This morning noticed these excellent slides on slideshare, of creative workplaces.
Well done to Serdar Belbag.
The 2thinknow view is that companies seeking to become employers-of-choice, need creative workspaces as an element of their strategy.
What do you think? Would it inspire you to work in these offices?
Or is your work or dream office more creative?
Post the photos in our new flickr group: Creative Companies

About Creative Companies
Creative workplace. Employers of choice. Ethical corporations. Nice seats. Micro-finance projects. Creative Capitalism. Innovation Teams. Inspiring workplaces. Not cubicle farms (unless they are cool). Cool.
The places you …

COMMENT, Global – One of the trends I have noticed amplified whilst updating my book the Global Innovation Review 2007, is a return to the figurative in art and culture.
Why is this important? It shows direction in art. Away from post-modernist ‘I am a painter so why do I bother to paint?‘ thinking that typified the 90s. The 90s were however that kind of decade perhaps…!
Even moreso it shows a return to seeking meaning. It’s tiring looking at noir films, drinking black coffee and talk about meaninglessness.
Remember the artist …

COMMENT, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA — Thanks to all of you who attended our joint Web 2.0 seminar in our Melbourne offices.
It’s an emerging topic in Australia (Australia is about at early-adopter stage (2%), whereas the USA is in adolescence on Web 2.0 adoption.)
We had quite a few big Melbourne companies, government, and some fellows from the press…
Sydney Seminar Tuesday, November 20th.
It was informative, interesting, and please remember when it comes to Web 2.0 you are not alone.
Our partner firm simple, can help; wherever you are on the growth curve.
Take care,
…

COMMENT, Global – A couple of months ago I was in San Francisco at a business event. The topic was citizen journalism. The women next to me was writing paper notes.
However, every single person, almost in that room was writing on a laptop.
The wireless internet crashed in the first 15 minutes. A few people were asked to turn off ‘Bit-torrent’ a heavy duty file downloader/sharer. Napster-ish.
We’ll contrast that later with an event in Australia last week.

COMMENT, Global: 2thinknow ® have identified Web 2.0 as one of the big trends sweeping the business world in a short to medium term.
If you feel Web 2.0 is a buzzword. it is. But then again unlike most, this one is useful.
What is Web 2.0?
In short Web 2.0 is the new new printing press, wireless and TV Tube.

ANALYSIS-IN-BRIEF, Global –Tim Berners-Lee is the father of the internet as a useful tool, in the form of the Web. He was there at the web’s birth, as the picture of the CERN web server following shows.

If you want to understand the future of the internet, as a communication medium then read Berners-Lee’s book, “Weaving the Web”.

ANALYSIS, Global – The answer is to ‘Stand on the Shoulders of Giants’.
This is the first part of a regular series on how to speak the language of ideas in coming weeks. How to be an Ideas Person.
Ideas and an intellectual education are important no matter how old we are. Both help us make better decisions in terms of positive change in our societies.
How do we personally understand what is positive change and what is not?
We talk incessantly about success, about wanting positive change.
We talk about love, relationships, children, families, …

COMMENT, Global — The modern world seems complex.
That’s because we’re trying to understand it with modernist 1950s metaphors from the age of the soon-to-be-gone Oil Economy.
The Neo-Cons were really the last hurrah, and just look how well Iraq is working out for them.
That’s despite all the freedoms they managed to crush in Western countries by invoking a straw man of terrorism and turning a blind eye to some desert-dwelling nutcases.
But the fact is they don’t get it. The modern world. The internet. Or trends.

ANALYSIS, Sydney –The tendency to think cities are homogenous across a country is an untruth.
Melbourne CBD is vastly different to Sydney CBD. (Yes I’m in Sydney once again. City yesterday and Parramatta today.)
Sydney CBD is vastly different to Parramatta.
The culture in the northern & Eastern Suburbs of Sydney are different. Both are affluent eras generally, but the culture is different.
This goes further than cities. Any form of grouping, cities, generational, academic, social, demographic is by nature a generalization.
Grouping theories
To generalise is human nature.
And many times in writing or describing …

COMMENT, Melbourne, Australia — Social networks are the next big thing, depending on where you are located in the physical world, they can be at various stages of adoption.
I asked this to a few people at WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco, and in a case of preaching to the converted, many felt blogs were already ‘established’.
But blogs & social networks have not gone mainstream yet in most markets.
(If one applies a model called the Innovation Diffusion curve, that is.)
PS. If you are reading this and twittering, you are probably not …

