more people can afford to buy.
- Slow growth cities have older average populations (Tampa and Pittsburgh are the two “oldest” cities in the US group sampled. Since older people are more likely to own their own homes, this probably accounts for a significant part of the difference in home ownership rates.)
- High growth cities are attracting new residents (and immigrants) who disproportionately rent their dwellings.
They noted that homeownership is what keeps stagnant or declining cities from losing people even faster: they are “sticky”, keeping people in declining cities longer than they should rationally stay given the opportunities elsewhere, because too much of their wealth is tied up in their house, with few potential buyers. People loathe to abandon functional capital stock like housing (although it is happening in places like Detroit). Non-homeowners are quicker to move to cities with more opportunity, leaving behind a population with a higher percentage of homeownership.
This was lifted from here (via CEOs for Cities).
Many of our parents’ generation worked toward the great Australian Dream and owning your own home in Australia is still thought to be the clearest and most quantifiable ticket to security & success :: there’s a certain amount of status attached to finally making the move to the mortgage side of the fence.
If you wanted more info on Australian stats – home ownership, affordability yad yada then check out the Australian Urban Housing Institute here.
The great Aussie dream is dying. Owning a beautiful house with a Jamie Durie-styled garden is an unobtainable fantasy for many young Australians due to the nation’s current housing affordability crisis. With soaring rent and exorbitant housing prices—it’s practically impossible for young people to move out of home let alone even consider buying their first house.
The so called ‘housing crisis’ has been splashed across the media in recent months. There is no single solution to the problem, but federal, and state and territory governments need to work together to provide greater support to first home-buyers and low income earners who are being driven out of the housing market.
A lack of affordable housing is clearly making home ownership and even renting a nightmare for ordinary Australians. According to the 2006 Census, over 500,000 Australian households are facing ‘housing stress’, which means they spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. Similarly, ‘mortgage stress’ is affecting over 500,000 households, with home owners directing more than 30 per cent of their gross income into mortgage repayments.
Current strategies to resolve the escalating housing crisis do not address the need for ongoing financial support. The First Home Owner Grant and state government schemes that reduce stamp duties are great incentives to buy a home. Yet they remain only launching pads to home ownership, not ways of managing debt and avoiding mortgage stress. For instance, the $7000 First Home Owner Grant can only be a starting point when the median house price in Melbourne is $420,000.
The Howard Government’s solution to the housing crisis is to release more land on the outskirts of metropolitan areas in the hope that it will increase land affordability. While increasing the amount of available land may reduce housing demand, it’s also a one-way ticket to urban sprawl. This means metro regions rapidly grow, which can often result in a delay in establishing community infrastructure like public transport, schools and healthcare facilities.
In July this year, the federal Opposition pledged to create a $500 million fund to encourage local councils to cut infrastructure costs and red tape in the home building process. Local councils would receive grants if they proved they could reduce costs associated with developing new housing, such as installing sewerage, electricity and roads—which are traditionally shouldered by home buyers. Whilst the ALP recognises the burden of taxes, levies and stamp duties on home buyers and the long term benefits of investing in infrastructure in new communities, it remains uncertain whether their strategy can significantly lower housing prices.
One method of addressing the housing crisis is to examine land use in existing suburbs. Rather than simply bulldozing more trees on urban fringes to make way for more housing estates, land use should be in line with a long term housing plan. Usually implemented by state governments, such plans now require an open approach to new developments, recognising the need for a mixture of property types and dwellings, from apartments, to townhouses, to strata titled houses. The ideal of having a house on a quarter acre block is no longer feasible for most people, particularly for first home buyers.
Furthermore, critical ongoing financial support is urgently needed to cover a range of different circumstances—from supporting low income earners to pay their rent, to aiding first home-buyers to pay off their mortgages. Lobby group Australians for Affordable Housing (AFAH) has put forward a proposal for addressing housing affordability. They are calling for the First Home Owners Grant to be extended into a mortgage assistance scheme benefiting those who struggle to pay off their mortgages in the first few years of ownership. AFAH also proposes an increase in Commonwealth rental assistance to a maximum of $20 per week for low income earners who cannot afford their own homes or are unable to access public housing.
Even more pertinent is the need for public housing. In Western Australia, for example, there are 15,400 people on waiting lists for public housing. The WA Government announced a $417 million injection into a public housing ‘rescue package’. Yet the federal government has supported an initiative for private companies to develop public housing, potentially excluding state governments from providing public housing. Nevertheless without increased public housing, the rise of homelessness in Australia is a real possibility.
The key to finding a solution to the housing crisis is cooperation. Federal, state and territory governments need to work together to support young people, ordinary Australians and those living on the poverty line. We need more financial initiatives, more public housing, and opportunities to develop both older and newer suburban areas with greater planning and foresight. Most of all we need these initiatives to begin now or risk severe problems such as rising homelessness.
( via ACT NOW written by Natasha Chow)
