IFTF's Future Now

New study on Chinese-EU energy cooperation

SciDevNet reports on a new study proposing cooperation between the EU and China on alternative energy research and development:

China and the European Union (EU) can significantly advance low-carbon technologies if they cooperate closely on technological development and market access, according to a new report.

'Interdependencies on Energy and Climate Security for China and Europe', outlines common challenges faced by the China and the EU in dealing with the impact of climate change on energy security — despite differences in their economic development.

The report was presented in Beijing last month (28 February). Contributors include UK think tank Chatham House and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

In order to meet its fast-growing energy demands, China will need to add power generation capacity of 1260 gigawatts by 2030. And despite stable economic development, the countries of the EU will need to generate 862 gigawatts of additional energy by 2030 to replace outdated generation facilities.

If conventional technologies are used, both China and the EU will be locked in a high-carbon development model, the report warns.

But if they work together, the EU and China — which together account for 30 per cent of the world's energy consumption — could create unprecedented opportunities for global transition to low-carbon energy generation, says the report.

China's huge energy demands, low-cost manufacturing, and cheap local technological talent offer a shortcut for the production of clean energy technologies such as wind, solar and clean coal.

China has already produced 80 per cent of the world's energy-saving lamps — many of which are based on technology created in the EU.

The report recommends that EU research bodies establish research and development centres in China and increase the involvement of Chinese expertise in the development of clean energy technology.

It also suggests that the EU builds 'low-carbon economic zones' in China and establishes a joint technology platform to improve energy efficiency in the building sector.

Technorati Tags: China, cooperation, energy, Europe

The Big Mac, symbol of globalization

A Canadian and South African research team has studied the "phylogenetic distribution" of the human diet, using a Big Mac meal as a case study:

University of Calgary plant evolutionary ecologist Jana Vamosi, working with a team led by Serban Proches from Stellenbosch University in South Africa, found that humans likely stand alone when it comes to the spectrum of species we consume. Our ability to process food combined with an insatiable hunger for new tastes and international trade systems has also led to food becoming the ultimate product of a globalized society.

“Generally speaking, we eat very broadly from the tree of life,” Vamosi said. “Others have looked at the sheer number of plant species we consume but nobody has ever examined whether the plants we eat are clustered in certain branches. It turns out that they are not.”

In a paper published in the current issue of the scientific journal BioScience, the researchers examined more than 7,000 plant species commonly eaten by people to determine the origins and evolutionary relationships of the various plants that comprise humankind’s menu. In addition to confirming the incredible number of species that are regularly eaten, they found that we chow down on members of a remarkably high number of plant families known to biology.

As a case study, the scientists analyzed the ingredients of a simple fast food meal – a McDonald’s Big Mac, French fries and a cup of coffee – to illustrate how the average human diet in developed nations is more diverse than ever before. From potatoes that were first domesticated in South America to mustard that was developed in India, onions and wheat that originated in the Middle East and coffee from Ethiopia, they found the meal contained approximately 20 different species and ingredients that originated around the world.... This leads to the conclusion that “a Big Mac is an apt symbol of globalization.”

Technorati Tags: food, globalization

Miguel Nicolelis and the future of Brazilian science

Despite the fact that I'm quoted in it, Scientific American's recent story on Miguel Nicolelis' plans to build a network of institutions to improve Brazilian science is worth reading.

Convinced that science is a key capable of unlocking human potential well beyond the rigid hierarchies of academia—and outside the traditional scientific bastions of North America and Europe—his other big project has been nothing less than a quest to transform the way research is carried out in his native Brazil. In the process, he believes, science can also leverage economic and social transformation throughout the country. The heart of Nicolelis’s vision is a string of “science cities” built across Brazil’s poorest regions, each centered on a world-class research institute specializing in a different area of science or technology. A web of education and social programs would intimately involve surrounding communities with each institution while improving local infrastructure and quality of life. And the presence of these knowledge-based oases would spark a Silicon Valley–style clustering of commercial scientific enterprise around them, jump-starting regional development.

One of the most notable aspects of his vision is that it reaches down into primary education-- something that's very unusual for science city projects that tend to focus on attracting major multinationals or luring in world-class researchers.

In Nicolelis’s view, reaching children well before college age is crucial. He believes that science education strengthens critical thinking skills in general, and he plans to use improvements in the children’s regular school performance as a benchmark for the effectiveness of the supplementary classes at institute science schools. If some of the kids become interested in pursuing science and technology careers, they will find plenty of opportunities in the knowledge economy. “Ninety-nine percent of scientific work doesn’t require a Ph.D.,” he insists.

Technorati Tags: brain, brain circulation, brazil, pro-am

The new Indian Ocean technology trade

My friend Gregg Zachary, whose career is an illustration of Thomas Friedman's thesis-- first he covered technology in Silicon Valley, then he covered the culture of Silicon Valley, and now he writes about innovation worldwide-- has a piece (I saw it first in the Pakistan Daily Times; it's also on Project Syndicate) on the "browning" of African technology that, appropriately, has been republished in a large number of papers in Asia, but has hardly been seen in the U.S.

Africa boasts the world’s fastest-growing market for wireless telephony, and Huawei — with offices in 14 African countries — is running away with the business, sending scores of engineers into the bush to bring a new generation of low-cost technology to some of the planet’s poorest people.... According to Chris Lundh, the American chief of Rwandatel, “That’s the way things work in Africa now. The Chinese do it all.”

Well, not quite. Across sub-Saharan Africa, engineers from India — armed with appropriate technologies honed in their home market — are also making their mark. India supplies Africa with computer-education courses, the most reliable water pumps, low-cost rice-milling equipment, and dozens of other technologies.

The sudden influx of Chinese and Indian technologies represents the “browning” of African technology, which has long been the domain of “white” Americans and Europeans who want to apply their saving hand to African problems.

“It is a tectonic shift to the East with shattering implications,” says Calestous Juma, a Kenyan professor at Harvard University who advises the African Union on technology policy.

One big change is in education. There are roughly 2,000 African students in China, most of whom are pursuing engineering and science courses. According to Juma, that number is expected to double over the next two years, making China “Africa’s leading destination for science and engineering education”.

The “browning” of technology in Africa is only in its infancy, but the shift is likely to accelerate. Chinese and Indian engineers hail from places that have much more in common with nitty-gritty Africa than comfortable Silicon Valley or Cambridge. Africa also offers a testing ground for Asian-designed technologies that are not yet ready for US or European markets.

In a way, you can see this as the reconstruction of a set of trade networks-- trade in resources, ideas, and people-- that connected east Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia for centuries. These networks were disrupted by Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and eventually British merchants starting in the 1500s (all those East India Companies weren't breaking new commercial ground, but were muscling in on some of the richest markets in the world). Now, with the end of colonialism and the rise of India and China as countries seen as offering technical expertise equivalent to the West, those networks are reasserting themselves.

