Category Archives: Current Affairs

Make your LEGO wish come true

Originally a site in Japanese only, Cuusoo means “wish” in Japanese and the name of a great concept for crowdsourcing product ideas. The site is a veritable treasure trove of ideas suggested by users, where others vote on the ideas by committing to buying it should the product get produced.

The LEGO Group has collaborated with Elephant design, the originators of the Cuusoo idea since 2010 to explore how new LEGO product ideas could be crowd-sourced by users making a ‘wish’. Here your mission is to come up with a great product idea and find 10,000 people who also think it’s a great idea. The wonderful Shinkai 6500 submersible is one of the fantastic products that have already come out of this collaboration. Now the site is launching internationally and we hope that an even bigger audience of fans and designers out there will come forward with great ideas of what LEGO designers should be making. Check out the site here.

The whistlestop tour of the economic crisis

Have recently started an executive MBA course, this one called Trium, a joint programme by the London School of Economics, NUY Stern, and HEC Paris. It specialises in three elements that to me are critical for business education these days: a global point of view supported by a diverse cultural mix of students, an in-depth focus on emerging markets where the future of the world economy really lies, and a balance of backgrounds and experience of the students itself: MBAs are not just for stockbrokers and traders. Our first module took place in September at the London School of Economics, where we dived into the depths of the macro-economic picture, the dynamics of the various international institutions that govern the international economy, the origins of the financial crisis and also the political and economic background to emerging markets.

A highly thought-provoking module, this presentation by David Harvey illustrates a part of the things we learned: the convoluted and difficult picture behind the current economic crisis, enjoy!

Learning to think in systems – using LEGO bricks.

What does Google’s Pagerank, the scientific citation index and the taxonomy of plants, animals and insects have in common with LEGO bricks? They are all systems. A post over at the MIT Technology review examines the history of the Pagerank algorithm and shows that in fact, this thinking had been around for quite a while until it was so successfully exploited by Larry Page and Sergei Brin of Google. They of course have a strong bond with LEGO bricks too, Larry claiming that the bricks taught him to be a scientist – to think digitally, in systems, networks and to iterate. Quoting from the article:

The PageRank algorithm is a key part of Google’s method of ranking web pages in search results. It uses the network of links between web pages to determine their value and, famously, judges a page to be important if it is linked to by other important pages.

One crucial feature of this idea is that it requires an iterative approach to constantly re-evaluate the value of a page as the importance of others varies. Iterative ranking algorithms have since become an important part of network theory.

Increasingly, this way of understanding the world – not as a set of static known constructs, but a series of relationships which can either combine and influence one another or not, is at the heart of some of the biggest innovation in the late 20th and early 21st century.

The world is not static, our knowledge or even perceptions of the world are not static – instead we need to understand systems, whether it be eco-systems in nature or increasingly, eco-systems of value creation that spell the future of business models, of enterprise and of innovation.

To be able to experiment with such abstract concepts, while simultaneously engaged hands-on is an invaluable gift to give a child, or indeed anyone, because we learn by experience and we store our learning in terms of experiences of what worked and what didn’t work.

Systems thinking is complex, it’s potentially vast in scope and also abstract in nature so being able to understand relationships by manipulating bricks, which have endless opportunities to be combined with other bricks, yet follow a distinct, intelligible system, whereby you don’t need to know every brick by heart to know how to combine it with another one. You learn that by understanding the system and you understand the potential of a new brick by understanding the system. That is the power of LEGO bricks, but also the kind of thinking we need to master in more and more domains as globalisation and digitisation blaze the trail of connecting the world through supply and demand, finance, security, communication and environmental responsibility.

Think Eco-Systems not just Issues

Take global warming or government regulation as examples – these are all very complex topics, collections of variables where solving the problem cannot be achieved through solving one issue alone, but in fact the solution rests in addressing the eco-system tying together all the inter-linked variables. In fact, seeing things on purely the issue level may in fact be contributing to the problem.

In the book Freakonomics the authors quote numerous examples of cases where seemingly complex phenomena have very simple origins, but often in an entirely different field and the eco-system magnifies the impact through all the inter-related variables and creates an impact on local, sometimes national and international levels. One of the striking examples is their analysis of crime figures in large cities in the US. The numbers were growing at epic proportions year-on year until sometime in the mid-eighties the trend suddenly stopped and began a steady decline. Experts tried to attribute this reversal to anything from an increase in spending on the police, a growth in numbers of staff, prisons, different governments, new laws etc. but the biggest impact came from the legalisation of abortion.

