Super-fast Internet is the new ‘Wealth of Nations’ – enabling innovation competitive advantage & improving destination desirability; failure is not an option.

National Broadband Network, & closer technological collaboration between Australia & Germany are 2 key themes of CeBIT AusInnovate.

Shared Services as Innovation. Jack Cassidy, MD of Bearing Point raised this as enabling collaborative innovation. Good point.

Conroy opened CeBIT AusInnovate, with National Broadband Network for Australia. Then the detail – CSIRO & DSTO – the need not to kill innovation… highlights from CeBIT in Sydney.

Victoria, Australia makes the decision to support local innovation.

ANALYSIS, USA — It’s all over!
Obama has won the US Presidency with a probable popular vote of up to 5%.

Political Winds. Economic Trends.
The key significance of Obama, is a little-noticed trend.
Economic local-ism.
Grass-roots.
Ground-up.
In Talbott’s book, Obamanomics, he refers to Obama’s ideas “bottom-up economics”.
Read it: Obamanomics: How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics
Economics is trend # 1.
Economics has changed.
With the surge of China, Economic Crisis &  under-reported power of Europe, economic intervention is back. Economic regulation is back.
The trends have shifted at the infancy stage, and represent a paradigm shift. Unimaginable …

ANALYSIS, USA — Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proven to be a visionary leader of California.
Schwarzenegger, a Republican, married to a Kennedy Democrat, will become the nations most senior Republican, as the party moves back to the centre.
There’s an interesting video of Governor Schwarzenegger’s idea for a “Bipartisan Commission Will Address Chronic Budget Problems”. Read the release here.
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Schwarzenegger Action, Ideas.
Interestingly, Obama winning means Schwarzenegger will be the symbolic leader. Vindicated in opposition to Bush on many policies. Bi-partisan. Moderate. Results-driven. Environmentally-focussed. New ideas.
A lot of power …

ANALYSIS – According to the Polls, Obama should win the US election only a couple of days away.
We hope this time the result is not tangled up in electoral court-cases or misanthropic journalism, as was the case in Gore v Bush.
We’ll look now at how trends support Obama.
Trends Support Obama.
Australia’s Centre Left.
The fortune of leaders are often tied to the same trends in English-speaking countries. Reagan-Thatcher. Clinton-Blair. Bush-Howard.
Australia’s Prime Minister Rudd represents generational change, Obama does too.
2thinknow accurately predicted the result of the Rudd election, and the margin within 1%, …

ANALYSIS, USA — According to The Age newspaper online:
“The economy suffered its biggest decline since 2001 in the third quarter, ushering in what may be the worst recession in a quarter-century … Gross domestic product contracted at a 0.3% pace from July to September, according to a Commerce Department report.
“The crisis really kicked up in late September,” Ethan Harris, co-head of US economic research at Barclays Capital Inc. in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “We’re going to be looking at a very unfriendly GDP number in the …

ANALYSIS, Melbourne — 2thinknow have predicted an Australian recession since 2007.
In October 2007, I indicated 2thinknow’s concerns of recession, in December 2007 I made clear predictions of recession and in February foresaw nationalisation of banks & various other consequences.
It’s worth noting that most commentators using economic predictions were wrong in October 2007-February 2008. None raised nationalisation, nor believed the ASX would go as low as 4500. 2thinknow was a lonely voice in specific correct prediction.
2thinknow take a different view, because we have foresight based on proprietary nascent trend analysis.
And, in …

ANALYSIS, Global – Salaried employees in the C-Suite being paid obscene sums of money they ill-deserve, is an inflationary disease that has spread to executives in most Western countries.
Kevin Rudd is one of a chorus of international leaders to draw our attention to this short-termism & greed as a philosophical cause of the international economic crisis.

Pay Solutions.
How can we simply link executive pay & control it? Without something as unwieldly as a black-letter figure…
Simple. The 2thinknow view is that we set executive pay based on a market capitalisation and a …

ANALYSIS, Frankfurt — Art (or kunst in Deutsch) is a window into mens souls.
German art is a window into the Saxons, Prussians, Bavarians and other Germanic tribes.
People forget that the German nation is a modern construct, stitched together by Bismarck as a Greater Prussia. Prior to this, Germany was a collection of largely independent kingdoms.

Accordingly, major German regions and cities with links to art and design throughout European history are hardly surprising.
I find much to like in the art of Saxony, including Leipzig, and the so-called Leipzig School (an …

Africa is often neglected in terms of innovation, but Africa needs a plan for innovation. A 100 year plan…

ANALYSIS, Australia — Tonight, in Australia, Wayne Swan as Australian Treasurer delivered the first budget of the new Rudd Centre-Left Labor Government.
The budget was solid, economically and fiscally-responsible according to ABC commentators like Alan Kohler. The budget was also politically astute, delivering on the promises made in the last election.

2thinknow Building Innovation Textbook
The budget read from the 2thinknow textbook on economic growth in challenging times, and nation-building of innovation cities and regions:
1) Infrastructure investment – ports, rail, institutions, broadband and roads
2) Productivity driven economics – childcare, flexible industrial relations, education
3) …

This is one of our very popular earlier 2008 articles working to rebalance the criticism that Generation Y attracted, and pointing out that non-linearity may be an asset in a networked world. Enjoy the ‘Creative Generation’, reproduced for your reading pleasure…

ANALYSIS, Germany — Train travel, after an unfashionable period in the 1970s-80s, is emerging again as an environmentally-friendlier, and practical way to travel to and from work.
Well, this is true, in Germany, and much of Europe.

The ease of implementation of the Deutsche Bahn (D-Bahn) system, allows for the enquiry into, and booking of complex train routes.
Whilst no mechanical system is perfect, those with some human knowledge of conditions on the ground in Germany, can plan and map routes across Europe using the German website for D-Bahn.
German Trains Worldwide Benchmark
In public …

ANALYSIS, USA — Wealthy white people with academic economic dogma are a plague on all our wallets, let alone houses.

The economics brains trust of our last 8 years or so of US (and British & Australian) economic policy have been a few rich white guys, right-wing academic economists from big universities like Harvard. These folks theories are to blame for severity of the coming US recession.
Why?
Most universities (like Harvard) have a fair mix of dissent; but the current US administration selected all economists (and think-tanks) with far-Right free market views.
Clinton, …

Food, real food. We take it for granted – yet more often than not what Westerners are eating is not ‘food’, but produced artificially in labs. As Felicity Lawrence, Peter Singer, Jim Mason and Greg Critser (among others), have argued the time has for consumers come to demand and purchase only real food, and not ’substitutes’. This flight to food is fundamental to human health and wellbeing, now and in the future.

COMMENT, USA, Australia – Let’s start with the USA economy.
US sliding into a chasm
The debate on whether the US economy is in recession or not seems to be over.
The bear is among us.

For months people have been standing up that the US economy is not as bad as first believed. The US recession was predicted by 2thinknow in December 2007, using our innovation models.
Before Christmas, many were sitting on the fence. I called this recession, in this journal, in straightforward terms before Goldman Sachs, or UN made their announcements.
Of course …

ANALYSIS, Global — It is always a folly to assume the past is an extension of the present.

Thinkers call this the problem of induction. i.e. Assuming that the past is a predictor of future performance. It’s why if you draw a straight line above a graph, invariably the graph will deviate if it’s measured over a long enough time frame.
Don’t be economically disappointed
This flawed human tendency to view the current set of circumstances as normal is why many countries now place on financial products a disclaimer: “Current financial performance is …