The Little Economy

My colleague Paige did this brilliant piece in May outlining some of the basic must-knows in the little economy. Here is a wordle snapshot of the basic issues:

Birth rates are dropping around the world, and in some societies, entire populations are slowly shrinking. This is the flip side of the much talked about silver economy, this is the little economy where babies are precious, and cities set themselves apart from the competition by being child-friendly.

If talent is moving to cities where they can both expand their careers, have a good lifestyle and also raise their precious young, that is the sweet spot. Being a global city and being a great place for children are not contradictory. In addition, being a great place for education from pre-school all the way to adult education creates a stickiness, a funnel effect, that is hard to replace. Of course, this effect is hard to setup in the first place, but I think SGP has a good chance of getting this right.

You can see the entire flow on slideshare below.

What are your thoughts on this matter?

Rise of the Rest

I’m fiddling around with a better way to get the word out. I consume information through videos, RSS feeds, interviews and attending conferences. Our main output is consumed through slide formats. That allows for some depth and breadth. This video is a stab in the same direction, with an overlay of music and line animation. It is inspired by “Shift Happens” and let’s see how it is received, consumed and used.

I am also a great admirer of the Institute of the Future’s futurescapes. I have them pinned liberally around my three walls. I love mash ups. I hope to be able to acquire the skills, or at least crowdsource, outsource, to create our own soon.

The Rise of the Rest video is in production right now and I’ll post it up likely next week. I’ll be making a Chinese version as well at a later date. Here’s a wordle glimpse on what it looks like.

Future of Food

I didn’t realise there was such a gulf in looking at the future. When I asked some European based futures ppl what their view on future of food was, they replied on going organic, a big firm no to GMOs and the slow food movement. The irony of this is over here in Asia, there is plenty of food stress going on in the system and going organic etc was not very high on the priority list, feeding people and preventing societal breakdown is.

I did up a Future of Food presentation last November, and to my surprise, it turned out to be a favorite and folks have asked for me to present it, and for the ppt to be shared.

If you like to follow the entire flow, here it is on slideshare.

Despite all the talk so far, and the Food Summit in Rome, I fear there has been little action or leadership shown. Food stressed countries like China, India, GCCs have started moving in their own ways on this.

Aside from food supply stresses, there are food security stresses. We have seen plenty of public discomfort with the presence of large corporations dominating the food chain. I saw a lovely map showing how all of UK’s many farms had to sell to only 5 conglomerates dominating the supermarket outlets … what I call the Wal-Martization of the food chain …. and this makes it open to abuse. There are many forms of this abuse, but the recent Sanlu melamine in milk (China), tainted rice (Japan) etc shows the weakness of the system. Is this going to change? How might it change in the face of public outrage and surveillance? That is worth going into, and of course my challenge is showing what this means for Singapore, hah hah. But that’s for later.

I came across this really lovely wordle website where you can crunch your research and out comes a word cloud, pretty nifty way of seeing where my research keeps throwing up leads, and if I am a little too heavy or biased. A 2 second glance to ‘get’ what I am talking about.