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.

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.

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.

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.

In the second post subtitled “what has been keeping me busy,” Future Agenda is now live. This is a unique cross-discipline programme which is uniting the best minds from around the globe to address the greatest challenges of the next decade. In doing so, it is mapping out the major issues, identifying and debating potential solutions and suggesting the best ways forward.  We’ve used a website as a centre point for the programme,which in effect is creating a structured open-source approach to foresight.

I encourage you to visit the site and to add your comments.

A quick pointer to an article on The Guardian that takes an in-depth look at drugs that enhance cognitive performance:

In 2004 he coined the term “cosmetic neurology” to describe the practice of using drugs developed for recognised medical conditions to strengthen ordinary cognition. Chatterjee worries about cosmetic neurology, but he thinks that it will eventually become as acceptable as cosmetic surgery; in fact with neuroenhancement it’s harder to argue that it’s frivolous. As he notes in a 2007 paper: “Many sectors of society have winner-take-all conditions in which small advantages produce disproportionate rewards.” At school and at work, the usefulness of being “smarter”, needing less sleep and learning more quickly is “abundantly clear”. In the near future, he predicts, some neurologists will refashion themselves as “quality-of-life consultants” whose role will be “to provide information while abrogating final responsibility for these decisions to patients”. The demand is certainly there: from an ageing population that won’t put up with memory loss; from overwrought parents bent on giving their children every possible edge; from anxious employees in an efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture where work never really ends.

I was intrigued to read on the BBC today that a Western shipping company has successfully delivered cargo via the once impassable North East Passage. The significance of cannot be understated for it’s impact on world trade:

…the once impenetrable ice that prevented ships travelling along the northern Russian coast has been retreating rapidly because of global warming in recent decades. The passage became passable without ice breakers in 2005. By avoiding the Suez canal, the trip from Asia to Europe is shortened by almost 5,000km (3,100 miles). The company behind the enterprise says it is saving about $300,000 per vessel by using the northern route.

One of the ships was named Beluga Foresight.

As mentioned earlier I headed to Sydney to attend the AMP Innovation Festival a couple of weeks back.  In a previous post I interviewed the organiser – Annalie Killian – about the event.  I’m not going to revisit that, however I am going to say that the event was simply stunning on a number of levels.

However don’t just take my word for it, but have a read of what one of the speakers – James Gardner – says:

Amplify09 is the most magnificent ideation campaign I’ve ever seen. [...] AMP is an institution that’s realised that the real competitive advantage it has is the people who choose to work there. Who cares about technology and products and processes, when you have the ability to invent uniqueness whenever you want?

It’s worth reading his entire post.