Cities get a new lease of life - Future of Business

Next month (June), “Monocle” magazine, the glossy chronicler of culture and design, will publish its latest annual “liveability index”. Ranking the world’s cities in this way has become a rather popular activity in recent years. Similar lists are produced by the management consultancy Mercer, the Economist Intelligence Unit and others. Largely, though, they cater for corporations looking to decide what they should pay in living and other allowances to personnel located around the world. As such, they tend to favour smaller cities that suit families. For example, the latest EIU list is topped by the same 10 cities as took the top spots the previous year (albeit with a couple of place swaps) and seven of the 10 are in Canada and Australia, countries where – as the report points out – population densities are well below those in much of the United States and Europe.

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Start-Ups, Not Bailouts, is The Creative Way To Go - Thomas L. Friedman - NYTimes.com

Here’s my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: “Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”

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MicroPayments - Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky

With continued turmoil in the advertising market, people who work at newspapers and magazines are wondering if micropayments will save them, with recent speculation in this direction by David Sarno of the LA Times, David Carr of the NY Times, and Walter Isaacson in Time magazine. Unfortunately for the optimists, micropayments — small payments made by readers for individual articles or other pieces of a la carte content — won’t work for online journalism. To understand why not, there are two key pieces of background.

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The Density of Smart People - a new way of looking at human capital - Richard Florida - The Atlantic

Clusters of smart people of the highly educated sort that economists refer to as "human capital" are the key engine of economic growth and development. Jane Jacobs argued that the clustering of talented and energetic in cities is the fundamental driving force of economic development. In a classic essay, "On the Mechanics of Economic Development," the Nobel prize-winning, University of Chicago economist Robert Lucas formalized Jacobs' insights and argued that human capital, or what can be called Jane Jacobs externalities, are indeed the key factor in economic growth and development. Still, the standard way economists measure human capital is to take the percentage of people in a country, state, or metropolitan area with a bachelor's degree or higher. So I was intrigued by this fascinating analysis by Rob Pitingolo (h/t: Don Peck) which looks at the density of human capital.

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OECD Innovation Strategy

Just launched, the OECD Innovation Strategy. Download a summary from here. The Creative Leadership Forum would be really interested in your thoughts on its content in particular its recommendations, its outcome, styles and future directions..

The OECD also offers a YouTube Channel containing a series of interviews accompanying the document.

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