Heading east, and following another ancient trade network, the Silk Road, one sees a new interest in Indian education in Japan:

Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. But even in this fad-obsessed nation, one result was never expected: a growing craze for Indian education.... [M]any people here are looking for lessons from India, the country the Japanese see as the world’s ascendant education superpower.

Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan.

As the Japan Times reported earlier this year,

the arrival of Indian international schools here follows on the heels of the rapid growth in the number of Indian residents -- in turn largely driven by the IT sector's demand for highly skilled engineers, with whom India is famously well-blessed....

But it's not just Indian people who are welcoming Indian-style education here, with many Japanese becoming aware of the high academic standards it offers -- especially in mathematics. Rumors among people that Indian children "memorize the multiplication tables from 1×1 to 99×99 in India" have done a lot to fuel this interest, which has been reflected in press headlines such as "Indian schools boast astonishing math skills."

The schools also benefitted from a labor anomaly: "many Indian wives who come here with their husbands have a teaching license."

If reports in the Japanese press reflect the interest of parents, there are two things at work here. The first is a sense that because the Indian economy is growing so quickly, the educational system must be doing something right. Second, and more interesting, is a belief that what students are getting is an exotic combination of English-style rigor and something like ancient memory arts-- most notably, mnemonics and techniques to do rapid calculation.

It's another example of the remarkable globalization of learning that's led to lots of European universities opening campuses in China, Indian tutors working remotely with Silicon Valley students, but also a Malaysian private university opening a campus in Botswana-- not that far from Great Zimbabwe, where South Asian merchants traded for African goods a thousand years ago.

Technorati Tags: China, education, globalization, India, university, X2

The world's biggest company is Chinese

For now, anyway:

PetroChina, China's largest oil and gas producer, became the world's first trillion dollar company today after floating on the Shanghai stock market.

In scenes reminiscent of the dotcom boom, investors rushed to buy shares in the company. They floated at 16.7 yuan (107p), and almost tripled to close at 43.96 yuan, giving the group a market capitalisation of around $1 trillion (£480bn).

As well as leapfrogging ExxonMobil – whose $480bn market capitalisation had previously made it the world's biggest company – PetroChina is worth nearly twice as much as the combined value of Royal Dutch Shell and BP.

Technorati Tags: business, China

Going to a place called Lim Kok Wing / Gonna get a big bowl of beef chow mein

The Guardian covered the opening of London's newest university-- a branch of Limkokwing University, which is based in Kuala Lumpur and has campuses in Beijing, Jakarta, and Gabarone (the capital of Botswana).

It's the moment when the empire strikes back - in a good way. For generations, Malaysians have been educated by the old colonial power - either coming to UK universities and colleges or following British-style degree courses at home.

This month, the first Malaysian university to return the favour opened its doors in London's Piccadilly. The grand Victorian edifice on one of the capital's most expensive streets shows that Limkokwing University is determined to make a splash.

There are lots of European and American universities, educational corporations, consultants, etc. involved in joint ventures with Asian universities, or setting up foreign branch campuses. But this is no longer entirely a one-way process.

It may have been inevitable that Limkokwing would move into the European market, given the already-global character of its main campus:

The 6,000 students at Limkokwing University of Creative Technology in Kuala Lumpur come from 150 countries, mostly from the developing world, but increasingly from Europe, where governments like those of Denmark and Germany are keen to expose young people to the culture and business of Asia.

So the strategy of creating branch campuses is part brand extension, part growth opportunity, and part attempt to expand opportunities for global study-- something that schools like this see as particularly important.

All this is neat, in the way that counterintuitive trends can be. But what really sticks with me is something Lim says near the end of the article:

British higher education goes back hundreds of years and Malaysian universities can never match the strong traditions in academic scholarship built up by the British.

However, as a developing country, Malaysia is better able to understand the needs of other developing nations. It is therefore in a better position to deliver British education to the developing world.

In future, British education will be delivered in China and Malaysia and wherever. I don't think that can be stopped and I think it is a good thing for the UK.

"British education" as a model of education, not as something that happens in (or emanates from) a specific geographical location, and can thus be treated as a monopoly. This is disruptive thinking. Or as Kris Olds and Susan Robertson comment,

So a Malaysian university, providing a Malaysian education in London, and a British education in Botswana (to students from over 100 countries)…the global higher ed landscape is indeed changing…

Technorati Tags: business, education, higher education, Malaysia, UK, university

More on global trends in universities

A promising-looking source on globalization and higher education: GlobalHigherEd, a blog started by University of Wisconsin geographer Kris Olds, and Bristol professor Susan Robertson. They explain:

We are interested in how and why new knowledge and new spaces (including socio-technical networks) are being developed in association with the emergence of the ‘knowledge economy’, and what the implications of this complex development process are. Three examples of relatively territorialized knowledge spaces are Qatar Education City, Singapore’s ‘Global Schoolhouse’, and the European Higher Education Area, though even in these cases they are fundamentally dependent upon extra-territorial relations and linkages (e.g., see the Singapore-MIT Alliance). Examples of relatively more networked spaces of knowledge production include the Erasmus Mundus programme, and university consortia like the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) or the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU). There are also a myriad of fascinating and rarely examined spaces of knowledge production (e.g., non-profit think tanks, private research centres and universities).

A bit on the academic side, but that's perfectly appropriate for a blog about... academia.

Technorati Tags: blogging, business, education, university

Building universities in Saudi Arabia

There's a university-building boom in Saudi Arabia. Given that the kingdom has a growing population and even faster-growing demand for higher education, is raking in vast amounts of money thanks to high oil prices, and is starting to think about its place in a post-oil world (or at least a world in which its reserves are no longer vast enough to give it a dominant position in world the oil market), this development isn't entirely surprising. Last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education noted that

The higher-education ministry's budget has nearly tripled since 2004, to $15-billion, much of which has been spent on opening more than 100 new colleges and universities.... And the government has lifted a decades-old ban on private institutions, offering free land and more than $10-million toward scholarships and building costs.

Earlier this year, the kingdom announced a "government plan to open 11 new universities in the next three years... located throughout the kingdom, [which] will focus on applied sciences."

Today, the New York Times had an article on the ground-breaking of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, a graduate university on the Red Sea. There are several interesting things about the way the university is developing, and how it'll be organized.

Technorati Tags: education, R&D, research, Saudi Arabia, science, university

But the good news is we'll save fuel sailing from Asia to Europe

The Northwest Passage will soon be open, and doubtless more intrepid captains sailing between Asia and Europe will be using it. The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that

Of particular note is imminent opening of the fabled Northwest Passage through the channels of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. This shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was first navigated by Roald Amundsen in the early 1900s. It took his group over two years of arduous and dangerous navigation through narrow lanes of open water amongst thick, compact ice. Analysts at the Canadian Ice Service and the U.S. National Ice Center confirm that the passage is almost completely clear and that the region is more open than it has ever been since the advent of routine monitoring in 1972. The Northwest Passage traces from Baffin Bay in the South toward M'Clure Strait.

