Future of business – Page 21

Australia is becoming a global hub for crowdsourcing platforms: Freelancer.com, 99designs, DesignCrowd

Crowdsourcing in the broadest sense will be one of the fundamental platforms of the emerging network economy. As such it’s pleasing to see that Australia is becoming a hub for a number of the most significant crowdsourcing platforms globally.

I caught up with Alec Lynch of DesignCrowd yesterday for an interesting conversation about the crowdsourcing space and thought it was worth giving a quick pointer to the three main platforms run out of Australia (though all are global in scope).

Freelancer.com, was founded in Sweden as getafreelancer.com in 2004. I first wrote about it in 2005 in an overview of the space. For many years it was the dominant online services exchange in Europe, and one of the top three globally. In May 2009 it was bought by Australian company Ignition Networks, which also acquired the domain Freelancer.com. The company is run by veteran tech entrepreneur Matt Barrie, who most recently founded and ran specialty processor firm Sensory Networks Inc.

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The polarization of film budgets

By Ross Dawson

When I walked out from seeing Avatar 3D in December, I tweeted: “$300 million very well spent!”

Movie theaters can create extraordinary experiences, but the cost of production is ever greater.

On the other hand, movies can be made for extremely low cost, using HD cameras, digital editing, and volunteer labor.

At Media 2010 Suzanne Stefanac pointed to Escape to City 17, a machinima movie that had been made with a budget of less than $500, mainly for the costumes. It looks pretty good considering how little was spent.

Expect both increasing film budgets at the top end, and lowering film budgets at the bottom end.

Interactive scenarios for 2030: provocation for long-term strategy

By Ross Dawson

Last year I kicked off a strategy session of a major infrastructure company with a presentation to the executive team on the world in 2030. This used a set of four scenarios to provoke new thinking about the world moving forward.

I wrote about these in The World in 2030: Four scenarios for long-term planning and strategy, providing some of the background to the scenarios and presentation.

We’ve now created a flash piece to make it easier to navigate and interact with the scenarios. Please play with the interactive piece.

The power of personal brands in strategy and attracting talent

By Ross Dawson

A few months ago I wrote about The shift from corporate brands to personal brands, referencing Jeremiah Owyang’s move from Forrester to the newly-founded Altimeter Group with former colleagues.

This is a long-term secular trend – in fact last week when I spoke at the Online Marketing by Design event I pointed to it as one of the three most important trends for this year. I was discussing it in the context of marketing, where companies must recognize that trust resides in individuals not institutions, and use this to shape their external engagement. However it is just as important in the context of attracting and retaining talented people. I wrote:

Now, as personal brands grow in relative strength, corporations need to consider how they can best reflect and tap the influence of the individuals working for them. As Jeremiah notes, social media means that personal brands are immensely portable, as are personal networks.

This is about power to the worker, absolutely, but those companies that understand this and tap this shift can do extremely well. They can attract those with strong personal brands and create immense value from their influence, simply by focusing on building the brands of their key staff as much as they do their corporate brand.

In this context, I find it striking that Forrester Group has decided to ban personally-branded research blogs by its staff, as reported by analyst-watchers SageCircle. It says:

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7:30 Report: the social impact of the population boom and Australia’s future

By Ross Dawson

Last week the ABC’s 7:30 Report spent the entire week looking at the drivers of Australia’s long-term future. The fourth program, on The social impact of the population boom, was an excellent examination of the diverse issues and perspectives on the implications of rapid population growth, including interviews with a diverse range of politicians, demographers, analysts, and myself as the lone futurist.

It’s well worth seeing the video of the full program along with the transcript on the ABC’s website. A video of the program’s introduction and excerpts from my comments are below.

The program examined Australia’s demographic and social future, however the issues raised are absolutely relevant in all developed countries, where low immigration inevitably means a rapidly aging population, with all of the associated challenges.

Last December I wrote about the driving trends and uncertainties in Australia’s population growth, pointing to the recent dramatic increase in the 2050 forecast for Australia’s population from 28 million to 35 million. This revised forecast had a powerful impact, resulting in heated discussion about the social, ecological, and economic implications of what would be the fastest population growth of any developed country in the world.

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Effective strategies for a rapidly changing media industry

By Ross Dawson

When I wrote my recent article Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities for Media Titles magazine, they kindly offered Future Exploration Network a full page ad in the magazine.

The ad provides a nice overview of our current work with media organizations that are having to develop and implement strategies on the fly as the industry landscape shifts.

Click on the ad image for a larger version, or the key offerings are described below. If you’re interested in finding out more, some of the strategy tools we think are particularly useful in the current environment are described in our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework.

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Trend map for 2010 and out to 2050

By Ross Dawson

For the last few years Richard Watson of NowandNext has created annual trend maps based on city subway maps. This year he has been more ambitious, creating a highly detailed map with five time zones, ranging from 2010-2015 out to 2035-2050.

For the previous three trend maps (shown at the bottom) I collaborated with Richard and we co-branded them with Future Exploration Network, however time pressures this year meant that I haven’t directly contributed to the 2010 map. It is still as rich and glorious as ever – spend some time delving into the trends ahead!

MEGATRENDS OF THE TREND MAP

– Ageing

– Power shift Eastwards

– Globalisation

– Localisation

– Digitalisation

– Personalisation

– Volatility

– Individualism

– Environmental change

– Sustainability

– Debt

– Urbanisation

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The top 10 trends for the 2010s: the most exciting decade in human history

By Ross Dawson

In his excellent book The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin asks when in human history you would most like to be alive.

For me there is no question that it is now. The coming decade will be the most exciting in human history. The very challenging year of 2009 that we are preparing to bid farewell to helped to tear up the fairly linear progress of the first decade of the century. Now, technological and social change are poised to accelerate far beyond what we have become accustomed to.

A critical uncertainty is how well we will respond to this extraordinary pace of change, both as individuals and as societies. Will we be able to adapt and change, or will severe dysfunctions emerge? Just one dimension is the manifold ethical dilemmas that are raised by gaining extraordinary technological capabilities.

Here are the ten trends that I believe will be most fundamental to the decade ahead. I hope to present these and associated trends in an interactive visual format before long. For now, here are the 10 trends for 2010.

1. Information Intensity

We will soon consume more media than there are waking hours, by virtue of multi-channeling at most times. Billions of people and places will be media producers, including video streaming from most points of view on the world. We are just at the dawn of an incomprehensible daily onslaught of news and information – some valuable, much useless.

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The polarization of film budgets

Interactive scenarios for 2030: provocation for long-term strategy

Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

Keynote Speaker

Strategy Advisor

Content

Influence Rankings