How could this have anything to do with crime figures you may wonder? Here the eco-system comes in: the women most likely to have an abortion back in the 60s where women in low-income households with several children already and who before the legalisation either had to risk their lives to have an abortion by often unqualified people in unsafe conditions and risk prosecution or not have one at all. Many didn’t and subsequently struggled to look after their children, who often ended up in crime from a lack of opportunity in life. As abortion became legal in many states, the numbers of these ‘unwanted’ children dropped and the sheer numbers of disadvantaged youth decreased, thus decreasing the populace likely to commit crime. It’s not to say that the other measures had no impact at all, but collectively they helped solve the problem as the eco-system of ideal conditions leading to crime gradually became more untenable.

Biofuels are another example of where eco-system thinking really needs to be applied on a much larger scale than today – touted as the solution to the West’s reliance on fossil fuels, the growth of crops destined for biofuels is now accelerating across the world, leading to an increased rate of rain forest destruction (these are our most efficient weapon in clearing CO2 from the atmosphere) as land is being cleared to grow palm oil – a crucial ingredient in biofuels. Much agricultural land previously home to food production is being converted to grow crops for biofuel, putting food production in danger. The biggest irony of all is that the process of producing biofuels has a greater negative impact on global warming than fossil fuel use – proving that there is no simple ‘solution’ to global warming, in fact simple solutions may in fact be aggravating it further, instead we need to think in eco-systems, not just locally, but nationally and internationally.

Nancy Gibbs of Time, talks in her column about the Vatican reflecting on its mortal sins for the modern age (24th March 2008) of the fact that back in the past sloth, lust, greed, envy and anger accounted for virtually all the crimes of mankind, whereas today the issues that once were the clear culprits behind our follies and misfortunes are far more complex than the 7 deadly sins alone. Causes and consequences come together to form eco-systems, where one problem feeds another and addressing consequences is meaningless without understanding and addressing
the causes. Contextualising what was once simple in our now increasingly interlinked world – Quoting Mohandas Gandhi’s version of the 7 deadly sins:

  • Wealth without work
  • Pleasure without conscience
  • Science without humanity
  • Knowledge without character
  • Politics without principle
  • Commerce without morality
  • Worship without sacrifice

The responsibility rests with the individual, but that includes the duty to take care of others as well as yourself.

Deeper Sense of Luxury

In an earlier post I talked about what makes a good toy, contrasting two rival consumer mindsets against one another as partially to blame for the problem with toys imported from China: on one hand the desire (or expectation) for safety and quality at knock-down prices; on the other hand – the (almost)
accepted transitory nature of many products and the subsequent unwillingness to spend
money on products where safety and quality are taken extremely
seriously.

So where the true cost of quality has eluded people, and the effects of low quality not being completely clear (until now), it has been an easy option for many companies caught in this dilemma to go for Chinese-manufactured products as keeping manufacture in Europe or the US would simply have created prices that consumers would not be willing to pay.

However this is beginning to change. First indications of this was the emergent trading up, trading down trend where people deliberately sought to save money through highly thrifty shopping for everyday essentials, yet splashing out on upgrading select items in luxury outlets. Yet, contributing to the warped sense of value is of course the flip-side to all this, where reports and documentaries detailing how many luxury labels charge a premium for the ‘perception’ of quality they embody, but in actual fact many products are manufactured just the same as ordinary priced items. Luxury items simply command a higher margin, with labels pocketing the change.

What people are beginning to understand is what exactly the elusive term ‘quality’ means. It appears that Quality functions like a broad stroke term to encompass high expectations on:

  •     Material
  •     Finishing
  •     Design and Usability
  •     Functionality, features and compatibility
  •     Ethics and sustainability
  •     Health and Safety
  •     Environmental Impact
  •     Service and replace-ability

Many still refuse to pay the premium that this may translate to in the short term, but as we increasingly begin to be able to factor the costs of the long-term impact of such choices – it becomes very hard to sustain the argument. Leading this change is the growing attention paid to corporate social responsibility and initiatives like the Deeper Luxury report by WWF UK where the media response to this could be the tipping point for the Industry as suggested by CSRwire

Report_cover
Media Response to WWF-UK Report on Luxury Brands Could Be Tipping Point for the Industry.


Last week over fifty newspapers and magazines from Britain, Brazil,
Australia, New Zealand, Italy and Switzerland reported on the corporate
responsibility of the world’s largest holding companies of luxury
brands. For the first time they had been ranked on their ethical
performance in the report Deeper Luxury: Quality and Style When the
World Matters, which was published by environmental group WWF-UK. The
news went ‘viral’ through trade journals and blogs on fashion, jewelry,
and celebrities.

The
report "could herald a huge change in the way global luxury brands
operate," states Fashion UK.(1) ‘The luxury goods industry looks like
it’s having its own Nike moment," suggests UN corporate reporting
expert Dr Anthony Miller, referring to the mid-90′s criticism of labour
practices in Nike’s supply chain that made the company invest heavily
in its corporate responsibility programme. Within days, Just-Style.com
reported that "PPR Group commits to improving sustainability" as a
result of the publication.(2)

 

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