The document appears to be from a Technology Horizons Program held by the Institute for the Future in November 2012. It discusses topics around creativity with Chinese characteristics, including creative chaos in China, manufacturing as a global creativity accelerator, and Chinese manufacturing and the maker movement. Specific subtopics mentioned include national myths of creativity across cultures, craft thinking, good design as good business, makers as creative communities of hope, incubators, and markets for Chinese creatives.
This Emergency Communications System is portable and can be set up and disassembled by one individual in less then an hour and provide Wireless, Secure and Encrypted Communications for up to 500 users in a 42 sq miles radius.Daughter sites can be added on which can increase coverage and provide an additional 84 sq miles and additional 1,000 users. This system was designed for rapid deployment purposes and is to be used for a multitude of Emergency situations as is the case with Civil Disturbances,Military and Law Enforcement purposes and Natural Disasters such as Earthquakes,Floods and Hurricanes!
Innomantra - Patent Portfolio of Electric Cars - 2015 ver 1.0F2Innomantra
The purpose of this study is to analyze the importance given by selected major automobile companies in the electric car segment to innovation, based on their Patent Portfolios. Apart from providing an account of innovation and technological development taking place in the automobile, specifically to electric car segment, the analysis of the patenting activity provides an insight into the current trends in the intellectual property generation activity. The study summarizes results of the research that was conducted on Toyota Motor Corporation, Tesla Motor Inc., The Ford Motor Company, Nissan Motor Company Ltd and General Motors Company.
This report covers filing trends of the above mentioned companies along with status of Patents, International Patent Classification and Priority Date. The study also provides the filing trends and status in the field of engineering to which they belong, along with details of all Patents filed by these companies since 2008.
The electric car industry is still in the nascent stage of growth. The electric car market is majorly concentrated in US and Japanese market. There is an increasing trend in the formation of Joint Ventures in research of electric battery technology by the automobile companies. Electronic and electronic components manufacturing companies like Samsung are filing patents in the electric car segment. This shows that electronic companies are planning to enter the electric automobile market. Developing low cost batteries, providing long range and government support are essential for success of mass-market electric vehicle industry.
The major automobile companies have filed patents in electrical machinery and transport segments. This shows that the investment is majorly done in battery and power train technologies. Though Tesla motors started recently in 2003, it is competing with top automobile companies like Toyota, Nissan, Ford and General Motors which were established nearly 100 years ago. Tesla patents are referred by all the major automobile companies and automobile component manufacturing companies. Tesla motors are followed by General motors which show that GM considers Tesla a direct competitor for the company in the electric car segment. Tesla motors did not cite any other patents filed by other automobile companies. This shows that Tesla motors is leading other automobile companies in technology research. Toyota motors have cited patents of all the other major automobile companies which shows that Toyota is following technological research of all the other major automobile companies.
This Emergency Communications System is portable and can be set up and disassembled by one individual in less then an hour and provide Wireless, Secure and Encrypted Communications for up to 500 users in a 42 sq miles radius.Daughter sites can be added on which can increase coverage and provide an additional 84 sq miles and additional 1,000 users. This system was designed for rapid deployment purposes and is to be used for a multitude of Emergency situations as is the case with Civil Disturbances,Military and Law Enforcement purposes and Natural Disasters such as Earthquakes,Floods and Hurricanes!
Innomantra - Patent Portfolio of Electric Cars - 2015 ver 1.0F2Innomantra
The purpose of this study is to analyze the importance given by selected major automobile companies in the electric car segment to innovation, based on their Patent Portfolios. Apart from providing an account of innovation and technological development taking place in the automobile, specifically to electric car segment, the analysis of the patenting activity provides an insight into the current trends in the intellectual property generation activity. The study summarizes results of the research that was conducted on Toyota Motor Corporation, Tesla Motor Inc., The Ford Motor Company, Nissan Motor Company Ltd and General Motors Company.
