Tag Archives: creativity

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Recommended Book: The Flight of the Creative Class

I've followed Richard Florida's theories for a few years.  Building upon The Rise of the Creative Class, where he introduced us to his model whereupon a certain group of people whose job relies not only on the consumption of knowledge, but also on the creation of it, and how the world economy is changing, he introduces this book where he expands on the concept and what does it mean for individuals and countries.

The edition I bought starts with his essay The World is Spiky where he critiques The World is Flat, saying that it only looks flat from one peak to the next, but there's plenty of places that haven't yet gotten connected.

Furthermore, the whole idea of the book is simply that the people constituting this creative class are highly mobile and will settle wherever they see fit, therefore having a huge influence in the prosperity of the places they choose.  According to his analysis, this choice is guided by 3 factors: Talent, Tolerance & Technology, and he goes on identifying places in the United States and abroad that are doing all they can to attract and retain their "brains".

Whereas his results for North America seem well founded, he tends to get in a flimsier position when identifying creative class hubs outside of that zone.  He, for example, lumps Helsinki-Tampere-Oulu as an area (which is rather like talking about Brussels, Barcelona and London being in the same neighbourhood). 

There are, however, certain things that leaders in Finland should take to heart, as he mentions explicitly in page 173: "Not all cities are able to compete effectively for global talent.  There are a signficant number… indicating that they are either attracting a very narrow band of immigrants or not attracting many immigrants period.  Cities in this group include… the Scandinavian centers of Helsinki and Oslo.  These places are challenged by their lack of appeal to global talent and will need to improve their diversity and tolerance if they wish to compete at the global cutting edge."

In other words: your educational system is excellent, your use of technology second to none, but the lack of diversity puts a hold on the ideas and points of view you can create here, which is a definite minus in these terms.  As I've mentioned before, there's a lot of foreigners here who work as hard as everybody else here, and not feeling welcome will make them leave, taking their skills with them.  Furthermore, as more and more Finns get to know and appreciate that kind of diversity somewhere else, they will also leave.

For Mexico there is also a lot of lessons to be learned from this book, but I have mostly covered them in another post.  Further moderation of Mexican racist attitudes would also be most welcome.

in english

Finland: Geek Paradise

I have mentioned before that I believe Finland to be the closest thing to a geek paradise.  The reason for it is very simple: given the high esteem Finnish society in general has of education, people are encouraged to be highly educated, which results on a certain level of geekness.

Even though individuals related to IT such as Linus Torvalds are probably the most famous, there are other aspects of geekiness where Finns excell.  I could for example mention the Nuntii Latini, the renowned service of Latin-language news, or the fascination Finns have with Tolkien.  There I have found out that there are not only computer geeks, but history geeks, role-playing geeks, music geeks, art geeks and even food geeks (also known as foodies), and not only are they not ridiculed, they are accepted.

This is one of the reasons why Finland is cool, and why it is thriving in the creative economy.

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Do you get your best ideas at 2 a.m.?

Most of the posts I wrote during the weekend were thought/dreamt in the period between 1-3 a.m. last friday. It was so bad that I had an idea, wrote it down, then another one, wrote it down, then another one and so on until, finally, I got too tired to go on. Does it happen to you?

As inspiration, I’ll leave you with an ad-hoc video. Sleeping Awake by P.O.D. (from the Matrix Reloaded Soundtrack)

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I admire our grandparents

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One point brought home from another of the speakers at the CWF is the fact that people of our grandparents’ generation (65+ years old) have already gone through very big changes in the world, something that I don’t think we recognise often enough. If your grandparents are old enough, they saw the introduction of radio, TV, trans-atlantic travel, the Second World War, decolonisation, the European Union, the nuclear bomb, the massification of the automobile… without even talking about microwave ovens, immigrants from different parts of the world, computers and the internet… If you take into account that the rate of change is much faster now than when they were your or my age, you can only come to the conclusion that the world will be even more drastically different when we reach their age.