[from NSIDC; large version here]

I haven't seen an estimate yet of how long it'll be before it's possible to sail along the northern coast of Russia.

[via The Guardian]

Technorati Tags: Arctic, climate, North Pole, Northwest Passage

Beware the authoritarian Great Powers

In the latest Foreign Affairs, Azar Gat makes the case that "The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers" [sub req] is the big threat to Western democracy.

Today's global liberal democratic order faces two challenges. The first is radical Islam -- and it is the lesser of the two challenges. Although the proponents of radical Islam find liberal democracy repugnant, and the movement is often described as the new fascist threat, the societies from which it arises are generally poor and stagnant. They represent no viable alternative to modernity and pose no significant military threat to the developed world. It is mainly the potential use of weapons of mass destruction -- particularly by nonstate actors -- that makes militant Islam a menace.

The second, and more significant, challenge emanates from the rise of nondemocratic great powers: the West's old Cold War rivals China and Russia, now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist, regimes. Authoritarian capitalist great powers played a leading role in the international system up until 1945. They have been absent since then. But today, they seem poised for a comeback.

Authoritarian capitalist states, today exemplified by China and Russia, may represent a viable alternative path to modernity, which in turn suggests that there is nothing inevitable about liberal democracy's ultimate victory -- or future dominance.

Technorati Tags: economics, politics, security

Canada stepping up naval presence in Arctic

A few days ago we noted a Russian announcement of a new claim to oil- and gas-rich territory near the North Pole, territory that's becoming more accessible as the ice caps recede. Today, the Associated Press reports that Canada is stepping up its claims of sovereignty over the Northwest Passage:

Canada announced plans Monday to increase its Arctic military presence in an effort to assert sovereignty over the Northwest Passage - a potentially oil-rich region the United States claims is international territory....

"Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic. We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it," Harper said. "It is no exaggeration to say that the need to assert our sovereignty and protect our territorial integrity in the North on our terms have never been more urgent."...

As global warming melts the passage - which now is only navigable during a slim window in the summer - the waters are exposing unexplored resources such as oil, fishing stocks and minerals, and becoming an attractive shipping route. Commercial ships can shave off some 2,480 miles from Europe to Asia compared with current routes through the Panama Canal....

Canadians have long claimed the waters.

The article notes that "the U.S. Geological Survey estimates [that the region] has as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas."

Canada's CBC reports that

The federal government will fund the construction of six to eight new Arctic patrol ships to help reassert Canada's sovereignty over the North, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday.

The Polar Class 5 Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships will be custom-built, state of the art and made in Canada.... The ships will cost about $3.1 billion, with about $4.3 billion for operations and maintenance over their 25-year lifespan.

However, despite the competing territorial claims, there are also multinational plans for commercializing the Passage:

The Russian and Manitoba governments have emerged as unlikely partners in a push to create maritime and air cargo routes that would cross the Arctic, saving time and money on transporting goods between North America and Asia.

If successful, Russian icebreakers could be operating in Canadian waters, clearing the way for freighters docking between Churchill and the Russian port city of Murmansk while Winnipeg would emerge as an air hub for flights from various Asian countries....

[N]ot only are Russian companies keen on taking advantage of a shortened route to the North American market, but China and India have also expressed their interest.

And as usual, the scientists are the ones acting like adults.

Technorati Tags: Arctic, Canada, conflict, Northwest Passage, Russia

Forward thinking cultures

Another interesting piece from the latest Harvard Business Review: Mansour Javidan's short article on forward-thinking cultures. It grows out of a much bigger global study Javidan has been conducting on culture and leadership.

By surveying over 17,000 middle managers in 61 societies, we have been able to discern clear differences in nine key areas. One of these is what we call “future orientation,” or the extent to which a culture encourages and rewards such behavior as delaying gratification, planning, and investing in the future....

We found that societies vary greatly in how oriented they actually are to the long term, but in most cultures people’s personal values and aspirations are similar and quite future oriented. What’s more, most people feel their cultures aren’t as forward thinking as they should be.

In our study, Singapore emerged as the most future oriented of cultures, followed by Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Malaysia. The least future oriented were Russia, Argentina, Poland, and Hungary. Squarely in the middle were Germany, Taiwan, Korea, and Ireland. Even more important, however, is our further finding that the greater a society’s future orientation, the higher its average GDP per capita and its levels of innovativeness, happiness, confidence, and (as the chart shows) competitiveness.


Source: Mansour Javidan, "Forward-Thinking Cultures," Harvard Business Review (July/August 2007)

I can say that Javidan's conclusions track reasonably well with our (or at least my own) more anecdotal experience at the Institute: we have a disproportionate number of clients or inquiries from Singapore (Paul Saffo, invoking Buckminster Fuller, writes about "Spaceship Singapore"), Switzerland, and Scandinavia.

The chart also wouldn't be a bad proxy for investment (or at least spending) on government futures and forecasting.

Technorati Tags: future, globalization

Medical innovation: Could the U.S. slip?

The Washington Post's Amar Bakshi writes about the Artemis Medical Foundation, an about-to-open clinical research center in India. It's an interesting piece for two things. The first is its blunt critique of American medical research: Artemis founder Kushagra Katariya (formerly a professor at the U. of Miami) declares, “Opportunities to develop cutting edge [medical practices] are fast disappearing in…the United States."

He says that when it comes to developing a new, improved way to treat patients, he can do it “quicker, develop it better, and have the ingredients to really take it much further" than he could in the same amount of time in the U.S.

Here, he can combine his clinical practice with scientific research and technological development, all at a breakneck pace.

"Clinical research and translational research is down 70% in the U.S.," he tells me, laying out two primary explanations:

First, he blames “the lobbies, restrictions, confidentiality problems, insurance companies regulating what needs to be done, what can be done, what cannot be done…the usual ambulance chasing that occurs." In the U.S. there’s too much red tape.

Second, there’s an “inhibition of intellect coming together.” Because “provisions for funding are few and far between," there is a huge amount of “talent divided among 200 universities" that don't always collaborate.

This, in addition to "super-specialization," creates a "silo-mentality" between and within leading institutions. “Clinical applicators at the bedside” and the “researchers in the lab” are like “two parallel railway tracks that never meet” even though they’re working toward the same goal, improved patient care. In India, he says, ideas are fresh and different sectors are more amenable to being brought together to “beat the disease.”...