This report covers filing trends of the above mentioned companies along with status of Patents, International Patent Classification and Priority Date. The study also provides the filing trends and status in the field of engineering to which they belong, along with details of all Patents filed by these companies since 2008.
The electric car industry is still in the nascent stage of growth. The electric car market is majorly concentrated in US and Japanese market. There is an increasing trend in the formation of Joint Ventures in research of electric battery technology by the automobile companies. Electronic and electronic components manufacturing companies like Samsung are filing patents in the electric car segment. This shows that electronic companies are planning to enter the electric automobile market. Developing low cost batteries, providing long range and government support are essential for success of mass-market electric vehicle industry.
The major automobile companies have filed patents in electrical machinery and transport segments. This shows that the investment is majorly done in battery and power train technologies. Though Tesla motors started recently in 2003, it is competing with top automobile companies like Toyota, Nissan, Ford and General Motors which were established nearly 100 years ago. Tesla patents are referred by all the major automobile companies and automobile component manufacturing companies. Tesla motors are followed by General motors which show that GM considers Tesla a direct competitor for the company in the electric car segment. Tesla motors did not cite any other patents filed by other automobile companies. This shows that Tesla motors is leading other automobile companies in technology research. Toyota motors have cited patents of all the other major automobile companies which shows that Toyota is following technological research of all the other major automobile companies.
Short Workshop on Transforming Ideas to Intellectual PropertyInnomantra
“Intellectual Property is the Cinderella of modern organisation by revealing her true value swept her to prominence”
Every organization form a startup to multinational has a reason for being. It might be a unique ability to offer a particular product or service, or it might arise from having been in the right place at the right time with certain set of capabilities. But at its core, your organisation probably relies on Intellectual Property (IP) far more than one can imagine.
The knowledge and their ability to innovate are frequently the differentiator between organizations that succeed and those that fail. Physical assets and traditional sources of competitive advantage such as manufacturing capability or location have far less relevance. The value of many of the world’s largest organisations is increasingly vested in knowledge-based, innovation driven and intangible assets. An economy based on these assets is often known as ‘Innovation Economy’.
CII's The Seventh Innovation Summit 2011 - Programme AgendaInnomantra
Mr.Hein De Keyzer, CEO, CogniStreamer, Belgium & Mr.DeepuChandran, Director & Co-Founder, Innomantra Consulting Private Limited are speaking at the conference.
Agenda for the final 3-day workshop for the pilot ALICT course, organized by Gesci.org at the African Union Headquarters. About 70 participants from 5 different countries in souther and eastern Africa.
Phóng viên tạp chí công nghệ được sự cho phép của bạn Cường nói lên thực trạng SEO trong cuộc thi IDOL năm 2013 bằng câu chuyện rất trung thực và rất sát với thực tế. Qua đó SEO thời tam quốc đã cho phép bác cường diễn tả sự khốc liệt của cuộc thi SEO IDOL năm nay.
http://tapchicongnghe.vn/seo-thoi-tam-quoc.html
Hannah Fox, Silk Mill Project Director, Derby Museums Trust
ow tech, hi-tech, bi-tech, little tech – whatever the type of scale, technology provides the tools, methods and materials… but it’s what we do with them that counts. In a world where museums need to push boundaries and our comfort levels to survive and thrive, how might we use these tools and human-centred design to disrupt the form of designing and making our museums in ways that ensure they have relevance and sustainability.
Hannah will share the internationally-acclaimed approaches being used by Derby Museums to develop their sites and programmes – including their redevelopment of the Silk Mill, site of the world’s first factory, as the Museum of Making – challenging us to expand perspectives on what ‘makes a museum’.