If there’s people over 70 wathching pictures in Flickr and doing their banking over the internet, that’s the kind of person I want to be when I’m their age, and I understand why not everybody can be like that (there’s also cultural issues of, say, uncertainty avoidance involved which they are not responsible for, among many other factors). If at that age they still take the world at face value and enjoy what they do, that’s the person I want to be. So if you agree with me spare a thought for your parents and grandparents and give them your love and respect. Probably a hug would be nice too.

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Ode to curiosity

I still remember that I learned to read when I was 4. After that all mayhem broke loose and you could not make me part from a book, regardles. I was so interested in everything, and literally devoured any written material that came to my hands. It took me some time to learn that curiosity was not only about the contents of books, but about what would happen if you kicked a ball a certain way, did something to a frog, or how would people be. During the years I have met some people that are not (or seem not to) be curious about pretty much anything. I really don’t understand them, because to be curious is part of what being human is all about (but one we share with other organisms… after all, “curiosity killed the cat”, which is a horrible saying). We’re all very curious when we’re children, but not so much anymore as adults. Why?

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The singularity vs. chauvinism

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One of the speakers at the CWF made some very interesting points that I had already thought about but not really articulated in the fluid, structured way he did, but of course I need to start from the beginning.

The singularity I’m talking about is something that to some people might sound like a concept out of science fiction: the fact that in the next few years, the processing power of a computer will be reaching that of a human brain, and we will be able to augment our grey matter with cybernetic prostethics. As such, we will have more “processing muscle” than ever before, but our ability to imagine, that what takes us apart from machines, is what adds value. At the same time, we’re more connected than ever, but that doesn’t make us less chauvinistic, and maybe even more, because we’re able to see up close those things that we didn’t lay our sight on before, like poverty, war and strange people and customs. A point that was very important is that we don’t know where it’s taking us, how it is changing us and even whether we will survive these opposing forces bringing us together and at the same time further away from each other. I sure hope we do.

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When will Latin American governments get it?

As said in some of my previous posts, I was at the Creativity World Forum in Ghent this week and I was really surprised by one thing, but let’s start from the beginning.

The event itself was organised by the self-proclaimed Districts of Creativity, an association of what I can only term regions-state borrowing from Kenichi Ohmae’s term. These districts of creativity include Flanders (Belgium), Qingdao (China), Shanghai (China), Lombardy (Italy), Nord-Pas de Calais (France), Karnataka (India), Maryland (USA), Baden-Württemberg (Germany), Rhône-Alps (France), Catalonia (Spain), Scotland (UK) and Québec (Canada).

I was at the Karnataka booth (Bangalore, the IT capital of India is in this state) and I was pleasantly surprised by the attitude of the government representatives there. Regardless of the fact that I am a student and I don’t have anything to bring to their country they really explained to me what are they all about and invited me to come. I couldn’t help but contrast it with the attitude prevalent in most of Latin America that Foreign Direct Investment is the devil and we are so much better without it, and how the Indians really try to attract as much as they can but not only stay at the lower end of, in this case, software production, but keep on repeating their matra of “moving up the value chain” (no pun intended).

When will our governments start doing that?

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Creativity World Forum in Ghent, Belgium

This week I had the opportunity to attend the Creativity World Forum in Ghent, basically mentioning how regional governments, enterprises and individals can compete and benefit in the so-called creative economy. The event was comprised of two days of conferences and workshops, with some cocktails and extensive networking thrown in between as it happens in this kind of events.

Generally I can say that I was inspired by the congress, but there is still left one nagging feeling that the word “World” is slightly too pretentious in the name, given that there was nobody from two continents (South America and Africa) and the vast majority of the participants were Belgians from Flanders. However, I believe that it was a very good initaitive by the local government and it’s interesting to see the already the rise of the region-state that had been predicted by Thomas L. Friedman and Kenichi Ohmae.