This sense that the funding, institutional, and reward structures for scientific research have become too conservative-- not in the political sense, but in the sense of being risk-averse, incrementalist, and overly fond of specialization-- is something I've heard in virtually every workshop I've done with scientists. It's a theme I especially hear with young scientists-- and it's strong enough to now serve as a disincentive for some of them to stay in academia or pure research.

(The article doesn't ask whether that speed is a consequence of patients bearing higher risks. An American-trained doctor working in India comments that while "India could be a cheaper option" for "routine medical procedures... one has to realize that ordinarily no one is held accountable if something goes wrong. So do it at your own risk.")

The second interesting thing in the article is Katariya's perspective on the global movement of talent. Because of low wages, there are still lots of Indian-trained doctors who leave for better-paying jobs in Europe, the Middle East, or North America. But

does Katariya stress keeping doctors in India? “No,” he says. “We want people to get experiences everywhere else that the world has to offer, but at the end of the day…we want to bring it back to India....because the local talent, the local ingredients exist to be able to create that stuff [new treatment methods] over here much faster than at a Hopkins, or Cleveland Clinic, or a Stanford or the big names you hear about in the U.S.”

This assumption that flattening the world of science-- to borrow from Tom Friedman-- will be good for everyone is one that I've heard, with greater or lesser undertones of anxiety, among senior scientists and policy people in Europe and the U.S.

Technorati Tags: science, India, medical tourism, brain circulation

From medical tourism to retirement tourism

According to the Guardian, Norway is now "exporting its elderly and infirm to the Costa Blanca" of Spain to save money on retirement costs. Essentially, a welfare state is exporting its citizens and its services to a place with lower labor rates, cheaper land, and better weather.

[T]housands of [elderly] Norwegians are relaxing in the Spanish sun and taking health cures at a growing number of geriatric and rehabilitation centres run by Norwegian municipalities and staffed almost entirely by Norwegians in the Alicante region.

The trend goes beyond the waves of "health tourists", including many Britons, who fly to Malaga for a cheaper hip replacement or a shorter waiting list than back home. All the Norwegians have to do is get the approval of their doctors, fill in a few forms and they are eligible for six weeks to a lifetime stay near Benidorm, at the expense of Norwegian tax payers.

"Instead of building a new treatment centre in Oslo, local authorities can just build one in southern Spain," said Lotte Tollefsen, a spokeswoman at the Norwegian embassy in Madrid. "It is easy to find qualified medical personnel and the climate is very beneficial to the patients. Compared to the Norwegian winters, it's a soothing balm."

Salaries, land prices and ordinary living expenses are also considerably lower in Alicante than in Norway, one of the most expensive countries in the world. Many doctors and nurses are even willing to accept lower pay in exchange for the chance to work for a year or two in sunny Spain.

Of course, there are thousands of Americans and Europeans who've retired to Central America, Spain, or other warm climates, but it's still notable when cities and national governments do it. How long before national health systems in Europe open their own clinics in Africa, or American insurance companies buy up a few hospitals in Costa Rica?

Technorati Tags: globalization, medical tourism

Getting Emerging Markets Right: Nokia in India

BusinessWeek Asia has a great article today, with a photo slideshow, describing Nokia's success in designing mobile phones for India that are both affordable and localized.

Since 2003, Finnish mobile-phone maker Nokia has been selling handsets designed specifically for India with features such as dustproof cases (crucial in dry rural areas) and flashlights (helpful during the frequent power outages). The designs are one big reason Nokia now claims more than 70% of the Indian market for handsets using the GSM digital standard.

full article and slideshow

This story shows that innovating for emerging markets like India can be cost-effective as well. I can't imagine that it was a major development effort to create this family phone, but the impacts will be huge as cooperative models for shared phone ownership take advantage of it:

The Nokia 1200 is designed for families or groups of friends who share a phone to keep the cost down. Priced at $47 before operator subsidies, the model 1200 allows users to maintain up to five separate phone books. Owners can also set limits on how much time individual users can talk or how much money they can spend.

Political Obstacles to High-Tech Clustering in China

A good article in this week's BusinessWeek looks at the challenges that Chinese high-tech companies are having succeeding in global markets. Even Lenovo, the darling of China's tech sector, is having trouble and laying off workers.

Buried in the article, though was this fascinating bit of news - it seems that in return for aid from the central government, tech companies are being forced to decentralize manufacturing (and presumably R&D) across the country. It's an interesting policy, because while it may ultimately lead to the emergence of more high-tech clusters, it will almost certainly delay the accumulation of critical mass to make existing centers really take off.

The woes of China's tech hopefuls, though, aren't entirely the result of poor timing or management missteps. What was supposed to be a major advantage for Chinese tech companies--the backing they receive from Beijing--has in many cases turned into a liability. In exchange for preferential loans, tax breaks, and sweetheart property deals, Communist Party bosses often get to influence key business decisions.

Take SMIC. The chipmaker will soon operate plants in five cities across China. By contrast, SMIC's Taiwanese rivals, United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM), have built most of their factories in two science parks just a few hours' drive from one another in Taiwan, making it easier to manage the plants. So why has SMIC spread out so much? "Every [local] government wants to go into high tech," says Pranab Kumar Samar, an analyst in Hong Kong with Daiwa Institute of Research. That might make for good politics, but it's not exactly smart business.

Read the full article

Is this a new model for high-tech clustering?

When the US government started to spend a lot of procurements (especially military) in California after World War II, it was a powerful force in decentralizing high-tech from Boston and the New York region. But as far as I know, there was never anything as drastic as forcing companies to open branch facilities.

Phase Z.Ro

As I was walking down the hill from Biopolis, I saw a little development between the Ministry of Education and the subway stop: several yellow buildings that announced themselves as the Phase Z.Ro, a "technopreneur park."

via flickr

If Biopolis seemed familiar, an attempt to outdo Western scientific facilities on their own terms, Z.Ro (get it?) struck me as something potentially quite different.

For one thing, the place makes your average Silicon Valley tilt-up look like Versailles. Each three two-story building is made of prefabricated panels, making them look like cargo containers that have been painted yellow, had windows and doors punched in them, and wired with AC and Cat-6 cable.

cargo container chic, via flickr

It's easy to dismiss such a modest place, but maybe this is the social equivalent of a disruptive innovation. Maybe the real future of innovation isn't in glittering science cities like Biopolis, but in grittier places like this?

in the shadow of biopolis (that's helios in the background), via flickr

Technorati Tags: innovation, science cities, Silicon Valley, Singapore

Biopolis and the new urban science

I spent last week in Singapore, speaking at a conference on RFID in Asia, and visiting with various futures groups in the Singaporean government. But the thing I was really looking forward to doing in my free time was not shopping (though the shopping is very good), nor the food (which was excellent): rather, it was the chance to see Biopolis.

biopolis sky bridge, via flickr

Biopolis is one of the cornerstones in the Singaporean government's effort to turn the city-state into a regional (indeed, global) center for biotech research. Novartis and SKB already occupy parts of two buildings; five others are mainly occupied by labs run by A*Star; and two more are under construction. Over the long run, they want to build more local talent in the basic sciences underlying biotech, and support the development of a native biotech companies.

map of biopolis, via flickr

Not only is it architecturally very exciting-- the best contemporary Singaporean architecture is all post-Rem Koolhaus and Zaha Hadid swooping lines and glass, Biopolis also beautifully exemplifies a couple trends in the design of spaces for science that Anthony Townsend and I wrote about in the 2006 Ten Year Forecast (warning: it's a huge PDF-- 24MB).

