Sunday Posts

I have written about Kolkata at regular intervals ( see here ). I can't claim to be objective and analytical about the city, but from the experience of Kolkata, as well as of elsewhere, I know Kolkata has a future. One factor is its teeming multitude, the source of much of its woes, which can transform into a great source of strength. The other factor is the transformation of the global economy, which will open up new opportunities by breaking down the old economic structures, and Kolkata may be the right place at this right time. While Dubai or Singapore may seek to import a labour force to maintain its creative economies, Kolkata may have an indigenous source, and therefore, can complete to be Asia's Creative Capital. That would need imagination, and courage, but Kolkata has it all.  However, to discuss this, one must start with the obvious negative. The common claim is that Kolkata is a dying city - a label first slapped on the city by late Rajiv Gandhi - and the India...

The Global Innovation Index, produced by INSEAD and others, is built around seven factors - Institutions, Human capital and research, Infrastructure, Market sophistication, Business sophistication, Knowledge and technology outputs and Creative outputs - and measures an economy's ability to innovate. India has continually slipped in the rankings, from 62nd in 2011 to 64th in 2012, to 66th in 2013 and now at 76th in 2014. Indeed, it is useful to contrast India with China, acknowledging the coveted hyphenation that many Indians desire: China has remained on the 29th position during this time, losing and recovering the lost ground during the in-between years (though China includes the territory of Hong Kong, which is treated separately and is a top 10 territory in these rankings). Not that rankings matter much, but they are useful reminders of where one is going. India's decline tells a story in the context of the rest of the world. In the past rankings, India was ranked 2nd...

Policies need to be made of dream stuff, particularly in these difficult times. Reality is always hard to believe and good words are usually handy to keep away wrong statistic: Like the drop in real incomes for middle classes for a decade or the very current drop in employment numbers. But this is the way of the world - or, as Stephen Covey puts it, an area of concern - and the decent thing for plain folks is to get on with it. What makes the Old Street roundabout Britain's answer to silicon valley? The place is indeed run-down, ideal for new property development. It is rumoured that Russians are now moving in and buying the Bangladeshis out. Commercial Road is becoming, well, commercial. Indeed, there are so many other creative hot spots in Britain, and as a friend rhetorically put it, why not Brighton, that one wonders whether the vision of a silicon valley in Hoxton has anything to do with creative enterprises, or is it a clarion call to beleaguered property developers. I must ...

I spent the afternoon in an event celebrating the University of Creative Arts' ( UCA ) Creative Challenge event, the student competition to come up with creative business ideas. It was very well organized, at very cozy meeting rooms on a bar on the Greek Street in Soho, with great food and drinks to go with it. Besides, the event was lightened up by a brilliant presentation by Mike Southon of FT and Beermat Entrepreneur (See his profile here ). His inspiring presentation of 45 minutes, built around the story of Beatles, arguably the best creative team/ business in history, was aided by clips, stories and intelligent contextualization by Mike. Overall, a great afternoon of ideas, just what I needed to lift my spirits amid a rather miserable run. Apart from the entertainment, this was useful time spent, considering that I am trying to give some shape to rather abstract ideas of 'digital enterprise' that we are working on. Of late, I have been displaying some disillusi...

I am working on a paper about teaching 'Creativity' at the workplace. I have been fascinated by the various workshops and consultants who teach 'Creative Thinking' to white collar workers, and whose methods range from well-set formulas to the abolition of collar, and everything in between. I must admit my curiosity starts from my rather dim view of managers of all sorts, those poor souls who has no skills other than carrying out orders and shepherding others to carry out orders, those who wants to be as far distant from the customers and as close as to the boss/ the owners as possible, and those who don't even possess the skills of making a cup of tea for themselves but claim to have the solutions which can solve the problems of the world: But then I exaggerate. However, whatever the managers are capable of doing, I wonder, how can they be creative: Isn't management all about maintaining the status quo and not to be creative? This one question pushed me to at...

Story as appeared on bbc.co.uk Website ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adobe has secured a deal to put its Flash software into many of the chips that go inside TVs and set-top boxes. It will enable developers and content providers to create applications to deliver web-based content such as news, weather and share prices to TV screens. Flash will be included on most chips -those made by Broadcom, Intel, NXP and STMicroelectronics - but the deal does not cover TVs made by Sony and Samsung. The first applications using Flash are expected to hit TV sets early in 2010. Sony and Samsung already have a number of connected TVs on the market, but they are using Yahoo's rich media platform of widgets instead of Flash. More than 420 million TVs, set-top boxes, and media players are expected to ship globally in the next three years and increasingly they are capable of being connected to the net. Adobe hopes it can get Flash inside many of thos...

The idea of a Conceptual Age, as described in Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind or in Howard Gardner's Five Minds For The Future , has significant implications in policy making in developing countries. The current orthodoxy in development planning is indeed that an economy must go through stages - from manufacturing to services and up the value chain - and therefore most developing economies today compete to attract western firms to shift their manufacturing bases. Obviously, this policy has startling successes, like China, which dominates the store shelves across the world. This sequential thinking, indeed a result of our left brain orientation, dominates the economic science, and possibly one gift that Karl Marx passed on to his successors. And, because of its origin, there is a broad consensus between the left and the right on this issue of steps in development process. However, if we step aside economics and infuse the paradigm of business in development policy-making, the f...