b l a s t u l a reblog++

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(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, stay tuned for parts two and three in the coming days.)

I???m new to the Wikinomics blog, so I thought that I???d say a few words about myself.?? I graduated from MIT last year with degrees in Political Science and Management, and now I???m a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, a think tank in D.C.??

I recently entered Change.org???s competition to propel ten ideas to the fore of the Obama administration???s agenda.?? Although my proposal to establish a global challenges Wikipedia didn???t make the cut (it came in 66^th place out of about 8,000 ideas), it generated a lot of interest amongst NGOs, consulting firms, and policy organizations.?? Here???s the short (and kind of wonky) idea description that I submitted to the Change.org team:

There are currently about 20 global challenges (for example, climate change and infectious diseases) and 200 countries.?? A ???global challenges Wikipedia (GCW)??? would empower us to address those challenges efficiently and systematically. ??It would have three parts: ??

1. ??The global challenges repository (GCR) would be a 20 x 200 matrix.?? Its cells would contain
   (a) A history of that global challenge in that country;
   (b) An inventory of the players ??? the international institutions, governments, businesses,??NGOs, and individuals ??? that are addressing it, and how; and
   (c) A profile of the issue, financial, and logistical networks between these players. ????Government-commissioned expert teams, one per global challenge, would ensure the accuracy of contributions to the GCR.
   ??

??

??

The impetus behind the GCW is simple ??? one of the main problems that we face in addressing global challenges is that there are too many players in the game.?? It seems like not a day passes without the announcement of a new NGO that???s devoted to mitigating global poverty or promoting corporate social responsibility.?? This outpouring of awareness, enthusiasm, and effort is, of course, wonderful in theory.?? The problem comes, however, when these players start clashing ??? sometimes because they???re unaware of each other and sometimes because they compete with each other.

A subtler, but no less important problem is the uniformity (or lack thereof) of their objectives.?? Global poverty offers a great illustration.?? Some players want to tackle it in a specific country.?? Others want to address it in a specific region.?? Yet others want to achieve the UN???s Millennium Development Goals.?? Complicating matters further is that there???s often a conflation of goals.?? For example, reducing global poverty and promoting global development are often interchanged even though they have very different meanings.?? Collaboration is far harder, and far less productive, if the collaborating parties don???t have the same end goal in mind.

Our task, then, is to rein in the chaos and make the problem-solving resources that we have ??? people, technology, and money being the big three ??? as efficient and productive as possible.

–

<!–StartFragment–>That’s part one! What do you think??? Please feel free to leave a comment below, or contact me at awyne@alum.mit.edu.??I look forward to hearing from you!<!–EndFragment–>??

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Guest Blogger


reBlogged

on Feb 9, 2009, 5:12AM

Originally by Guest Blogger from Wikinomics on February 9, 2009, 6:12am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

Following a theme here, I also like the distinction made between crowdsourcing and citizen science by Yale-based astrophysicist and Galaxy Zoo founder Kevin Schawinski:

“We prefer to call this [Galaxy Zoo] citizen science because it???s a better description of what you???re doing; you???re a regular citizen but you???re doing science. Crowd sourcing sounds a bit like, well, you???re just a member of the crowd and you???re not; you???re our collaborator. You???re pro-actively involved in the process of science by participating.”

On comparisons between Galaxy Zoo and seti@home, stardust@home, etc., etc., etc.:

“Galaxy Zoo volunteers do real work. They’re not just passively running something on their computer and hoping that they???ll be the first person to find aliens. They have a stake in science that comes out of it, which means that they are now interested in what we do with it, and what we find.”

On the application of wikinomics to astrophysics:

???It’s a new way of doing science. Mass collaboration makes things possible that were impossible before, mostly because of the size of our data sets. You can analyze a data set with hundreds or perhaps thousands of objects by yourself or with a small team. But if the question you want to answer involves millions of images or objects then there is really only one answer to this question: public participation.”

This interview, btw, was in my top five for 2008.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Anthony D. Williams


reBlogged

on Feb 9, 2009, 10:04PM

Originally by Anthony D. Williams from Wikinomics on February 9, 2009, 11:04pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

Being in Common by Proboscis — A Commission for Gunpowder Park: Art of Common Spaces project :: March 21-22, 2009 :: Gunpowder Park, The Field Station, Sewardstone Road, Waltham Abbey, Essex.

