Subscribe
Don Tapscott kicked off the second session talking about kids in the digital age. He called young adults and children of this generation digital natives- he is a digital immigrant. He pointed out that the technology revolution is intersecting with the demographic revolution. As a result, for the first time, kids are experts at a critical cultural skill. There is a cultural sea change occurring, and young people are incredibly powerful in the new paradigm. He told a story about his son creating a facebook page for his book, Wikinomics, and how later that day the group already had hundreds of fans. Don realized his son was literate in a whole host of skills that were foreign to him. Further, this is the first time we can really learn from young people in terms of a new family form, a new work environment, etc. He said the next generation of kids are not the dumbest (in fact he told a story of a Rhode Scholar that doesn’t read books), SATs go up year after year and it keeps getting harder to get into top school, volunteering is at an all-time high, etc. The next generation processes information differently, their brains have developed differently, and they might just be the most creative generation yet.
Next up Helmut Traitler, VP of Innovation Partnerships at Nestle, had a conversation with Bruce Nussbaum. Helmut talked about how open innovation speeds up the process of development and helps meet market opportunities before they are gone. They use expert resources from the outside the company that allows them to find the answers faster. They qualify a network of people that they look to to get input from them. The example of a problem they were looking to solve was how to ship ice cream warmer (or warmer) to make it more energy efficient than distributing it frozen. I had two lingering questions; first, why head in the direction of more artificial when it seems the trend in food is more natural/organic, and second, how do they address IP ownership concerns in a creative collaboration setting?
Nell Merlino was next on stage. She gave a striking statistic: since the economic downturn, women make up more employed persons than men for the first time ever. We’ve also known for a while that roughly half of all business are owned by women, but many of them are very small. So the first goal for her service that helps women grow their businesses is to break down the barrier of isolation that keep women entrepreneurs from being networked in. She imagined the power that come from the opportunity for unemployed college students to pair with women owned businesses to market their businesses. She also addressed the myths that women like their businesses small (what a crock of crap). Finally, women entrepreneurs are prone to having difficulties hiring people (they find it hard to delegate), and they don’t get deep enough in the numbers (for fear the numbers will undermine their dreams even though the opposite is true).
To end the session, Helen Walters sat down with Saul Kaplan. Helen is the editor for the Design channel at BusinessWeek. They told a story about how they met and built a fruitful professional relationship over Twitter, but the most interesting part for me was a question Saul asked about what trends they are following. Helen said they are following a few including “reverse innovation”, transferring innovations back to the first world, the opposite of trickle down to the developing world that we’ve seen in the past. They are also seeing innovation of the government side that she hopes stays.