Technorati Tags: biotech, innovation, science, science cities, Singapore

Baby Boomers Invade the Developing World

Cabo San Lucas and the rest of Baja California have long been the poster child for retiree-based economic development in a developing country. The influx of wealth and service jobs has made it one of the richest parts of Mexico (not counting the expats of course). In Europe, Morocco and Turkey are options. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday (subscribers only) that talks about the next wave of expat retirees heading to Southeast Asia. The most fascinating to me is the quote in bold below - if the Philippines reaches its goal of 1 million expat retirees, that will be nearly 1% of it's projected national population of 102 million by 2015!

The Perfect Place - WSJ.com

The Philippines, meanwhile, has revved up its recruiting efforts as a matter of national priority. The number of overseas retirees rose by 1,273 last year, more than double the previous year's total. The number of active retirement visa holders totaled 5,183 at the end of 2006, excluding dependents.

"We aim to have one million retirees here by 2015," says Ernesto M. Ordonez, president of Philippine Retirement Inc., a nonprofit organization that helps foster cooperation between private companies and the government's Philippine Retirement Authority, which processes visas for retirees.

Is brain drain bad?

The conventional answer is a resounding "of course." And certainly a dynamic in which wealthy Western nations drawing away talented minds from the developing world looks like a zero-sum game, with clear winners and losers.

After all, people can't be in two places at once. Further, while they might have notable careers in the West, they give up the opportunity to have a transformative impact on public health systems, universities, civil society, public culture and the world of letters back home.

Finally, to add insult to injury, in some fields-- particularly medicine and nursing-- the people who leave were trained, sometimes at government expense, by their home countries. It's bad enough to have that promising young scientist go to Oxford for his D.Phil and never return; it's even worse to lose a virologist trained at the national university.

But is brain drain really such a zero sum game? A Nature editorial (sub req) suggests that it may not be. Brain drain, it notes, is still

a policy fixation in European science, a concern for at least three-quarters of American states, and, most of all, a major strategic headache for developing countries.

In South Africa, for example, the government has demonized institutions that train doctors and nurses who leave for employment elsewhere. It has taken steps to penalize those state-trained health professionals who choose to leave.

But South Africa is wrong. Its perception of the brain drain — as a simple transaction in which the recipient gains and the donor loses — is, at best, incomplete.

One data-point is a recent study by economist Michael Clemens on the impact of health professional emigration on African health care systems. As Clemens writes:

Conventional wisdom says that, because low-income countries need skilled professionals to develop, their migration to better-paying countries is unequivocally bad--when they leave, poor countries lose engineers' ideas, lawyers' contracts, and physicians' care. So the recent surge in the international mass migration of highly skilled workers has many worrying: will the loss of skilled professionals stymie development?

What's the answer?

[I]mpeding the migration of skilled health professionals, by sending and receiving countries, does little to improve health systems or heath outcomes in Africa.

The Nature editorial argues that this apparently counterintuitive conclusion makes sense:

This is not so strange, when you think about it. Countries and professions with more openness and greater mobility of personnel are more likely to be in touch with global trends — and more likely to attract able trainees in the first place.

In other words, all the arrows point the same way. Countries that have people who are well-trained enough to be attractive on the global market are more likely to have better medical systems and educational institutions, and to be more a part of scientific and professional worlds-- in other words, they're not the poorest countries, but ones that aren't doing too badly.

Finally, there's the role that these emigrants play as sources of global connections-- and hard cash.

The tendency of perhaps half of today's emigrants to return home later on in their careers is another factor. So is remuneration and the large amounts of cash that migrants send back home. These changes make the old model of immigrant 'donor' societies obsolescent. Communities can benefit, financially and intellectually, from those who have left. It is the degree to which these benefits counteract the unquestionable initial loss that is open to question.

Unexpected dynamics may not be at work only between the developing and developed world. Migration opportunities between Western countries may also work to the benefit of migrants' home countries.

Similar observations could be made regarding emigration flows between wealthy nations. According to the World Bank, Britain has more professional émigrés than any nation on Earth. But... [a]ccording to surveys of citations against expenditure, Britain has one of the most productive research systems in the world. How can this be?

Well, say the revisionists, science departments at British universities may actually benefit from the ambition to depart, and, to a lesser degree, from their connections with those who have done so. Perish the thought, but some of these mobile researchers may even do the best work of their lives at Salford, say, only to take their foot ever-so-slightly off the gas when they 'arrive' at Stanford.

Certainly this is an interesting piece, but I'm not entirely sanguine about the net benefits of brain drain. For one thing, I'd be interested to know how language and GDP affect the ability of migrants to stay in touch with, and eventually return home to, their countries of origin. Do Haiti and Costa Rica, or Cambodia and Singapore, experience brain drain the same way?

It would also be good to know to what degree developing nations that can train skilled migrants also serve as magnets for talent from the developed world. If I'm a restless physicist, say, eager to leave my postdoc in Austin research semiconductors and do some more meaningful work on alternative energy in the developing world, where am I likely to go? To a place so far away you have to fall off the edge of the flat world to get there? or a country I find through one of my advisor's former students, who went back a few years ago and now runs the national bureau of standards?

Technorati Tags: brain circulation, globalization, science

Beijing Hipsters Hit Manhattan

I had the chance last night to catch two new alternative rock bands from Beijing that are touring the US, Rebuilding the Rights of Statues and Lonely China Day, at Cake Shop on New York's Lower East Side.

The music was definitely good, but it was a struggle to hear any unique Chinese influence or sound. Most of it seemed derived from various US and UK alternative music sounds - I definitely heard some Siouxsie and the Banshees in the Rebuilding's style. So while I was hoping for more, and I wouldn't say the Beijing sound is going to sweep the world, I think it's pretty cool that Beijing hipsters are popping up in Manhattan. Who would have thought that 10 years ago or 20 years ago? Who'll be here 10 or 20 years from now? Lahore hipsters? Lagos hipsters?

Cake Shop's Flickr feed (a couple days behind, look for the March 8 shots in about a week)

The Globalization of White-Collar Work: Less Disruption Than We Thought?