Being in Common invites people to expand and alter their understanding of ‘common space’, asking what it means to them and exploring wider notions of ‘kinship’ and ‘belonging’ as well as ‘property’ and ‘ownership’. In late 2008 over 20 Exploration Packs created by Proboscis were sent out to people around the world - chosen for their differing relationships to space and place - to use the materials included to consider and create their own perspectives on common space, both conceptually and physically.

The second part of the project consists of physical objects designed and created by Proboscis, to be installed as interventions shifting perceptions of the environment. Accompanying these interventions will be a ‘Catalogue of Ideas’ inspired by the team’s research, responses from the Exploration Packs and other ephemera collected during the project.

The Art of Common Space: What is ‘common space’ in our 21st century multicultural society? The Art of Common Space is a series of arts led events, commissions and debates, both live and virtual, which respond to the question: what is ‘common space’ in our 21st century multicultural society? As built environments increasingly dominate our communities, this extensive exploration by creative professionals asks how open spaces can continue to provide a common experience.

This festival of collaborative and related activities is conceived and produced in Gunpowder Park, by Landscape+Arts Network Services. The Park will act as the hub and facilitator over 12-15 months to generate relationships between regional and international creative, funding and media partners, questioning the social and physical implications of redefining what is urban, what is rural, and what is the true value of public open spaces.

The Art of Common Space is an exceptional opportunity for all participants and visitors to engage with and contribute to a large scale, ongoing exploration of some of the most vital issues relating to public open space in our time: issues of ownership, identity, commonality, biodiversity and climate change. The concept provides opportunities to showcase and commission new site or place specific works of international significance by creative practitioners and cultural organisations working across all aspects of arts and the environment.

The Art of Common Space aims to create an inspirational and meaningful live experience for visitors to Gunpowder Park, attracting new audiences to this unique open space and in particular individuals who would not normally choose to experience the arts in traditional indoor settings of galleries, museums, theatres and concert halls.

The scale and duration of The Art of Common Space positions Gunpowder Park as the central hub for a debate that reaches within and beyond London; an example of high quality, regenerated green space, which prompts crucial questions about our society and our place in the landscape.

The Project

The Gunpowder Park team has a strong commitment to collaborative working practice, bringing together professional individuals of different nationalities and disciplines. Over the past year, Gunpowder Park has curated the founding concepts for The Art of Common Space, which connects and builds on all of Gunpowder Park’s projects. Reducing the perceived and real barriers of language, culture, and socio-economics which can separate the arts and the public audience, is a key element of the project. As common space employs the tenets of democracy to encourage a democratic use of public space, so The Art of Common Space aims to employ democratic means to produce a work which is accessible to all. Following this ethos and the commitment to interdisciplinary collaborations, each stage of the project is developed through workshops and dialogues between a range of practitioners and the public.

Beginning with a series of temporary site specific installations, extending to a network of local and regional partner projects, The Art of Common Space will aim to connect with Lee Valley Regional Park’s riparian boroughs. The creative masterplan extends the potential of the work beyond the Park’s natural resources of the meadows, marshes and woodland, and the landmark Field Station building, by creating a vital network of partner organisations. Neighbouring boroughs, regional counties and international sites will be designated as ‘outposts’, with people and places supporting and contributing to the project by showcasing local spaces, initiatives and new works.

This wide reaching network will grow throughout the course of the project, contributing to the sense of a shared experience, be it a live experience in the Park, the local ‘outpost’ or a virtual connection developed through the ‘new commons’ of the Internet. More >>

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo


reBlogged

on Feb 10, 2009, 7:43PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on February 10, 2009, 8:43pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

(note: you can see the original post here).

For the last few weeks I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about the Keynesian “Paradox of Thrift“, which has become particularly relevant in today’s turbulent economy. As everyone knows by now, one of the driving forces of the problems revealed in 2008 was that consumers took on too much debt. The natural anecdote for this is for consumers to stop borrowing, and start saving - but that’s where the paradox lies. If everyone does that, aggregate demand will fall, the economy crashes, and the savings rate falls further still (also noting that when one saves by putting money in bank, it has to become debt for someone else in order to earn interest). Thus, we have a problem.

So it’s a case where doing what looks like the right thing for the long-term success of the economy has some perilous implications - at least in the short-term. In turn, it got me thinking about whether there is a similar, and potentially much larger, “Paradox of Wikinomics” as well. What I mean by this is that while application of the wikinomics principles might appear to?? be the right thing for many companies and industries acting in their own self-interest, everyone adopting them at once could have similarly dire consequences - again, at least in the short-term.

