Presented by Alfons Cornella and Antonella Broglia
1) Re-greening
The future is green.
The need to introduce alternative energies to be more sustainable will have a considerable impact in economy. The next big thing in business is related to this issue. The Economist has published a story about the “Greening of America” and the “Future of Energy” and Fast Company has highlighted how the green policy of the California “governator” Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the one which will have more impact in its economy. The magic number in this field is 20% in 2020. This means the CO2 emissions have to drop by this percentatge. This will make the difference between countries that succeed and those that fail.
This trend to green will lead to big green facilities: “Big is beautiful”
Moreover, consumers are more and more interested by green. And companies take actions: Wall Mart has sought to sell 100 million compact fluorescents in one year, Ikea has produced cheaper reusable bags, Australia switches off incandescents bulbs.
As for future sources of fuel, serious attention has returned to the electric cars: For example, Tesla has introduced the Tesla Roadster, which runs entirely on electric power.
2) User-centered innovation
This is the most important idea of the year or even the decade!
As a reference, you can read the book of Eric Von Hippel, Democratrizing Innovation, and the one by Patricia Seybold, Outside Innovation.
The leading-edge user is the man or woman who has used your product to the fullest and now is pushing the limits in how it can be improved and changed.
There are many examples of products invented by active users. Revelations is a fan film created by fans of George Lucas Star Wars saga. Linux and related products are made by smart users who invent new ways of writing software. There are surgery tools invented by surgeons, which are then shared nationwide. The Engadget website plays an important role in the gadget discovery.
Several companies like Neuros, a Chicago based enterprise, Nutricia, Tate Modern Gallery in London, Communispace, and Telefonica, in Spain, are already taking advantage of this model.
As for governments, Denmark has developed a laboratory for user-centered innovations.
3) Hybridization business
In the internet world, it’s called mashup. That’s the possibility to merge things to create new products. Consumer electronics are a good example of this trend which will emerge in other fields. The question is how many products there will be in the middle.
We can think as well in the combination of ideas. There are examples in different areas. You take the best part of two products to create a new one: For instance, the combination of private vehicle and public vehicle can result in car-sharing. The combination of home and hotel has given birth to extended-stay hotels with a small kitchen in the room. “It’s less like a hotel, and more like a home”, they say. The combination of reality and fiction results in programs with actors playing lives of celebrities, and so on.
The future is hybrid: 1+1=3
4) Gamer generation in the workplace
The new generation works in a different way, says John Beck in his book The Kids Are Alright.
They consider themselves highly prepared, and they want to prove it. They see competition everywhere. The more they have played, the more they feel interested in their companies. They love diving amongst great amount of data and analyse several factors and alternatives very quickly. They expect high compensations: they want to be heroes, because only heroes play. They don’t believe in hierarchy very much, but they believe in teams. Failure does not hurt them: They try until they find a way out. They see risks as something natural to be successful. They are natural born managers: they put everything in perspective. They are global by nature and believe in a better world. Just consider all this if you have to hire one of them.
5) Emerging Technologies
The MIT technology review selection for this year has put forward a bunch of emerging technologies, like reality mining, offline web applications, probabilistic chips, modeling surprise, wireless power or nanoradio.
At Update, we want to draw the attention to some more:
-The greater digital capacity: we have more data in a smaller space.
-Optical antennas: free space optics.
-Ibiquity, which is different from ubiquity: new applications with information adapted to the place where you are.
-Telepresence
-Geolabelling: a combination of Second Life and Google Earth, for example.
-Augmented reality: the invisible train project can be an example: you have the railroad made of wood and the virtual train in a palm and you combine both things to see the train work.
-Artificial artificial intelligence: See, for instance, the Amazon Mechanical Turk.
-Personal manufacturing: Ponoko is an example: they manufacture any piece you want.
-Neo-Flight: trend to use more small airports rather than large ones in the US. This may change the way people move around.
“Somebody said that everything has been done in Arts and that new technologies are the only way to do something really new. I’m not sure I agree, but I do believe new technologies are a big challenge to creators and producers”
“I grew up with parents who were owners of a videogame arcade. When I later wanted to write a book, I missed the kind of interaction during plot development that I experienced with videogames”
“Machinima is a neologism created with the words “machine” and “cinema,” and it refers to the creation of a new animation movie with content produced from a videogame or virtual reality.”