McKinsey's Global Institute has a good assessment (free registration required) of the future growth of the global labor force - that's provocative for its conservative forecasts. Over the last few years the rhetoric over off-shoring of white-collar jobs has been loud and reactionary. This report lays many of those concerns to rest, and makes a convincing case that its a win-win game for both sides: rising wages in the developing world for a growing number of workers, and minimal negative impacts on wages in the developed world.

The summary:

• "The integration of global labor markets is tending to produce what amounts to a single market for jobs that can be performed remotely.
• Today that global market is small. But as it grows, the demand for offshore labor from the developed world's companies will increasingly affect wage rates and employment levels in the developing world.
• Offshoring is unlikely to create any sudden discontinuities in overall levels of employment and wages in developed countries.
• Both companies and countries can take specific measures to help clear supply and demand more efficiently in this nascent global market."

Internet, China's wonderland of fun

My colleagues at the beautifully-designed Virtual China will no doubt have more interesting things to say about this report, but the New York Times had a piece on Chinese company Tencent what its dominance among Chinese Internet users-- it's like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and MySpace all rolled into one-- reveals about national differences in Internet use:

While America’s Internet users send e-mail messages and surf for information on their personal computers, young people in China are playing online games, downloading video and music into their cellphones and MP3 players and entering imaginary worlds where they can swap virtual goods and assume online personas. Tencent earns the bulk of its revenue from the entertainment services it sells through the Internet and mobile phones.

Another distinguishing feature is the youthful face of China’s online community. In the United States, roughly 70 percent of Internet users are over the age of 30; in China, it is the other way around — 70 percent of users here are under 30, according to the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Because few people in China have credit cards or trust the Internet for financial transactions, e-commerce is emerging slowly. But instant messaging and game-playing are major obsessions, now central to Chinese culture. So is social networking, a natural fit in a country full of young people without siblings. Tencent combines aspects of the social networking site MySpace, the video sharing site YouTube and the online virtual world of Second Life.

These kinds of national differences have long been recognized as important for multinational companies trying to enter new markets; but in a world of user-generated media, such differences have the potential to drive the evolution over time of distinctive national technical and media styles.

Technorati Tags: business, China, culture, entertainment, IM, internet, social software

Good Places to Do Business: Transparent Budgeting

From the "to blog about" pile that I'm cleaning out:

Budget transparency is one good indicator of how risky a country is for business. That's one lessons from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities' International Budget Project, which claims to be the "first-ever budget transparency rating for 59 countries", released in October2006.

Top of the list: France, Britain, South Africa and the US.
Bottom: Nigeria, Egypt and Vietnam.

Interesting, because Vietnam is a hot-bed of foreign investment right now, especially as firms try to diversify risk out of China using so-called "China-plus-one" strategies: invest in China but build backup capacity in other countries in the region.

You've been warned.

The World in 2066: Forecast From The Economist Intelligence Unit

Recently, The Economist Intelligence Unit released a 60-year forecast on the eve of its 60-year anniversary. I'm quite a fan of The Economist, and have been an avid reader for about 10 years now. In my opinion, while heavily biased in its recommendations, its one of the few places where you can get a reasonably accurate, reasonably balanced, and utterly global yet locally relevant view of the world in under an hour. I never get on a plane without it.

In true style, the piece starts with a cheeky look back at 1946 - the year that the modern-day espresso machine was invented in Italy, Americans invented computing, and the French brought us the bikini.

In assessing the last 60 years, The Economist sticks to its brazenly optimistic style and starts out by reminding us that the world today actually isn't all that bad. "Wars kill fewer people today than at almost any time since the 1920s." And globally, we are smarter, living longer, and growing taller and fatter - "as one American researcher at the University of Chicago told the New York Times, the transformation is 'unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.'" Some 400 million people have been pulled out of poverty since 1946. The rosy picture is tainted only by 1) enduring poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, 2) recurring financial crises triggered by globalization and 3) the failure of women to achieve equal representation in politics.

In the forecast of 2026, things start to get interesting. By then, India and South Korea will have replaced Italy and Spain in the Top Ten list of largest economies. China and India will account for 45% of world economic growth - and by then the size of the world economy will have doubled. There will be loads of old people - EIU says look to Japan as an early indicator of the future for the rest of the developed economies.

But its the view of 2066 that makes this piece worth reading.

Sixty years hence, according to EIU projections, only the US and India will still have a growing workforce - all other developed economies (and that includes China and Vietnam and just about everywhere else) will be getting old extremely fast. Some 35 to 50% of EU citizens will be over age 60. Ironically, Britain's openness to immigration is likely to re-instate its past glory as Europe's largest economy by mid-century.

While earlier the report argues that "America's dominance of the 20th century will continue into the first few decades of the 21st", by 2066 "the Asian Century will be in full swing". The report forecasts a US that is still armed to the teeth but "won't dare to act without the nod every now and then from a now very wealthy China and India."

My favorite part of the whole piece of this relatively conservative forecast is the box that pulls out a list of "New countries by 2066?" - Catalonia, Guangzhou, Quebec, and Wales among the more interesting and significant.

Medical tourism for the uninsured

A couple months ago, we noted that medical tourism was going blue collar. Now, Wired News reports that uninsured Americans are starting to look abroad for health care:

As startling numbers of Americans go without health insurance, more of them see their only hope in fleeing to far-flung nations like India for life-saving medial treatments.

The dearth of affordable health insurance has engendered a new breed of what the New England Journal of Medicine classifies as "medical refugees" -- patients traveling abroad for heart surgery and other crucial procedures -- that has grown sharply in the past two years....

The phenomenon of "medical tourists" -- people who casually travel to foreign lands for face lifts or breast implants -- has been well documented. But the new exodus of patients are looking for more essential care. Indian hospitals welcome these sick travelers with open arms, often lavishing them with more attention than they could expect in their home country.

Indeed, the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that they not be called "emdical tourists," but "medical refugees:"

The mainstream media have begun to highlight the plight of some new refugees: seriously ill Americans who receive treatment at advanced private hospitals in low-income countries. These patients are not "medical tourists" seeking low-cost aesthetic enhancement. They are middle-income Americans evading impoverishment by expensive, medically necessary operations, as health care services are increasingly included in international economic trade....

To ensure both significant savings net of travel expenses and patients' safety, such offshore care must be limited to nonurgent, short-duration treatments costing more than $15,000 to $20,000 in the United States for conditions that aren't exacerbated by air travel; these include major cardiac and orthopedic procedures. We estimate that treatments meeting these criteria currently account for less than 2% of U.S. spending on noncosmetic health care for worker households (excluding care for U.S. residents who live along the Mexican border).