In order to explain, let’s start again (also used in the wisdom of crowds vs. uniquely qualified minds post) with the first story in the book - GoldCorp. The gist was that the company ran a contest to find the best methods for identifying gold on their property, to great success. In theory, the methods they identified are probably the best for many such potential mines around the world. A logical extension would be that there are probably thousands upon thousands of people employed trying to discover ore deposits, that might very well now be redundant, if all similar companies adopted such approaches - transparency, information sharing, etc. - simultaneously. The old model, while less “efficient”, created more jobs.

So fine - one small subset of workers in the world potentially losing their jobs would barely cause a ripple in the global economy. But as you extend the principle of what made the GoldCorp story a success to other industries, such job loses can pile up. Other ideagoras (like Innocentive) would be an easy example, as companies start only paying for successful results (and a winner-takes-all economy takes hold) in R&D, while numerous people can no longer earn a living. But on a much larger scale, transparency and information sharing within the enterprise could make an extraordinary number of jobs redundant - jobs companies might be less resistant to cutting in the current economic climate than before. One easy example is “white collar grunt work” replaced by more effective, collaborative technologies - but there are many others.

And it of course doesn’t stop there. We’re already witnessing the demise of many newspapers, with the hyper-efficient Craigslist model being held responsible by many people. While I’m confident that the creation and dissemination of news will figure itself out again in the long run (and check out this excellent Clay Shirky interview for more thoughts on this), we’re seeing tremendous pressure on all creators of content tied to an advertising supported model. As the popularity of social media continues to increase, I expect that this trend will continue - and a lot of current jobs will be threatened.

I could go on, but I think you get my point by now. In the long run, what drives the wealth and success of an economy is productivity and efficiency. In my opinion, many of the principles of wikinomics continue to hold the promise of an extraordinary amount of efficiency and productivity to be unleashed, which should/ could have amazing long-term benefits. But in the short to medium term, I see the potential for a very difficult paradox - what makes the economy more efficient and productive as a whole causing a major dislocation of workers, who as we all know are also the consumers, and as they have less to spend the economy potentially shrivels up in a way similar to the paradox of thrift.

Given that the tagline of wikinomics is that mass collaboration changes everything, this dislocation could be on such a scale to make it a much tougher paradox to deal with. In such a case, the challenge is to ensure that the wave of innovation that can be unleashed through applying the wikinomics principles creates enough economic growth, and jobs, to compensate - and make sure the displaced workers can be re-trained to do them.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Denis Hancock


reBlogged

on Jan 6, 2009, 7:47PM

Originally by Denis Hancock from Wikinomics on January 6, 2009, 8:47pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

The World Economic Forum’s Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai late last year was a new, unique gathering of the world’s leaders from academia, business, government and society. The Summit’s purpose is to advance solutions to the most critical challenges facing humanity. The over-arching message that came from the many discussions: The world needs to examine the basic operating systems that drive its economies, markets and societies and aim for a “fundamental reboot” to establish a fresh platform based on renewed confidence and trust, and on sustainability, responsibility and ethical principles. As part of the proceeding delegates could record their thoughts on the most pressing issues of the day. I discussed why the Obama administration must embrace Government 2.0.

reBlogged

Originally by Don Tapscott from Wikinomics 

Posted under reblog wikinomics

Edge.org recently posted a collection of 151 thoughts from leading thinkers on the ???game-changing scientific ideas or developments??? they think will ???change everything??? within their lifetimes. Having co-authored a book about how mass collaboration will change everything I was particularly intrigued by their answers.

There are many good entries, but artist, composer and producer Brian Eno???s short piece really struck a chord, mostly because it made me question some of the fundamental assumptions underlying our assertion that mass collaboration is not just a new business model that harnesses openness and participation; it???s a fundamentally new model of human organization and a new way to orchestrate our collective ingenuity to address the growing number of global challenges that may well overwhelm our traditional institutions.

Eno???s premise is that the game-changing development is more of a feeling than an idea???a creeping and insidious feeling that the world is getting worse rather than better, that the Earth???s natural capital is being pillaged rather than replenished, that war is more fruitful than peace, that your neighbor is more likely your rival than your friend. In this new world, fear, secrecy and mistrust reign. They replace optimism, openness and social cohesion as our dominant social operating principles. We will have reached the end of progress and then perhaps even the end of civilization.