Hannah is the Project Director for the re-development of Derby Silk Mill; the site of the world’s first factory; as a new Museum of Making. By embedding co-production and human centred design methodologies into a major museum development, citizen curators and makers are at the heart of the £17m project to ‘make’ the Museum of Making. This project features in several national and international publications, including Nina Simon’s latest book “The Art of Relevance”. Hannah is a National Arts Strategies Creative Communities Fellow – a global network of cultural and social entrepreneurs, She also mentors staff and organisations working in cross-sector projects for social impact and is a board member of FIGMENT, a global participatory arts programme.
Short Workshop on Transforming Ideas to Intellectual PropertyInnomantra
“Intellectual Property is the Cinderella of modern organisation by revealing her true value swept her to prominence”
Every organization form a startup to multinational has a reason for being. It might be a unique ability to offer a particular product or service, or it might arise from having been in the right place at the right time with certain set of capabilities. But at its core, your organisation probably relies on Intellectual Property (IP) far more than one can imagine.
The knowledge and their ability to innovate are frequently the differentiator between organizations that succeed and those that fail. Physical assets and traditional sources of competitive advantage such as manufacturing capability or location have far less relevance. The value of many of the world’s largest organisations is increasingly vested in knowledge-based, innovation driven and intangible assets. An economy based on these assets is often known as ‘Innovation Economy’.
CII's The Seventh Innovation Summit 2011 - Programme AgendaInnomantra
Mr.Hein De Keyzer, CEO, CogniStreamer, Belgium & Mr.DeepuChandran, Director & Co-Founder, Innomantra Consulting Private Limited are speaking at the conference.
Agenda for the final 3-day workshop for the pilot ALICT course, organized by Gesci.org at the African Union Headquarters. About 70 participants from 5 different countries in souther and eastern Africa.
Phóng viên tạp chí công nghệ được sự cho phép của bạn Cường nói lên thực trạng SEO trong cuộc thi IDOL năm 2013 bằng câu chuyện rất trung thực và rất sát với thực tế. Qua đó SEO thời tam quốc đã cho phép bác cường diễn tả sự khốc liệt của cuộc thi SEO IDOL năm nay.
http://tapchicongnghe.vn/seo-thoi-tam-quoc.html
Hannah Fox, Silk Mill Project Director, Derby Museums Trust
ow tech, hi-tech, bi-tech, little tech – whatever the type of scale, technology provides the tools, methods and materials… but it’s what we do with them that counts. In a world where museums need to push boundaries and our comfort levels to survive and thrive, how might we use these tools and human-centred design to disrupt the form of designing and making our museums in ways that ensure they have relevance and sustainability.
Hannah will share the internationally-acclaimed approaches being used by Derby Museums to develop their sites and programmes – including their redevelopment of the Silk Mill, site of the world’s first factory, as the Museum of Making – challenging us to expand perspectives on what ‘makes a museum’.
Hannah is the Project Director for the re-development of Derby Silk Mill; the site of the world’s first factory; as a new Museum of Making. By embedding co-production and human centred design methodologies into a major museum development, citizen curators and makers are at the heart of the £17m project to ‘make’ the Museum of Making. This project features in several national and international publications, including Nina Simon’s latest book “The Art of Relevance”. Hannah is a National Arts Strategies Creative Communities Fellow – a global network of cultural and social entrepreneurs, She also mentors staff and organisations working in cross-sector projects for social impact and is a board member of FIGMENT, a global participatory arts programme.
Young Influencers are working on a project to bring the Bank of Invention to Belfast.
A collaborative working space in the heart of the city.
www.younginfluencers.org
Structuring Serendipitous Collaboration - Nick Inglis keynote @ ARMA Canada 2021Nick Inglis
Get comfortable being uncomfortable and drive yourself and your organization forward by structuring serendipitous collaboration. This was a keynote by Nick Inglis at ARMA Canada Information Conference 2021.
> What are the opportunities in non-Western civilizations? Can they build global innovative products and services? Can the next Steve Jobs be Brazilian?
> Talk given at TEDxFIAP in Sao Paulo in November 2011.