Technorati Tags: India, medical tourism

Stewart Brand on squatter innovation

Stewart Brand (the subject of a great new book by Fred Turner, by the way) is interviewed in Business Week about "Learning from Informal Urban Economies."

What's interesting is that nations have figured out that squatters simply aren't going away. They're realizing they have to be finessed rather than crushed. An interesting parallel is open-source culture. In the high-tech world, the street finds uses for things.... Squatters operate in the same way. Just getting by takes a lot of creativity. And now nations and businesses are seeing, perhaps thanks to the open-source movement, that everything that isn't a crime has an application....

Sometimes, when money isn't the most important thing and wowing peers is the main event, innovation occurs.

The short slide show is also worth a look.

Doubtless Brand (echoing Prahalad, Clay Christensen, Muhammad Yunus, and others) is right that much can be learned from squatter cities, favels, etc.. The concept of the "base of the pyramid" is already well-established; still, as always, Brand's take on the idea is interesting, even vivid.

One thing about the piece, though, that struck a discordant note: its take is a bit "We [in the Bay Area] Are the World." It describes Sausalito as a squatter community-turned-gentrified San Francisco suburb. Favelas are like Burning Man, the struggle to get electricity is like coding Linux, people hauling water to their homes is entrepreneurship.

[T]he street finds uses for things. The Internet is rife with things people are doing for free.

And then someone figures out how to make it commercial. Linux applications are a great example. There's so much innovation and creativity in free domain. And large numbers count. Events such as Burning Man produce a lot of creative things. Sometimes, when money isn't the most important thing and wowing peers is the main event, innovation occurs.

Squatters operate in the same way.

Metaphors are inescapable, but trying to understand the world on its own terms is a worthy ideal. However, I suspect that this kind of approach is inevitable when writing about Brand: the article describes the WELL as "an online community that's a predecessor of MySpace."

Technorati Tags: business, city, innovation

Medical tourism going blue collar?

History shows that tourism is one sector in which the wealthy really are early adopters and innovators. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the growth of national railroad and telegraph systems, rise of steamship travel, the invention of the funicular (which made it possible to develop mountain resorts), and the growth of travel services, combined to make recreational travel-- and destinations that previously had been reserved for those wealthy enough to be able to spend several months a year on leisurely trips-- accessible to the middle classes and laborers. When this happened, rich travelers moved on, to the Alps or the south of France, the Rockies (the town of Aspen was developed by rich Chicago advertising executives), Hawaii, etc..

Now, the latest high-end tourist innovation is going mass-market. As Firedoglake reports:

Carl Garrett, a paper mill technician in Canton, N.C., needed gall bladder and shoulder surgery. So his employer, Blue Ridge Paper Products, came up with an increasingly less- than-novel solution: Send him overseas for surgery.

India, in this case.

In this case, the choice was employer-driven, thought Garrett was offered a cut of the savings. It's not clear how many examples like this there are, but it's a good bet that they'll become more common. The medical tourism industry is growing rapidly, and is configuring itself to project a high-tech, professional image reassuring to Western patients and employers (even if its Web page design sometimes remains wonderfully exuberant). Some marketers have already started appealing to small business owners and self-employed professionals, who aren't just in the market for plastic surgery or other elective work, but are in the market for more basic services:

In the past several years, trip organizers say, more patients have been pursuing not just elective and cosmetic surgeries, but also medically necessary procedures, including hip and knee replacements, angioplasty and hysterectomies.

Technorati Tags: health, medicine, tourism

Guide to Asia Economics Think Tanks

The Asian Development Bank Institute publishes an excellent and comprehensive guide to think tanks working on development and economics in the Asia-Pacific region. Covers every country from Afghanistan to Viet Nam.

Remembering 9/11: The Day the Infrastructure Collapsed?

My wife and I walked into Manhattan this morning over the Brooklyn Bridge, partly as our own kind of tribute, but partly because we were really wary of taking the subway. I recalled my own experience of 9/11 - I found out about 9/11 largely through failed interactions with collapsing infrastructures. I woke up late, around 9:30 am, and because most of the civilian telecoms infrastructure had collapsed under massive load by then, there were no ringing phones to wake me up. I showered, left home, and started walking west down Houston Street towards the F train subway. The streets were totally congested, and road construction guys were directing traffic away from Lower Manhattan. The subways were closed. I remember thinking to myself, "man, the infrastructure is this city is really letting me down today."

In many ways, 9/11 was about taking the infrastructure of global capitalism and imploding it back on itself. It illustrated how delicate our networks are and how powerfully destructive they are, if some outside force can deflect their flows just a few degrees off trajectory.

But perhaps more so, 9/11 demonstrated just how resilient post-industrial capitalism has become, because we depend less and less every day on heavy legacy infrastructure and more on lightweight, agile alternatives. Financial markets took a beating after the New York Stock Exchange closed for nearly a week - but life on the NASDAQ and other decentralized online markets went on as usual. The U.S. economy shuddered from 9/11 but recovered as the nation absorbed what turned out to be a very small recession highly localized in the New York metro area. Firms displaced by the physical destruction at Ground Zero rapidly reconvened in new quarters elsewhere, working by laptop and Blackberry from homes and hotels in the interim. The damage to the Pentagon had negligible real impact on the operational capabilities of the Defense Department, whose real intelligence is deliberately scattered across the globe.

So sometimes in my mind, while I still think of 9/11 as the day the infrastructure collapsed, and have written about those failures (especially the telecom failures), perhaps we should instead think of 9/11 as a looking glass into how our "machines for living in" as Le Corbusier called them, really function. Even a city as centralized as New York is, is finely stitched together with an increasingly dense web of lightweight links and connections that are the true flesh of our networked society.

China's latest export: Pollution

As some member of the punditocracy recently observed, one unintended consequence of the United States' outsourcing manufacturing to China is that it has improved our national carbon footprint: as we manufacture less, we generate less CO2 and other pollutants. But as the New York Times reports in a long article, we're now reimporting some of that pollution back:

One of China's lesser-known exports is a dangerous brew of soot, toxic chemicals and climate-changing gases from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants....

Unless China finds a way to clean up its coal plants and the thousands of factories that burn coal, pollution will soar both at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.

The sulfur dioxide produced in coal combustion poses an immediate threat to the health of China's citizens, contributing to about 400,000 premature deaths a year. It also causes acid rain that poisons lakes, rivers, forests and crops....

Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.

To make matters worse, India is right behind China in stepping up its construction of coal-fired power plants — and has a population expected to outstrip China's by 2030.

While the Times reports it as something new, the fact that Chinese industrialization is contributing to pollution in the northern Pacific is old news elsewhere. A couple years ago, when I was in Seoul, the city was shrouded in a yellow haze that my host said was from Chinese factories and farms. At first I didn't believe it, but scientists have also been tracking the global spread of Chinese pollution for years. As the Pacific Rim Aerosol Network reported in reported in 2000,

rising industrialization in Asia is discharging millions of tons of previously undetected contaminants annually into the winds that travel across the Pacific Ocean. These aerosols make people sick and destroy crops in Asia, may be polluting American waters and could dramatically change global climate.