The implication is that an end to optimism and a return to baser instincts would annihilate the conditions that make wikinomics possible–conditions such as high levels of social trust, a culture of openness and idea sharing, a deeply-ingrained sense of entrepreneurialism, not to mention a healthy dose of leisure time.

Here’s an excerpt from Eno:

Many of us grew up among the reverberations of the 1960’s. At that time there was a feeling that the world could be a better place, and that our responsibility was to make it real by living it. Why did this take root? Probably because there was new wealth around, a new unifying mass culture, and a newly empowered generation whose life experience was that the graph could only point ‘up’. In many ways their idealism paid off: the better results remain with us today, surfacing, for example, in the wiki-ised world of ideas-sharing of which this conversation is a part.

But suppose the feeling changes: that people start to anticipate the future world not in that way but instead as something more closely resembling the nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion described in Cormac McCarthy’s post-cataclysm novel The Road. What happens then?

The following: Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they operate on longer time-scales and require structures of social trust, don’t cohere. There isn’t time for them. Long term projects are abandoned???their payoffs are too remote. Global projects are abandoned???not enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be rapidly exhausted as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits.?? Any kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted. Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control. Survivalism rules. Might will be right.

I think Eno provides us with some food for thought–though I’m more of an optimist than he. We probably underestimate the importance of how much our collective faith in progress and ever-increasing prosperity has shaped the way the world has evolved, particularly over the last century. Now things have hardly turned out as well as they might have, but what might have happened if that broadly accepted notion that there will be continuous improvement in the human condition was rejected in favor of much more distopian worldview? And what about the future? There is no doubt in my mind that we will need new institutions for governance if the human species is to survive the 21st century. I still think wikinomics could be part of the solution-set. But what prospect will we have to build these institutions in an environment of scarcity, conflict and mistrust.

Thanks to much social research, we know quite a bit about how people???s expectations of the future profoundly shape their behavior in the present. It???s probably time to start thinking more about how people???s behavior will change if and when our collective expectations of the future take a sharp turn for the worse. Will the spirit of wikinomics survive in harsher times? I don???t know yet. But before the world ends I???m going to enjoy giving this more thought.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Anthony D. Williams


reBlogged

on Jan 7, 2009, 4:54AM

Originally by Anthony D. Williams from Wikinomics on January 7, 2009, 5:54am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

I???m Jeff Perron, a Research Analyst Intern at nGenera in Toronto. I???m immersed in some pretty fascinating research at nGenera and am happy to be able to share some of my interesting finds. Any feedback and comments are very much appreciated.

We???ve all heard about how technology, namely the internet, is ruining lives in a number of different ways. Personally, instead of resisting and complaining about the fact that we live in a ???plugged-in world,??? I???m more interested in how digital interconnectedness can directly improve quality of life. One field that is important to quality of life that could benefit from embracing innovation is mental health counselling.

Traditionally, mental health counselling is delivered behind the closed doors of health care institutions and the private offices of the professional delivering the treatment. This represents a significant barrier to care that is particularly relevant to NetGeners, who can be reluctant to access traditional, face-to-face counselling (particularly in instances of social phobia or agoraphobia).??

In this article, I learned that psychologists seem to be picking-up on the need to make changes to the traditional model of counselling in order to provide more help to more people. What exactly are they suggesting be used as a tool in counselling NetGeners? Social networking sites, namely Facebook.

Online counselling (or e-counselling), is not entirely new. (The Wikinomics Playbook [p. 31] actually discusses how wikinomics principles can be applied to mental health treatment). However, more engaging e-counselling models are foreign to many mental health professionals, particularly for use with NetGeners (although check out this grief-counselling site for teens).

It is promising to learn of mental health professionals who are ???reaching out??? by adopting new modes of engagement in order to meet the needs of NetGeners. The full potential of social networking sites as counselling tools has obviously not yet been realized. However, to provide the highest level of care to the greatest number of people it will be necessary for health care providers to tap-into these channels.

??

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Jeff Perron


reBlogged

on Jan 9, 2009, 11:35PM

Originally by Jeff Perron from Wikinomics on January 10, 2009, 12:35am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

In a country where many forms of communication and media are restricted by government, Iran has one of the most vibrant blogging communities in the world; hosting around 65,000 bloggers and 22 million internet users.