COMMENT, Melbourne, Australia — First of all let me say I am not partisan. I vote right, I vote left.
Personally, I think Giuliani, Gore, Clinton and McCain would all make good presidents at different times. Professionally I think Gore, Giuliani and Clinton may all lead to good outcomes for innovation.
The Left/Right divide is increasingly irrelevant, in any case. In a prior analysis from 2thinknowTM I made the case that the real contest is between Engaged and Not Engaged. See: Election innovation: why Left & Right don’t matter.
How Bush happened:
The people …

NEWS AND ANALYSIS, San Francisco, USA – Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of leading blogging platform WordPress, spoke at WordCamp 2007 today, Sunday July 22, 2007.
For the Agenda of the Matt Mullenweg’s presentation: http://2007.wordcamp.org/schedule/state-of-the-word/
NOTICE AND LICENSE: This story is copyright © 2007 2thinknow.This story is licensed for reprint in full or excerpt under copyright in any print or online media, under the terms that it includes the following byline within the reprint:Source: Christopher Hire, 2thinknowTM : http://www.2thinknow.com/innovation

Innovation: Past and Future of WordPress, according to Matt
Mullenweg …

ANALYSIS, San Francisco – WordCamp 2007 commenced today in San Francisco, at the Swedish American Hall on Market St. This is my second post.Presenter in the second session, was experienced journalist and IT veteran John Dvorak. He was joined by writer from the (sadly rumoured to be defunct) Business 2.0, OM Malik.
Dvorak had two interesting points regarding innovation:
“Bloggers present themselves as bloggers”
“Citizen journalism”
Schedule: http://2007.wordcamp.org/schedule/blogs-vs-journalism/
Both these allude to the innovation zeitgeist as 2thinknowTM define it.
The innovation zeitgesit in blogging is the upcoming professionalism and redesign of the presentation of user …

ANALYSIS, San Francisco — From WordCamp 2007. Podcasting will be a new media, and will grow in revenues. By then it may not be called podcasting.
It may be called something new and snappy, and will be in some ways more like TV/radio.
Marketing, including naming (eg. iPod is sexier than media player and is now the generic name) is important to product development and adoption (see Apple…)
Thanks to Dan Kuykendall, of www.mightyseek.com for an excellent and well balanced presentation of the what, why and how of pod-casting; and despite being first …

ANALYSIS — Visited the Art Gallery of South Australia on Saturday. Here’s the ideas and innovation from there.
A very nice venue, with a decidedly Australian colonial focus.
Innovation is like being the sole artist in a colony.
Take yourself back to the 1800s. You’re an English artist of limited fame. You board that long voyage of months to Australia, without more than another artists picture of the place, and a verbal history. Maybe some thin written reports.
It’s an act of faith, stepping on that ship to another distant and strange land. …

Forget myspace, unless you are a band, start thinking web social communities integrated around common ideas. In business words – fragmented vertical markets of web communities.
Some have said personal/professional divide. More likely we will have multiple profiles in multiple places, StumbleUpon, Xing, linkedIn, Ning, Skype and others being some of those.
Social communities
These are also ending the disconnection found in modern society. Social disconnection is the number one Innovation Driver, found in our Global Innovation research.
So in other words, feeling depressed, empty & alone? Well, in a word you are not …

Librarians are having to deal with the vast amount of content that only occurs in web or electronic form. It’s a massive trend. So a term, Library 2.0 and a support network has arisen. One of their communities online is at: library20.ning.com
Organising electronic data: this is a big issue. I predict veteran website snapshots will be a collectors item one day, much like movie merchandise/posters are now.
Social networking innovations: I found this whilst researching on Marc Andreessen’s new venture Ning.com, basically a site that lets you create your own social …

If I have not responded to your email in the past 3 days, it’s because I didn’t get it! I believe (but have no way to be sure) I may be still missing some mail, as some newsletters haven’t arrived. If you got a bounce this is also why.
Here’s Webcentral’s response to ‘email down’. I am interested to see what the cause was, I hope it’s open and honest. I think to be honest, this is about the best response I have had from any ISP or webhost over these …

Fresh from my posting about university students, I saw this on www.Digg.com the news ranking site.
The world’s oldest blogger… this lady has a very entertaining (and pictorial) blog.
“My name is Olive Riley. I live in Australia near Sydney. I was born in Broken Hill on Oct. 20th 1899.Broken Hill is a mining town, far away in the centre of Australia. My Friend, Mike, has arranged this blog for me. He is doing the typing and I am telling the stories.” 
read Olive’s Blog | digg story
A very entertaining read, and to …

In what I think is very interesting, and can only be described as a positive thing, uni students at melbourne Uni have been running a ‘First year Students’ blog since last year.
It’s a sign of the times. I like positive social engagement, I want to see positive change, indeed 2thinknow define innovation, in short, as positive change.
Using a blog to create communities, and share experiences and humanity is a positive change. Too much push media – TV,radio is about telling us what to think. (often based on what stats say …