The End of Normal: When Brands and Memes CollideBackslash
How can brands compete for attention in a world dominated by Tide Pods and Yodel Boy? Backslash speaks with TBWA's Chris Garbutt, McDonalds' Colin Mitchell, Cultural Connoisseur Sean Monahan and the Co-Founders of Meme Insider.
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions is the monthly e-newsletter for the United Nations Development Programme’s South-South Cooperation Unit (www.southerninnovator.org). It has been published every month since 2006.
Stories by David South
Design and Layout: UNDP South-South Cooperation Unit
Follow @SouthSouth1
What happens when the web2.0 architecture of participation meets the marginalised? What are the trends in web-enabled social innovation, and how can we encourage them.
Corporate culture is a lot like art. It’s hard to define but you know a masterpiece when you see it. Uncover how U.S. employers can develop strategies center on learning and education, employee recognition and leadership development to nurture a culture that employees want to be part of. With these three essential elements of corporate culture, your organization will engage talent, drive success and improve the work life experience.
Deloitte's 2016 Human Capital Trends Report found that 86% of executives believe culture is important, and 50% of companies are attempting to change their culture in response to shifting talent markets and increased competition.
As the world of work rapidly evolves, power is shifting from employer to employee. Employees push organizations to be better every day; they demand that employers create an environment they want to work in. Employees look for great culture to improve life at work and away from work.
The Art of Creating a Standout Culture SlideShare presentation explores why culture should be top of mind for executives.
Maker cities in Asia, Middle-East, Europe and America, by Innovation is Every...Innovation is Everywhere
Cities are the future of mankind, with 60% of the world population expected to live there by 2030. In these cities, makers could be the key to innovation, as local agent with expertise and community power to change things. This is, in a nutshell, the basis of the Institute For The Future (IFTF) project MakerCities. While in Shenzhen for the Maker Faire, the team delighted us with a series of 11 short speeches from as many cities represented by one of their makers.
Of course, you can't expect Beirut to sound exactly the same than Kathmandu or Singapore, but still, it's pretty interesting to compare how all these tech activists are organizing their communities and try to hack the city for the better.
So you will find here the review of ALL the speakers we've had the opportunity to listen to and discuss with in Shenzhen, representing, in addition to the above cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, London, New York, Hong Kong and Yogyakarta in Indonesia.
The concept of "making" is clearly an umbrella for a lot of different things. People talked about democracy, about immigrants mixing in urban areas, about creativity and arts. They also talked about data, life sciences and different generations, youths or the elderly.
If you want to know more about the project, just connect to MakerCities.net, designed as an open-source platform where you can also push content about how your own city is a maker city in its own way, small or big, arty or techy, as we suspect that makers, maybe more than the usual software engineer, is one of the keys to reactivate participation in political and local life with a meaning.
Corporate culture is a lot like art. It’s hard to define but you know a masterpiece when you see it. Uncover how Canadian employers can develop strategies center on learning and education, employee recognition and leadership development to nurture a culture that employees want to be part of. With these three essential elements of corporate culture, your organization will engage talent, drive success and improve the work life experience.
Deloitte's 2016 Human Capital Trends Report found that 86% of executives believe culture is important, and 50% of companies are attempting to change their culture in response to shifting talent markets and increased competition.
As the world of work rapidly evolves, power is shifting from employer to employee. Employees push organizations to be better every day; they demand that employers create an environment they want to work in. Employees look for great culture to improve life at work and away from work.
The Art of Creating a Standout Culture SlideShare presentation explores why culture should be top of mind for executives.
Templates and process for a half day signals sharing workshop for country teams working on the pilot ALICT course.
http://gesci.org/african-leadership-in-ict-alict.html
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Generating a custom Ruby SDK for your web service or Rails API using Smithyg2nightmarescribd
Have you ever wanted a Ruby client API to communicate with your web service? Smithy is a protocol-agnostic language for defining services and SDKs. Smithy Ruby is an implementation of Smithy that generates a Ruby SDK using a Smithy model. In this talk, we will explore Smithy and Smithy Ruby to learn how to generate custom feature-rich SDKs that can communicate with any web service, such as a Rails JSON API.