“The Machinima content has some important advantages. It´s cheap, it´s quick, it´s real time and, most importantly, it allows audience participation”
“Virtual reality won’t be the end of Internet as we know it in the same way television was not the end of radio”
“With our work we have learnt technology is stupid, expensive, and loves accidents, but it is also magical and, best of all, creates cultural dilemmas”
“We look forward to see the emergence of social networks and collective intelligence, friendly tech, and especially native digitals, kids will have grown up with these digital.”
How is Internet questioning educational beginning in the developing countries and how this will concern the future of the developed economies? Facing to the limitation of pedagogic resources in certain regions of the world, groups of children could be able to skip the whole school cycle with the use of computers and Internet.
What happens when there is free access to a computer and a child who has never previously seen this feature? After nearly nine years of experiments and fieldwork in rural and poor areas of their homeland, the Indian scientist Sugata Mitra, currently professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, explains how the Internet is challenging the educational principles in developing countries and how this will affect the future of developed economies. His experiments with unsupervised access to public computers by children in remote areas, often called the “hole in the wall” experiments are known throughout the world.
Dr. Mitra has taught and researched computer applications for over 25 years. He was until recently Chief Scientist with NIIT Limited in New Delhi. His contributions include a number of inventions and first-time applications. The database publishing industry in India and Bangladesh, as well as the first applications of digital multimedia and Internet based education in India, are attributed to him. His current interests include Children’s Education, Remote Presence, Self-organizing systems, Cognitive Systems, Physics and Consciousness.
From a man who shared creativity through design and studies the changes on cities identities, to another one who goes around the world advising companies.
Nigel Barlow defines himself as a provocative agent, a creative coach and a business rocker. Barlow founded Tom Peters’s consulting in Europe – Peters is the prophet of the revolution of the managerial management -, and nowadays he directs Service Legends Ltd. and the project Re-Think.
He is also the author of two best-sellers: Batteries included and Re-think.
From artisan production to intensive market. Emile Aarts will share with us his experience on how design is a key tool to compete on an intensive market (electronics of consumption). That’s what Philips Design is doing and the success of new products sales confirm they were right.
Emile Aarts is a key figure at Philips Research. He is vice-president and director of the scientific program of Philips Research and Head of New Media System & Applications and his task is to turn visions of the future into everyday reality. In 1998, he launched the concept of ambient intelligence and in 2001, he founded Philips Home Lab. His current research interests include embedded systems and interaction technology. Aarts describes ambient intelligence as the integration of technology into our environment.
Prof.dr. Emile Aarts holds a MS. and PhD. degree in physics. For almost twenty years, he has been active as a research scientist in computing science.
Knowledge and technology are changing us and Kevin Warwick is a real example of it.
Kevin Warwick talks about ultra-sonic senses, brain-to-brain telepathic communication, the therapeutic benefits of his experiments and why he won’t be the only cyborg on this planet in the future. Cyborg technology: a reality that might change human evolution.
Kevin Warwick has carried out a series of pioneering experiments involving the neuro-surgical implantation of a device into the median nerves of his left arm in order to link his nervous system directly to a computer in order to assess the latest technology for use with the disabled. He has been successful with the first extra-sensory (ultrasonic) input for a human and with the first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans. In 1998, when Kevin Warwick, researcher and Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England, implanted a silicon chip transponder into his left arm and connected it to his nervous system, he became the world’s first cyborg: a man-machine hybrid.
Big companies know they have to study carefully user’s behavior and trends in order to know what will be next and to create new products. This is what our next guest do. Younghee Jung is the product and interaction designer at Nokia, who leads one of the firm’s exploratory design research teams. These teams explore personal and social aspects of mobile phone use around the globe in order to support design decisions and inspire new ways of thinking when it comes to create new products.
We talked to Younghee Jung about the difficulties of exploring future trends in the mobile communication as well as the importance of local user behavior and she even confessed that the iPhone was actually, a positive thing to happen - both, for Nokia and the entire mobile phone industry. This is what she explained.