However, the Times spends lots of space on Chinese reliance on coal, and has a number of interviews with Chinese families about the tradeoff between pollution and standard of living, and Chinese efforts to reduce its coal use and energy consumption.

Technorati Tags: China, environment

"The Internet is a strange place. Child-to-child Communication is as Important as Child to Internet"

I went to a talk yesterday given by Michael Bleitsas of the MIT Media Lab & One Laptop Per Child project over at PARC. It's fascinating to see how details are emerging and in fact this project seems to be getting cooler as it moves along.

Some new details I haven't seen elsewhere:

• Scope: Thailand, Egypt, Nigeria, Brazil, and Argentina are expected to commit to 1 million units each for 2007. Total world laptop production is only 45 million, so this is a very optimistic and ambitious schedule.
  
• Life cycle: the $100 laptop is designed to be low maintenance... everything will be sealed against environmental contaminants, it has no moving parts, the plastic housing is 70% thicker than a normal laptop, the batteries are NiMH rather than lithium due to longer life cycle (2000 cycles and are easier to dispose.
  
• ROI: $20 is the average annual cost for textbook distribution per child in the target countries. Times 5 years equals $100.
  
• Timeline: developers will receive prototypes this Fall. expected rollout is 1Q2007.
  
• Parts: the "ears" on the prototype shown below are WiFi antennas
  

What really interested me though was to hear about the project's philosophy regarding the device's anticipated mesh networking capability and Internet access. I've been thinking about this since the days I started NYCwireless and was building free Wi-Fi hotspots in New York City's parks - how will the proliferation of wireless local area networks impact the way we use the Internet? Will they diminish the importance of the Internet? That is - as social networking begins to grow, does it become true that most of my communications can stay local?

As Michael described, in the early days of the Internet, almost all applications were end-to-end (today the term is peer-to-peer). Most communications were between one server and another or one client and a server, with few intermediary servers. As the interent grew, partly by design and partly by accident, intermediate servers have become really important. To use IM for instance, you need to have an Internet connection to the authemitcation server. This wont do for developing countries where Internet connections will be scarce and spotty. In his words "the Internet is a weird place... child to child communication is as important as child to Internet."

This may be the most interesting outcome of this project, as kids in developing countries build open source peer-to-peer applications for their ad-hoc, mesh-networked, and sometimes Internet-connected local swarms.

Thomas Friedman on... wait for it... The World is Flat

At Castilleja School this morning, listening to Thomas Friedman talking about The World is Flat. (As with all notes, a caveat: this isn't a perfect transcription, but what I managed to hear, make sense of, and translate into text.)

Until 9/11, Friedman says, he worked on "Lexus issues" versus "olive tree issues:" flying "from Silicon Valley to the Bekka Valley," as he puts it. The World is Flat got started when Friedman decided to visit call centers around the world, and interview people who spend their days imitating Americans-- and providing services to Americans. "Somewhere between the Indian entrepreneur who wanted to process my tax return from Bangalore, and the Indian entrepreneur who wanted to read my X-rays from Bangalore, and the Indian entrepreneur who wanted to write my software, and the Indian entrepreneur who wanted to trace my lost luggage from Bangalore," he realized that this was a big story.

Came up with The World is Flat in the car on the way from an interview with the head of Infosys. Got a leave after telling his bosses, if he didn't go write this book, "I'm going to write something really stupid in the New York Times. It's a great way to get a leave."

We're living through the third age of globalization.

Globalization 1.0 (1500-1800): Countries globalized in the Age of Discovery through imperialism.
Globalization 2.0 (1800-2000): Companies globalized by expanding to international markets.
Globalization 3.0 (2000-today): Not built around countries or companies; it's built around individuals. "You as individual young women can globalize yourselves."

[How many times has he given this talk, I wonder?]

Ten flatteners

1. 11/9/89. The Berlin Wall came down. The PC started becoming a mass-market device. It allowed people "to become authors of their own content in digital form," which makes that content more fungible, distributable, and sharable.
2. 8/9/95. Netscape went public, inaugurating both the spread of the Web and triggered the dot-com boom (some parents smile a bit-- they were part of that). This prompted $1 trillion in fiber optic cable, a huge overbuilding that "accidentally made Moscow, Bangalore, and Castilleja School next door neighbors."
3. Mid-1990s. Workflow software and interoperability allowed easier exchange of information, and lowered the barriers to collaboration.
4. Outsourcing.
5. Offshoring.
6. Uploading. The ability of the individual to send personal content anywhere: blogging, open source, podcasting, wikis.
7. Supply chaining. What Wal-Mart does.
8. Insourcing. What UPS does: "they come into your company, and take over your entire internal logistics operation." Toshiba laptops are repaired by UPS people in Louisville, KY, not Toshiba; UPS handles distribution of Nike shoes, Papa John's supply delivery.
9. Informing. What Google does-- or what people do using Google.
10. Steroids. Wireless and other technologies that make these other forms of collaboration mobile and more widely distributed.

All ten flatteners started to converge around 2000; at that point, we started seeing network effects and synergies. Going "from a world of vertical to horizontal." Says it three times. This is as big as Gutenberg. And it's accelerated by the fact that 3 billion people from India, China, and Russia arrived on the global playing field, just when the flatteners were kicking into high gear. The shift is similar to that in the early 20th century, when the diffusion of electric power in industry forced redesign of factories, workflow, work practices, and managerial standards.

The scale of participation in this world of innovation, consumption, etc., is so vast that "anything that can be done will be done." It's no longer "finish your dinner, there are people in India starving," but "finish your homework, there are people in India starving for your jobs." The only ones that won't be up for grabs are ones that are highly specialized (Michael Jordan), or highly localized (the corner baker).

To succeed if you're not in one of those two, you have to be a great collaborator (have a facility for languages, ability to get live abroad-- Infosys got 9,000 internship applications from all over the world); great leverager (can seriously boost productivity); great synthesizer (can think horizontally, creatively); passionate personalizers (do a conventional job really passionately); anything green ("3 billion people want the American dream," but if they get it ); great localizer (create local services or places that leverage flatteners); great explainer (like Tom Friedman); or a great adapter (staying "one step ahead of the Pac Man").

What's the education of the future? It's like training for the Olympics without knowing what sport you're competing in. Learning how to learn is critical. High curiosity and passion beat raw intelligence. It's a right-brain world: computers and cheap labor will beat your left brain.

Technorati Tags: business, Castilleja School, collaboration, globalization, Silicon Valley