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
How world-class product teams are winning in the AI era by CEO and Founder, P...
Creativity with Chinese Characteristics
1. Technology Horizons Program
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
November 7–8, 2012
creative chaos with Chinese
characteristics
manufacturing as a global
creativity accelerator
Lyn Jeffery | Research Director
4. “looking for piraters”
5000 is way
too much
for white
collar
workers like
us to
handle.
Once
again, let’s
beg the
great
piraters.
Let’s
pirate, pirat
e, pirate!
4
5000 is way
too much
for white
collar
workers like
us to
handle.
Once again,
let’s beg the
great
piraters.
Let’s pirate,
pirate,
pirate!
23. Technology Horizons Program
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
November 7–8, 2012
creative chaos with Chinese
characteristics
manufacturing as a global
creativity accelerator
Lyn Jeffery | Research Director
Editor's Notes
Any fashionistas in the crowd recognize these shoes? They are sneakers from French designer Isabel Marant’s fall 2011 collection and they cost $600-700 online, $800 in China. Way more than the average fashion conscious young Chinese woman could ever afford. But that’s no problem.
If you live in China, and you’re an especially entrepreneurial sort of person, you might put out a call on one of the popular online fashion forums like Hers.com, like this person named Summer19543 did early this year. She loves the Isabel Marant sneakers, but
http://bbs.hers.com.cn/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=5779070&extra=&highlight=%E6%B1%82%E5%B1%B1%E4%B8%BB&page=15000 RMB is way too much, she writes, for white collar workers like us to handle. Once again, let’s beg the great piraters. Let’s pirate, pirate, pirate! Summer 19543 was looking for others to go in with her to form a buying block, a kind of fashion do-ocracy, as well as for a manufacturer who will make the shoe for them for a better price. She chose the color of the shoe and maybe even hacked the original design, changing it a tiny bit here and there. China has a robust online payment system and internet users are accustomed to organizing themselves for all kinds of purchases. These are not traditional knock-offs which are more about copying a brand logo and not necessarily a specific design, and where you have to buy whatever the manufacturers feel like making. These are high-value items that are very current, at the height of fashion and are often not even available yet in the Chinese market, and they can even be produced in new colors or fabrics, spearheaded by a single passionate individual. Today, leading edge young Chinese women are doing this with designer shoes, bags, and clothing. But think forward five years: what if other products could be sourced, modified, and produced for the tastes of a small group of people? What if you could order up
A 64 GB 7.9 by 5.3 inch touchscreen tablet, with LTE connectivity
and a bright turquoise brushed-aluminum body, as long as you found enough people and a manufacturer who was willing to deal with small batch manufacturing? The Isabel Marant example is about modifying an already existing design—I’m curious to know what you think: is this a kind of creativity? Are other kinds of hacks a kind of creativity?This is a signal of the bigger story that I want to share with you today, which is this:
http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/1/54/154db370a169ef6d1627e168391a9881-origthink of the most mechanistic, imitative, counterfeit-ridden sector in the world—Chinese manufacturing—and now reframe it as a force that is realigning innovation and creativity, linking entrepreneurs, designers and makers to a whole set of capacities that support the growth of new businesses, products, and services. That’s the forecast that we’re making with this report.
I started this project because I noticed that a lot of people are kind of obsessed with creativity at the moment. We’re at an anxious moment when it comes to conversations about the innovative capacities of different countries and organizational forms. Both the US and Chinese governments have identified innovation as the main tool for getting us out of our respective slumps and providing us with prosperity in the future. And both have identified creativity as a main driver of innovation.
