brucesterling:

Joi Ito of MIT Media Lab:

Ito: There are nine or so principles to work in a world like this:

1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.

2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.

3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.

4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects.

5. You want to have good compasses not maps.

6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.

7. It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.

8. It’s the crowd instead of experts.

9. It’s a focus on learning instead of education.

We’re still working on it, but that is where our thinking is headed.

(via emergentfutures)

climateadaptation:

What is Resilience? is a nifty, free, 20page, visual ebook overview defining resilience. It’s free, and published by the researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. (Free ebook is free.)

Resilience is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It is about the capacity to use shocks and disturbances like a financial crisis or climate change to spur renewal and innovative thinking.

This publication presents the major strands within resilience thinking and social-ecological research. It describes the profound imprint we humans have had on nature and ideas on how to deal with the resulting challenges.

The publication is based on three scientific articles that were prepared for the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on global sustainability, which took place in Stockholm in May 2011. The articles were later published in the scientific journal Ambio. They represent a mix of necessary actions and exciting planetary opportunities. They also illustrate how we can use the growing insights into the many challenges we are facing by starting to work with the processes of the biosphere instead of against them.

Chapter One describes in detail the complex interdependencies between people and ecosystems. It highlights the fact that there are virtually no ecosystems that are not shaped by people and no people without the need for ecosystems and the services they provide. Too many of us seem to have disconnected ourselves from Nature. A shift in thinking will create exciting opportunities for us to continue to develop and thrive for generations to come.

Chapter Two takes us through the tremendous acceleration of human enterprise, especially since World War II. This acceleration is pushing the Earth dangerously close to its boundaries, to the extent that abrupt environmental change cannot be excluded. Furthermore, it has led scientists to argue that the current geological period should be labelled the ‘Antropocene’ – the Age of Man.

Chapter Three highlights the fascinating paradox that the innovative capacity that has put us in the current environmental predicament can also be used to push us out of it. It introduces the term social-ecological innovation, which essentially strives to find innovative ways to reconnect with the biosphere and stay within planetary boundaries.

Enjoy! :)

(via emergentfutures)

The significance of ART

citycollaboration:

The Global Innovation Index

Some insights from the attached chart (please feel free to add your own in the comments page):

1. Innovation has become global: all regions show potential as hubs of innovation (the two upper quadrants show the countries leading in the GII ranking)
2. Some emerging economies stand out: China is the only non-high income country among the top 30 on the GII. Results show that East Asia and the Pacific is at par with Europe and Central Asia (on average, across pillars), although the latter has a much higher average income per capita.
3. Innovation efficiency matters to get a higher ranking in the GII, as shown by the positive regression line.
4. For countries placed in the lower-right quadrant, efficiency is crucial, often determined by specialization in niche markets, pockets of wealth around clusters, or high growth. Pakistan is ranked 123^rd on inputs and 67^th on outputs, due to good marks on labor productivity, spending on software, high-tech exports, computer and communication service exports, domestic resident trademark applications , creative goods and services exports. Similarly, Nigeria is ranked 119^th on inputs, but 62^nd on outputs, Côte d’Ivoire is 125^th and 79^th respectively.
5. By contrast, countries in the upper-left, like Singapore, Hong Kong (SAR, China), Ireland, Luxembourg, Australia, Japan, Belgium do not achieve their full innovation potential.
6. Last but not least, there seems to be a positive relationship between population size and efficiency: six countries among the most densely populated, including three BRICs, are in the top 10 on the efficiency index: Nigeria, China, Pakistan, Brazil, India and Bangladesh (countries to the right of the chart; the chart shows the full name for the 30 most populated countries, except for USA and the UK).

ViaINSEAD eLab