At the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Innovation and Technology Forecast in Chicago Tuesday, there was significant discussion about China’s growth and what that would mean for innovation in Illinois. Many speakers also made references to the importance of catering to knowledge workers. Chunka Mui, Dan Ratner, Geoffrey Kasselman and Jerry Mitchell were panelists, and Jerry spends significant time in China. His admiration for what is happening in China was contagious and triggered the train of thought here.
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Innovation
I had the privilege of hearing Larry Keeley, Co-founder of Doblin, the innovation strategy firm, at the GCB Innovation Round Table last night. He painted a vivid picture of the white water global economy in which we find ourselves as a context for his talk on innovation. In brief, the degree of uncertainty and change has created a “nervous time” for corporate executives. The pace of change is probably unprecedented in the experience of the human race (my take on this below). He implied that the anxiety around terrorism is amplifying this underlying general nervousness:
We face a high degree of ambiguity on political, economic and societal levels. People hate ambiguity. Complexity has two meanings: things are difficult to understand and we cannot know the outcome of our actions (because there are too many inter-related concepts, dependencies and data for us to comprehend). People find this overwhelming. Volatility of markets; Wall Street (fill in the blank for other markets) punishes executives for vagaries in the numbers, which has led to a legendary “make the numbers at any cost” attitude. People find this mystifying and unsettling because it constantly produces nonsensical behavior.
If we define innovation as measured risk-taking and […]
Rare Legal and Business Insight into Offshore Countries and Regions describes Baker & McKenzie’s excellent webcasts focused on offshore business.
Depending on your business strategy, it may make sense to explore offshoring to several regions of the world to mitigate the risk that your partner might be affected by natural disasters or political upheaval. In fact, many offshore experts recommend a portfolio strategy for risk mitigation or operational effectiveness (follow the sun operations can reduce time to market) while meeting cost objectives.
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Much of what I write in this space will revolve around the new knowledge economy in which we increasingly find ourselves (no, I’m not talking about the “New Economy” of the 90s ;-). Therefore, I offer these thoughts on the 3.x economies in which we have lived.
The Knowledge Economy
A knowledge economy is fundamentally a new animal because its outputs are increasingly information-intensive services and “products.” Many of these products are infinitely scalable, like CDs, software or Webcasts. Selling additional “copies” of digital (music) is accomplished at virtually zero marginal cost for production and distribution. Of course, a knowledge economy also produces numerous industrial and agrarian goods, but the value of these goods is shifting toward information-intensive services that are related to the goods—away from the underlying goods themselves. Some examples are:
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