IdeaPort : strategic innovation, foresight, and futures thinking.

From the blog of Parag Khanna comes an insightful piece about the rise of cities over states as centres of power.  This has been an interesting trend to watch  – witness California wanting to sign Kyoto when Bush didn’t, or Ken Livingston refusing to meet Bush when he visited London (much to the embarrassment of Tony Blair).  Well worth a read:

The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built.

via Parag Khanna.

An article in the NYT covers the story of a group of neuroscientists on a rafting trip where there is no way to go online.

The rationale for the trip is to debate whether email, phones, IM etc reduce your ability to hit your cognitive peak.  However the most interesting part of the article for me was the piece where one of the scientists makes an observation after a few days:

…the group has become more reflective, quieter, more focused on the surroundings. “If I looked around like this at work, people would think I was goofing off,” he says.

The others are more relaxed too. Mr. Braver decides against coffee, bypassing his usual ritual.

Mr. Strayer, the believer, says the travelers are experiencing a stage of relaxation he calls “third-day syndrome.” Its symptoms may be unsurprising. But even the more skeptical of the scientists say something is happening to their brains that reinforces their scientific discussions — something that could be important to helping people cope in a world of constant electronic noise.

“If we can find out that people are walking around fatigued and not realizing their cognitive potential,” Mr. Braver says, then pauses and adds: “What can we do to get us back to our full potential?”

If you want to tackle a thorny problem, challenge a paradigm or bring to bear some serious intellectual horsepower, taking an hour or two out of your daily schedule isn’t going to do the job.

Taking an afternoon or even day off won’t have much impact either.  However there is plenty of evidence to suggest that multi-day events are very effective at increasing productivity.

(via Your Brain on Computers – Studying the Brain Off the Grid, Professors Find Clarity – NYTimes.com.)

Many of the early pioneers in the software revolution now say that if they were in the same position again, they’d be hacking life.  While this has traditionally been the realm of very expensive labs, this looks to change later this year when George Church, one of the leading researchers in the field, releases a game changer:

His lab’s device will go on sale later this year for about $90,000, and at least a dozen companies, including chemical giant DuPont (DD) and biotech startup Amyris, are considering purchasing it, says Wang.

via Innovator: George Church – BusinessWeek.

An interesting sound bite from Cisco’s Chief Futurist:

“humans generated more data in 2009 than in the previous 5,000 years combined.”

via A Sensor In Every Chicken: Cisco Bets on the Internet of Things.

If your business involves selling  – in fact selling anything – and you are looking to see where things are heading in the future, you’d do well to spend ten minutes reading this gem of an article about an interesting change in consumer spending:

“I think there’s a real opportunity in retail to be able to romance the experience again,” says Ms. Liebmann. “Retailers are going to have to work very hard to create that emotional feeling again. And it can’t just be ‘Here’s another thing to buy.’ It has to have a real sense of experience to it.”

via Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness – NYTimes.com.

And if you want evidence of how it actually plays out in real life, then look n further than the Baa Code:

Icebreaker, a clothing company specialising in merino wool garments says it wants to openly show customers its commitment to sustainability and environmental friendly practice. Each garment now sports a “baa code” – a number that retailers and consumers can input at Icebreaker.com to see how the garment was made from start to finish.

Enter the Baa Code from your garment on the IceBreaker website and the resulting page tells you the story about the farm where the wool came from, the famers and so much more.

In short, it creates an experience for the buyer, and an experience that cannot be replicated by another country.  Very clever.

“What’s the point of branding, if your brand can be knocked off completely?” The difference lies in the experiences we have and associate with that brand. That cannot be copied or knocked off.

via Brains On Fire Blog.

It would be interesting to map the number of disaster movies released with the following article extract.  It points out that in the USA shelters and bunkers are undergoing a revival, and it interests me as it’s a possible weak signal of something happening around how people perceive risk.

Radius Engineering in Terrell, Texas, has built underground shelters for more than three decades, and business has never been better, says Walton McCarthy, company president.

The company sells fiberglass shelters that can accommodate 10 to 2,000 adults to live underground for one to five years with power, food, water and filtered air, McCarthy says.

The shelters range from $400,000 to a $41 million facility Radius built and installed underground that is suitable for 750 people, McCarthy says. He declined to disclose the client or location of the shelter.

“We’ve doubled sales every year for five years,” he says.Other shelter manufacturers include Hardened Structures of Colorado and Utah Shelter Systems, which also report increased sales.

via Doomsday shelters making a comeback – USATODAY.com.

This is off topic, but the first line of this advert is too good to ignore. It’s on the side of a electrical store in Christchurch, New Zealand.  The iPad has just been released here and clearly this stores feels that the public need some clarification about what the all-singing, all-dancing iPad cannot do…

(photo taken here)

In a previous post about crowdsourcing, I highlighted an important point from an HBS Working Knowledge Article:

For user innovation to be a force, the cost of creating a new design must be within the reach of a single user, whose reward is solely the improvement of his or her own experience.

The article referenced the work of Eric von Hippel and the ‘lead-user’ theory of innovation.  This basically states that small groups of people can start new industries, and for corporations to leverage this they need to work with lead users to uncover potential revenue streams.

As an example the article referenced the sport of rodeo kayaking.

It seems there is another example coming through popular culture – longboarding.  As an indicator/weak signal check this quote from an article on the sport in the NYT:

“People are always going to create their own stuff and that’s what’s happening here. These guys are creating skateboarding and reinventing skateboarding.”

via Skateboarding Glides Into a New Phase – NYTimes.com.

The last two months have been absolutely frantic, with large scale idea management systems going live, a national conference being organised and Future Agenda workshops setup up around Asia Pacific. The next two months don’t look better with a jammed workload as well as trips to Europe, the States, Australia and Asia.

With that in mind something has to give, and one of those things is unfortunately going to have to be blogging.

I expect normal transmission to resume in August…