Versatile Amphibian

As promised in a previous post about information symmetry , I’ve now completed my first-draft framework for assessing the success of digital economies.  Digital education was quite a tough ask as it’s a broad ranging subject. I think it condenses into three topics, though: Higher education , because we’re in an age of discovery and people need to be both intellectually inquisitive and able to learn. My view is that a properly thought out higher education system which emphasises self-study is fundamental to the success of nations. I have major issues with the idea that those who wish to learn should have to pay for that learning excessively as it encourages competition based on perceived rather than real outcomes (why go to a college where it’s harder to get a good grade?)… but I accept that I’m a throwback in this regard and that commercial undergraduate education is here to stay. I don’t care about what subjects are being studied either – it’s simplistic to suggest...

For narcissistic reasons I recently looked back on the most popular posts from 5 years of blogging and discovered that amongst the top 3 was this one on the relative sizes and evolution of social networks. Back in 2012 I was trying to make a point about the decline and slight return of MySpace. Looking around has made me realise that consolidated views of active users in this market are actually quite thin on the ground. So here's my read on the performance of key social networks from 2006 to 2015. Although no one has matched the breakout performance of Facebook in 2007, there are murmurs of hockey sticks from Snapchat and Instagram. Poor old Twitter failed to kick on from 2012, despite looking a bit sticky. Too slow to become a photo stream and too transient to be a publisher, Twitter has struggled a bit for direction in the intervening three years, scoring successes only through Vine. I hope this brief recap is useful. Rest assured that I remain vigilant for hints of canine...

In previous posts I've written about presentations on the trajectories of digital economies in Africa and Norway . Both of these were based on an unfinished framework I've been developing that tries to describe the success factors for national economies in the Early Digital Economy. I won't recap this framework in detail as its described in the posts linked above, but at the highest level it breaks the success factors into four categories: Pervasive access to computing Information symmetry Innovative AND entrepreneurial culture Digital skills and education In order to complete the framework and starting building a broader data set to test it I've now populated one of the two missing sections, information symmetry . This topic breaks into 4: Unfiltered access to information, enabling people to have open conversations and access (if not a preference for) content from every potential point of view. This is vital for true innovation as a fear of repercussions ...

I'm on my way back from Oslo, where I presented a keynote on the Digital Economy at the DND IT-lederkonferansen 2015 conference. Rather than do a standard Eight Traits presentation I decided to build on the work on success factors for digital economies that I prepared for SATNAC last month. You can find the presentation here . The structure of my argument was as follows: Norway was one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Industrial Economy. Before 1770 GDP per capita was on the same level as Mexico or Portugal; now it is more than twice that of the latter and three times the former. (I had to show 2003 numbers on the chart as doing 2015 made it look crazy!) But now the system is changing away from automation of physical processes into automation of mental ones. This will cause great disruption as it will polarise the productivity and hence the success of companies and countries. So how well set up is Norway? Success for digital economies is driven by four main factors: ac...

About 10 days ago my team and I published an analysis of the creative challenges for UK TV. Our concerns were that the creative basis of our TV economy was being damaged, despite an environment of increasing revenues, driven by TV's role in reinforcing the telecoms market through triple and quad-play bundling. What we found was troubling. Although revenues are indeed up by 10% since 2012, our share of global TV revenues has fallen and that the entire of the revenue increase can be accounted for by sports rights. As we showed in our 2013 Royal Television Society report , sports rights spending flows straight through the industry into the rights bodies, clubs and players, rather than into new skills, ideas and creative formats. And the worst is yet to come: the new Champions League and Premier League rights deals add more than a billion pounds a year onto the rights budget, so unless revenues increase new funding sources will be required if net spending on new creative content is t...

I've been doing a really large number of driver trees recently - we've taken to using them on every project to get really into the guts of value creation for businesses and thus decide where to focus initiative development (How To Win, if you're keeping score). Anyhow, I had to pause for thought recently to work out how to represent the subscription aspect of telecoms retail for a client. Since it took me a minute, I thought I'd share... its lack of elegance suggests that its not quite right, although it was enough to demonstrate that there was a certain lack of coverage in the initiatives that my client was pursuing and thus spark a debate. Enjoy.

Since I'm stuck on a Eurostar crawling through western France I thought I'd use the downtime to share this table I've made on the differences between Industrial and Digital companies across the main business functions. A strange insight into how my mind works... but hopeful a useful summary!