Archive for October, 2007
Green influencers
Clare Archer writes:
To mark Energy Savings Week, which finished yesterday, the Energy Saving Trust commissioned us to research the role of word of mouth and community in promoting ideas about saving energy. Our research showed a strong correlation between people who were informed about ‘green ideas’ and their level of connectedness to other people in their communities – creating a kind of virtuous circle. From this we developed a index – working in conjunction with another consultancy, Wildfire – which allows any individual to calculate the power they have to influence others to save energy, on a scale of 1 to 100, by answering a few simple questions. The EST has shifted its strategy to focus on the power of communities to influence change.
There’s coverage in a number of publications – for example in Metro and Marketing Week.
Outing Dumbledore
Andrew Curry writes:
There’s a whole story here about fan culture and celebrities, and also what happens when authors don’t have to worry about what happens next. No sooner had J.K.Rowling mentioned at a reading in New York that Dumbledore was gay than the Dumbledore Pride site is selling the T-shirts – 7,000 before you can even get your wand out.
As Jason Kottke pointed out in his blog – the fan fiction floodgates are surely about to open. If Dumbledore, then who else?
26 October 2007 at 7:26 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
The future of civil society
Andrew Curry writes:
We’ve just finished an extensive project with Carnegie UK’s Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in Britain and Ireland, looking out to 2025. We ran eleven workshops across the five jurisdictions, involving several hundred people, and we used the innovative causal layered analysis method to build the scenarios, to help us get to shifts in values. The reports are out soon, and we’ll blog more then.
For the moment the Commission’s chair Geoff Mulgan has written a piece on the findings in today’s Society Guardian. Too bad that our credit for running the process – and for the futures quotes – got lost on the sub-editors’ table.
24 October 2007 at 8:33 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Signs of their times
Andrew Curry writes:
Great designs are of their moment – but they are also a vision of a future as well – future materials, future aesthetics, future lifestyles. Which is why I enjoyed finding this poster – a history of the future in an A-Z of classic designs from the 20th century.
From Blue Ant Studio via the Core 77 blog.
24 October 2007 at 7:25 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Modern evils
Michelle Singer writes:
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has now closed its website questionnaire on the subject of ‘modern social evils’. It reports that 3,500 responses were submitted, and these are now being analysed prior to the publication of a report on the subject early next year.Over a century ago, Joseph Rowntree was concerned to address “the underlying causes of weakness or evil in the community, rather than remedying their more superficial manifestations”. Amongst these “great scourges of humanity”, he included war, slavery, intemperance, impurity, the opium traffic and gambling.
15 October 2007 at 10:49 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Simple pleasures
Jo Phillips writes:
A shop in Soho (London) that I visited recently asks its customers “What is your luxury?” You are invited to chalk yours up on a huge blackboard alongside those of your predecessors.
15 October 2007 at 9:18 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Service recovery in a time of service failure
Eleanor Cooksey writes:
Though it is hard to gauge the full impact of the postal strike on the economy, it is worth considering the response of different organisations. Whilst big businesses will have been able to avoid the worst as they have their own delivery methods, others appear to have used this as an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to serving the customer.
13 October 2007 at 9:37 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
India is now outsourcing outsourcing
Brian writes:
The New York Times recently reported that India is now outsourcing outsourcing- a number of large Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices not only in developing countries, but even in Northern American cities in some cases. The looping of outsourcing back to the developed West where average costs of supplies and wages are much higher can be mind-boggling as it appears to be counter-intuitive to the conventional wisdom of cost minimization. But large companies like India’s Infosys Technolgies and Wipro are thinking beyond just wages and cost reductions. By gaining a comparative advantage in managing labor flows across continents, these companies are thriving to be “global matchmakers in outsourcing,” accumulating human capital that are crucial in serving local and specific knowledge to distant markets and clients.
The report illustrates the phenomenon but using an example of a company in the United States paying an Indian vendor 7,000 miles away to supply it with Mexican engineers working just 150 miles south of the US border. Now, outsiders may find it absurd for the company to outsource so far away for a service that is so close to home, but if the Indian firm can render the same service effectively at the equivalent or cheaper prices, then this transaction goes to show the lessening in importance of physical distance for many global service-based industries. With today’s communication capabilities, the world is perhaps flatter than we once thought. After all, nothing can really be that surprising in the world of outsourcing after that one Californian newspaper outsourced two journalists in India for reporting local news in fair Pasadena.
3 October 2007 at 2:52 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