Business leaders agree. The GE Global Innovation Barometer was commissioned by GE this year with nearly 3,000 senior business executives in 22 countries, were surveyed on their companies’ innovation strategy and decision making. They reported that the most important driver of innovation was more creative people, not technical experts, and not universities and labs.http://www.ge.com/innovationbarometer/key_findings.html
They also say that creativity is even more important for innovation than scientific research.http://www.ge.com/innovationbarometer/key_findings.html
Now, traditional views on creativity have held that Americans are especially individualistic and creative, and Chinese people are especially collectivist, and that this holds back the creative potential in China and justifies a world in which creative ideas come from the west and get executed in China. This isn’t just kind of a western story of looking down on China, but this a view that many in the Chinese government hold about their own country as well. It was about 6 years ago that China’s premier WenJiabaonoted that:“China has not fully developed one university capable of following a model that can produce creative and innovative talents; none has its own unique innovations, and thus has not produced distinguished individuals.” In typical command and control fashion, the Chinese government has, in the last 6 years, developed a comprehensive set of national policies to invest in creative and cultural industries. 100s of millions of dollars have been spent, some of it wasted perhaps, building new innovation parks, building up design curricula, and putting on public extravaganza like the
Beijng Design Week, which was held for the second time just a few weeks ago. It was a topdown effort full of government officials, sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Culture, municipal Gov’t of Beijing. Very successful by any standards: total visitors exceeding 5 million and a transaction volume that reached 5.6 billion yuan ($890 million), and drew designers, architects, and artists from around the world. Note the two themes of the event: craft thinking, which links traditional handmade Chinese crafts with design, and good design is good business, because the Chinese government always places creativity firmly in the sphere of future prosperity and economic development. What’s most surprising, however, is that over the next 5 to 10 years it will not be these topdown efforts that we should be paying the most attention to. The funny thing is that the heart of what we might think of as Chinese non-creativity—the schlocky, factory-based outputs and processes, literally the nuts and bolts of Chinese manufacturing—may turn out to be the real driver of the future of creativity, not only for China but for creative entrepreneurs in the US and Europe as well.
Chinese manufacturing capacities are the basis for the birth of a new ecosystem, still small, but worth paying attention to, that is all about creative making and new paths to products and services. We’ll go into this in a lot more detail in the final report, but for now let me share a few of the signals we’re excited about.
Makers will likely be some of the earliest adopters We have been doing research on the Maker movement for the last 5 years. Makers are people who are passionate about learning how to make things themselves, everything from computers to robots to jams. A combination of crafters and hackers and garage mechanics in the digital age. In contrast to the government and corporate anxiety about the future of creativity and innovation, makers are generally a hopeful group who do things for the fun of it, for the joy of using their hands and sharing knowledge and learning in a community. Because there still is no place in the world where you can get a piece of electronics or fabric designed, prototyped, and produced more easily, cheaply, and quickly than in China, we’re seeing two interesting things start to happen. One is we’re starting to see American and European makers who would normally be hanging out in hackerspaces or in their garages, going to China to take advantage of China’s unparalleled manufacturing and distribution capacities. For the first time we’re seeing small-scale Western entrepreneurs—sometimes just one passionate person with an idea—showing up in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, linking up with the pool of productive capacity that has formerly really only been available to large corporations or traditional manufacturing firms with years of experience. http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2012-04/09/content_2109285.htm
At the same time, we are seeing the growth of grassroots creativity and making culture spreading across Chinese youth. This is a photo from the first Maker faire in China, which was held in Shenzhen this April, and this guy is from the Shenzhen DIY robotics club. He made what he calls a Facebook phone, where it has the photo of the person you’re trying to call, which he made for his grandmother. Now of course unlike most parts of the world, it’s easy in Shenzhen to find all the parts you need for this kind of thing. http://szdiy.org/2013/11/facephone/
Businesses like Seeed Studio are popping up to help you find those parts if you don’t speak Chinese, and you can do it all online. We knew something exciting was happening when we saw Seeed show up—the first mainland Chinese participant—at the Maker Faire in San Mateo last year. If you have an idea about a piece of hardware that you want to create, no matter where you are in the world, Seeed Studio will help you design it and also act as a kind of human search engine or human task routing for the hardware you need, literally going out into the huge electronics markets and finding the right components. They call themselves an open hardware facilitator, and they are working closely with many of the DIY robotics folks around the the world. Eric opened one of the few makerspaces in China, and was the organizer behind the Shenzhen Maker Faire.