To suitably illustrate the popularity of blogging in Iran, according to Alexa.com, 4 of the top 10 sites in Iran are blogging services. The third most popular site in Iran behind Google at number 1 and Yahoo! at number 2 is BLOGFA ??? a free Persian blog service provider.
Surprisingly, not all the blogs are focused around politics. Topics include human rights, poetry, religion and pop culture. See visualization of the Iranian blogosphere produced by John Kelly and Bruce Etling for their paper, “Mapping Iran???s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere.”

Many Iranian youth are using blogging and other technologies to get around the tight restrictions they face in everyday life and are using it as an outlet to express themselves and be heard. With RapidShare.com at number 9 on Iran???s top sites list, Iranian bands are using the internet to share pop and rock music ???underground???.
Although the Iranian government has taken some steps to control the blogosphere, including blocking content and tracking authors, the internet has created a self-organizing web of communications, making it easy to participate in and hard for government to control.
To get past the restrictions and government blocks, many Iranians are forced to change their domain names regularly or download technologies such as anti-filtering software. Even some journalists who work in the mainstream media use the internet to publish articles they cannot get past their newspaper, program editors, or the official censors.

The Government recognizes the threat blogging poses to undermine their position and authority. According to this BBC article, there have even been reports of bloggers getting arrested. Parliament is also considering a law that could impose the death penalty on bloggers found guilty of using the web to spread corruption, prostitution or apostasy (religious disaffiliation).
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his own blog, although not very active. (His last English post was December 1, 2007; the last French post was November 30, 2007; and from what I can tell his last posts in Farsi and Arabic were also in 2007.) According to Statbrain.com his site receives approximately 4,786 visits per day.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Ming Kwan


reBlogged

on Jan 13, 2009, 10:05PM

Originally by Ming Kwan from Wikinomics on January 13, 2009, 11:05pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

By Scott Smith

The sustainable future will be a networked future: technology will be the glue that binds the green city together. One voice among those pushing this idea comes from communication equipment giant Cisco, which is staking the claim that sustainable cities are not just about grass roofs and vertical farming, but about using the IT skeleton of the urban environment — its web of communication systems, connected transport systems and networked living and working environments — to tie the whole city together in an integrated, controllable, monitored community.

As a step on this road to fully networked city environments, last month Cisco and the City of Amsterdam held the second Connected Urban Development (CUD) conference to highlight the Dutch city’s inclusion as one of three initial cities, alongside San Francisco and Seoul, in its CUD initiative. CUD’s creation in 2006 was driven by Cisco CEO John Chambers’ involvement in the Clinton Global Initiative, and held its first summit in San Francisco last year. This year’s event also marked the inclusion of four additional cities as CUD testing ground: Madrid, Hamburg, Lisbon and Birmingham, England.

Kicking off the conference, Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen pointed out that his city has several obvious reasons for being interested in looking more deeply into using IT to do its part to help slow climate change: not only because it is a low-lying city that would be strongly impacted by rising sea levels, but also because it has a tech-centric economy, with 12 percent of employment linked to IT and new media. With major traffic problems (and increasingly tech-based solutions) in his city as well as around the Netherlands in general, Cohen said Amsterdam felt not only pressure but an obligation to cut carbon emissions, and has set C02 reduction targets for 2029 at 40 percent lower than 1990, which will require aggressive action. Population density is a core issue the Dutch have had to face in recent years, as the country ranks 23rd in inhabitants per square kilometer worldwide, even higher if only land mass is taken into consideration.

Despite very high usage of alternative transport, Amsterdam still faces carbon problems driven by population density.

Cisco Europe’s Chris Dedicote also pointed to IT as a potentially powerful tool in helping cities lower emissions and achieve greater levels of sustainability by linking transportation, energy, built environments and other urban infrastructure, but only if use of technology itself is better understood for its own potential for negative impact on the environment. Dedicote said an estimated 2 percent of global carbon emissions can be traced back to unmanaged use of IT, and that his company was itself trying to better understand its own internal carbon consumption in order to establish carbon budgets alongside financial budgets. “You have no idea how much energy a department or an office uses,” Dedicote said in his keynote. “In the same way we know how much money [a department] spends, if we also know how much energy they use, it has an incredible impact on the way they work.” Dedicote pointed to refining monitoring and sensing technologies as the next key step in getting to this level of transparency across companies, buildings and entire cities.

