You say Asia’s a low-wage only economy. I, Tom Peters, Hans Henrik and others say the opposite. Asia might battle us a little of low-wage, but the big deal is in creativity, innovation, design and the like. Bloomberg in Tokyo seems to have understood that. They made a Smart Space that displays financial data and news, but the data is triggered by human moves. That means if you move your hands upwards and wave, then the data follows you. This is quite amazing, why haven’t we seen more of this before? Why do we see this in Asia first? I know that Bloomberg is an american company, but that’s not the deal here.
Via: infosthetics
3 comments so far
Congratulations on your new blog..
Good point Jacob, especially in the light of the current (and very late) debate in Denmark about outsourcing and globalisation. The debate seems to be Us (knowledge) vs. Then (low cost), therefore politicians go about stressing education as the key.
Innovation is thought to be a natural bi-product of knowledge, and therefore: “we need more education”.
Something’ missing? The link between knowledge and innovation perhaps?
Collaborative thinking and a labour market based on trust has been suggested as another competitive advantage. I wanted to link to a debate on deadline (Danish National Television) the 19th of January 2005, but for some reason it has been pulled down.
Thx Jon – we are delighted about the fact so many already have visiting the blog, have linked to it and already used it as a resource.
You raise interesting points in your comment – I agree totally that more education doesn’t do the trick. In fact there is a correlation between the length of your education and the innovation rate measured bye the number of upstarts.
What does that tell us? It tells me that innovation and start-up of companies doesn’t necessary have something to do with your academic degree – on a contrary.
Education isn’t the key – at all. I believe the key is to be found in the area of overall framing, about how to help newstarters, how to change attitudes, how to create clusters were knowledge can be shared between different practices, how to tax upstarts, how to help upstarts in bank dialogue, how to make a valid businessplan, if needed.
There are many areas which hasn’t the impact on innovation that people want to think – I think its too easy….
All the best
Hans Henrik
Congrats on your new blog!
People who tend to believe that Asia is only low-cost are gonna be in for a wake-up. Read the other day that 450.000 engineers are being educated in China, you think they are only gonna be working in low-wage production?
Still, I think the us vs. them is a somewhat of the point. Globalization isn’t about us/them its about everybody - its not Danish companies competing with chinese firms, its danish companies competing with everyone all over the world. And by the way - its no longer danish companies, its international companies. I think the debate about “us” competing against “them” is viewing it all in the wrong picture. My attitude towards globalization is that its just great! Off course there’s gonna be lots of changes in EU/US/the West but in the end its gonna be a better world for everybody; and isn’t that what it is all about?? Globalize Me - that’s my attitude 