An inspiring evening courtesy of the Club of Amsterdam February 18, 2011
Posted by rthewins in Business, Society, Technology.trackback
I had a great evening yesterday participating in a conference on the Future of Services at the Club of Amsterdam. It has been a while since I’ve done something like this and it reminded me how important it is to share data, information, knowledge beyond our professional borders. The Club of Amsterdam’s mission is “Shaping Your Future in the Knowledge Society” and I found the topic for the evening, my fellow speakers, the audience and, well, basically everybody to be an inspired, inspiring and impressively diverse collection of humanity.
My theme for the evening was Darwinian ecosystems as applied to business — or, as we call them at Pentacle, Money Making Machines. A quick romp covering the incredible economic longevity of the rock band Aerosmith versus the rock band game Guitar Hero, and the Battle Royale between BlockBuster and Netflix.
My official 15 minutes of air time was dutifully enforced by a repeated technology failure that prevented me from wrapping up my presentation as planned, but the key message still got through: in the New World business ecosystems are forming and collapsing with increasing velocity and a key driver for this phenomenon in products and services is the rapid evolution of consumer preferences. The constant creation of technology wrapped into informatized services has led to equally rapid declines in experiential tolerance.
In other words, consumers get bored much more quickly with the latest and greatest that they have now and want the next latest and greatest faster.
Other speakers covered the evolution of education programs for future designers, the future of hyper-personalized services and the future of the Internet of Things taken from a design perspective.
Eclectic topics, but all connected.
After a break for a half hour mixer with drinks, snacks and conversation, the speakers reconvened as a panel to allow the audience to ask questions on the presentations.
A late dinner with new friends capped the evening. I look forward to my continued involvement with the Club.
[...] students. A lot of fun, and a very engaging, diverse and international group. Started off with the Darwinist Ecosystems material from the Club of Amsterdam evening, then moved on the Old World/New World debate and, [...]