Larger IT and communication companies have placed a main focus on the topic of energy-efficiency strategies as a competitive advantage. Cisco and one of its largest competitors, Nortel, have both been focusing on the energy consumption levels of their own networking equipment and benefits of green IT. Nortel’s latest ad campaign targets Cisco directly, claiming its own gear’s lower energy consumption amounts to an “energy tax” on those who use Cisco equipment. Cisco itself appointed a director of green engineering earlier this year to drive the company’s efforts in the area.

One element of Amsterdam’s strategy is the development of networked co-working centers, the first of which opened last week in Almere. The fast-growing satellite city to Amsterdam’s east is typical of sprawl that has emerged as the Netherlands’ population has grown in the past few decades. Created in 1971 in part to ease crowding in Amsterdam and now home to 185,000, Almere is expected to double in population by 2030, according to the city’s mayor, Annemarie Jorritsma. The Smart Work Centre provides working space for area commuters, including meeting space and fiber-based videoconferencing facilities, taking advantage of the massive fiber network infrastructure that has been laid under the Netherlands in the past decade. The city of Amsterdam uses the co-working space, as does IBM, but it will take many such centers to make a significant impact on working and commuting patterns in the region, and even then proponents will have to break through a traditional work culture built around 9 to 5 presence under management’s eye.

Almere’s mayor Annemarie Jorritsma speaks with Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen and others via a fiber-based video link.

CUD’s next stop is next spring in Seoul, where it will take stock of the initiative’s progress. Based on the plans and case studies discussed at CUD, sights are set high among government leaders, technologists and urban planners. With major projects ranging from San Francisco’s Treasure Island redevelopment to Abu Dhabi’s futuristic technology project of Masdar City — both presented at the conference — those hatching new mega-developments globally are feeling increasingly pushed to put sustainability front and center in order to achieve the scale of their project plans. Where a diverse set of city departmental managers once sat in different facilities watching traffic or power grid performance disconnected from one another, concepts discussed at CUD point toward a future where integrated “dashboard” views of a city’s vital statistics — a la Sim City — will redefine the nature of city management.

Scott Smith is a futurist and founder of Changeist, a human foresight consultancy, and project director of Smartspace, a research initiative to map development of integrated intelligent communities worldwide.

Photos taken by the author.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 8:45 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment, reblog innovation, reblog wikinomics

I wouldn’t consider myself a tree hugger or environmentalist by any means. However I do see their point. I bent my bike tire the other day and when I had it fixed I discovered it was twenty dollars cheaper to buy an entirely new bike. Oh, speaking of bikes and natural resources, I don’t ride mine these days for the exercise.

This waste is affecting business as well but going green isn’t the only problem keeping CEOs up at night. The list also includes:
1-    Boomers retiring, leaving an inexperienced group to take over the business
2-    Hard competition to attract and retain the new Net Gen
3-    “The need for speed”. Companies are seeking to innovate to stay ahead
4-    The need for trained workers quickly

The Eco-Patent Commons initiative that Dan Herman highlighted earlier this week demonstrates another example of businesses opening up to the masses. Crowd sourcing has leveled the playing field in research and development demonstrating that ideas don’t just come from specialists and experts. In fact, in greenbiz Julie Sammons highlights a few more initiatives that are tapping into a younger crowd.

Schools like the Presidio School of Management that has interdisciplinary teams of students work with business to solve problems. From their website: The Better World Project’s mission is: to promote public understanding of how academic research and technology transfer benefits you, your community and millions of people around the world.

What better way to attract the Net Gen then to involve them and give them a cause? Interdisciplinary teams create innovation and break through silos. Project oriented curriculum keeps students interested and gives them experience. Empower the younger crowd and somehow technology will find its way into the project.
What kind of internship program or other student programs does your company maintain? What are the students doing? What kind of relationships do you have with the local universities? To investigate this further the article gives some other valuable resources:  U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, the business portal for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, and Net Impact, the professional association for socially-minded MBAs.

I’ll end with this: my university flew me out to talk with executives on Wall Street. At one of the huge Investment banks we visited they explained to us that around 80% of their interns were hired upon graduating. What does that mean? Probably an even higher portion came back asking them for a job. In the competition for talent collaboration is vital. Think about it.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Caleb Love


reBlogged

on Sep 26, 2008, 2:51AM

Originally by Caleb Love from Wikinomics on September 26, 2008, 4:51am

Posted under reblog wikinomics