The Kev Blog

My friend Tyler showed me this tonight, and it looks friggin’ awesome.

VeloCity, a new residence at UW, fostering entrepreneurship and innovation, specifically in the mobile & web space.

“VeloCity is no ordinary student residence.

It’s a place where some of UW’s most talented, entrepreneurial, creative and technologically savvy students will be united under one roof to work on the future of mobile communications, web and new media.

It’s a place where students, faculty and corporate partners will be active collaborators and beneficiaries of the talent, ideas and innovations that evolve.

It’s a place where the ‘next big thing’ could happen.

VeloCity launches in September 2008.”

Apparently students will be free to pursue ideas of their own, while working with some of the brightest minds and undoubtedly one of the most innovative universities in Canada, if not the world. VeloCity also shows some promising backers, with a note already posted from Apple Canada in regards to their support for the program. Students will also have access to VCs and other members of industry.

It’s certainly a step in the right direction for entrepreneurship & innovation in Canada.

Cool. Almost makes me want to go back to first year.

This from a Tom Peters post in September:

Describing Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind.

Fundamental premise: “The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind—computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers.

But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”

Pink makes a sound analytic argument for all this, based on the Rise of Asia and the New Technologies, among other things. One other zinger I cotton to:

“The MFA [master of fine arts] is the new MBA.”

The other book is The Big Picture, from the person I consider to be the most innovative educator in America … Dennis Littky. Dennis considers the current school system a disaster.

He’s working on a new model, piloted in Providence, RI, and now spinning out across the nation courtesy a big grant from the Gates Foundation. Littky’s work dovetails brilliantly with Pink’s. He believes we need to get beyond the rote learning and teach-to-test shackles … and get kids to engage in activities that mean something to them.

Consider: “From the media, we hear these great tearjerker stories of kids who succeeded despite the odds. But all of our kids are instead facing the odds of an education system that is all wrong. The odds are against them because the system works against them instead of with them. … I see it every day: kids who people have dismissed as ‘dumb in math’ or ‘uninterested in science’ or ‘nonreaders’ doing incredible things in these exact same areas because they were (finally) allowed to start with something they were already interested in. A 9th-grade kid who ‘hates science’ sees a movie about freezing people, then decides to read a college biology text on cryogenics, and then gives a presentation on it that blows your socks off.”

Peters then goes on to explain that he thinks the state of education in the world is as important as terrorism. “I don’t think I’m crazy,” Peters says. “I think this is the equal of security concerns … perhaps the ultimate security concern?”

Image credit.

So what exactly does a ‘flat world’ mean? Well, it means that the “global competitive playing field is being leveled” says Thomas Friedman.

Still confused?

Think of it this way:

“It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing that at any previous time in the history of the world.”

It means that MBA students in North America can work on projects with MBA students in China, and then have that work edited by MBA students in India.

It means that someone with a laptop in an internet Cafe in Nigeria can start a business using Yahoo search engines and UPS logistics to ship products he has manufactured in China directly to the buyer who ordered the goods online, the whole time never touching his own products.

It means that anyone with a laptop can connect to absolutely anyone else with a laptop, and collaborate on any project, in almost any country, and change, create and develop anything they have the imagination to come up with.

It means a site like MySpace, if considered its own country, would be the 8th largest in the world, and that 1 in 8 couples married in 2008 will have met over the Internet.

It means that a company can open up its management, product development, and marketing tools to the world, share information that was once considered ‘for executives’ eyes only’, and see customers participate in company processes that used to be reserved for the boardroom.

It means that 6 billion people have a shot at participating in the new global economy.

Well….almost.

Friedman is quick to admit that not all the world is flat…at least not yet. There are still close to 3 billion people in rural parts of China, India, South America, Africa, and even Europe and North America who don’t have access to the flat world. However, that is changing as well. In efforts to maximize the global ‘talent pool’, individuals and organizations already in the flat world are now using globalization and collaboration to solve these problems.

Take Jeremy Hockenstein, for example. A former McKinsey employee, Hockenstein left to start a not-for-profit data entry firm that outsources work to Cambodia of all places; not the best of economies or work environments. So what did he and his colleagues decide to do? Bridge the gap between the flat world and the un-flat world. They opened “Digital Divide Data” and trained people in Cambodia to type information into computers. They then went to India to find data-entry organizations who needed text inputted into computers in digital form to be stored in databases. They also returned home to America to find work there. In fact, Harvard gave Digital Divide Data its first big contract, archiving old copies of its school newspaper. So, in a nutshell, two Americans trained people in Cambodia to type and use the Internet so that Indian companies and Harvard University could outsource data-entry work. The world is flat.

While we’ve all heard the arguments against globalization, it is critically important to see the advantages of living in a truly flat world. When projects like this can happen seamlessly, and its just as easy to communicate with someone in the next city as it is the opposite side of the world, the possibilities are endless. It will surely be exciting to see where the flat world takes us, and how it will shape education, governments, health care, organizations, and individuals.

The World is Flat should absolutely be a required reading for all business and economics students (at the very minimum), not to mention professors and faculty.

If our generation will be living in a flat world, should we not be educating for it?

With all the tools and technology out there, there is no reason why business and economics students are not working on research papers, assignments, and projects right alongside students in India and China.

There is no doubt that the concept of a ‘flat world’ is one that every future employee, business leader, politician, entrepreneur, student (and the list goes on), must understand.

The fact that globalization is happening is a non-issue. What does matter is the how the human race pushes globalization along. Friedman’s The World is Flat is an excellent starting point, but just like in the flat world, its what we do with all this shared knowledge and collaboration that counts.

Another Ted Talk - this time with Ken Robinson who argues that “it is creativity which is at the heart of our greatest achievements not academic ability.”

“Robinson points out the many ways our schools fail to recognize — much less cultivate — the talents of many brilliant people. ‘We are educating people out of their creativity,’ Robinson says.”

His main points:

• Creativity is now as important in education as is literacy.

• Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They are not frightened of being wrong.

• If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. As you become adults, you become afraid of being wrong.

• We are educating people out of their born capacities.

• We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence, and that new view cannot be based on academic success.

• Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we have strip-mined the earth for a particular commodity.

• We need to see our creative capacities for the richness they are.

See the full 20min talk here.