We’re also seeing the growth of new accelerators and incubators such as HAXLR8R, a joint US-China venture fund, now in its second year, and what it does is select 6 or 7 teams from around the world and bring them to Shenzhen, gives them 25K and mentors, and helps them develop prototype, test product, create biz plan, then come back to SF and pitch it to investors here. So there’s a very interesting fluid interaction taking place between creators, venture capital in the US and manufacturing capacity in China. For those of us who are interested in creative making through the use of 3d printers, it’s very exciting that Zach Smith, one of the co-founders of the first affordable hobbyist 3d printer the Makerbot, is now living in Shenzhen working with HAXLR8R.
Nomiku is a great example of this. They were in the first cohort of teams chosen by HAXLR8R. They are an American husband and wife team, Lisa and Abe, who love cooking and were watching a lot of Iron Chef, where chefs were using industrial sous vide machines to cook ingredients sealed within a plastic pouch at a precise,constant, low temperature for hours or days. So they decided to invent their own version, for amateur at-home cooks, which would be more affordable. Lisa was a journalist, and Abe a plasma physicist, by the way, so neither had any experience in manufacturing consumer hardware. Lisa and Abe got chosen to do the HAXLR8R program last year and spent 4 months in SEZ refining both their prototype and their vision for the business. They parlayed all of that into a 500 successful fundraising on Kickstarter and they’re now back in HK, learning how to build a device that can be mass-produced. I spoke with Lisa last week and she was telling me about their very strict verification processes for the factories they want to work with, where she checks for the lighting, ventilation, and working hours, but also the expressions on the workers’ faces and perhaps most importantly, whether workers are learning skills that can help them advance in their careers. . So these new kinds of creative linkages will hopefully extend new opportunities to the manufacturing labor force themselves.
The third signal I want to share is the growth of an ecosystem to support Chinese creativity and design in China. For the first time, we’re starting to see Chinese designers and makers be able to sustain themselves financially using new web platforms. Nuandao is like US start-up Fab.com, which sells desginer products at a steep discount.Nuandao, run by two california Chinese american women who live in Beijing, promotes Chinese products that have a focus on unique quality design at flash sale prices on a weekly basis. It does this by curating well designed products from mainly independent Chinese designers and showcasing it to the Chinese design-lover community.Wowsai has been compared to a Chinese Etsy. Demohour is a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter. Right now these are not easily open to purchasing from outside of china, and they are only in the Chinese language. But imagine 5 years from now, when they are likely to be open to all of us.
“With Chinese characteristics” is a favorite phrase in China used to describe pretty much anything that is done somewhere else, but works differently in China, such as capitalism with Chinese characteristics or law with Chinese characteristics. Now that we see Chinese manufacturing acting as a kind of global creativity accelerator, there is bound to be a lot of creativity and a lot of chaos in the next decade.
imagine a world a decade from now in which you see something you like and you can hack the design and get someone to make for you, all at a price you can afford. Or you can make it yourself and possibly even start your own business. In a decade, maybe you’ll even be able to here-source it. What kind of new designs, products, and services might we find ourselves surrounded with?
What we’re seeing here is the realignment of innovation and creativity, linking entrepreneurs, designers and makers to their counterparts in China, and to a whole set of manufacturing capacities that will drive the growth of new businesses, products, and services.AnandKulkarni of MobileWorks asked us, what would you do with a 1000-person team at your disposal? We might also want to ask: what would you do with a 100-person skilled manufacturing team at your disposal?