It's been a particularly illuminating week. Any beliefs I had that I was successfully balancing dissertation-writing with on-the-bike fitness came to an abrupt end around four hours into a long ride from Oakland to Mt. Diablo and back. The ride - ostensibly a "five-taco ride," representing the number of taco-truck tacos wolfed down at the ride's conclusion - laid bare how soft I had become after three months of thinking and scribbling.

I had come to the Bay Area for meetings and to attend the IIT Madras Clean Energy Panel Discussion in Santa Clara. What I thought would be a small gathering of special interests and a great panel including ex-Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Om Nalamasu (now Applied Materials VP and Deputy CTO) was basically a standing-room-only affair. The place was packed with technical folks who wanted to apply their mad hardware and software skeels to the twin challenges of energy and climate change. It was a great event, and one that left me hopeful for breakthrough innovation in this domain.

While in the Bay Area I also had a chance to talk to a couple of folks experimenting with different approaches to venture capital investment. The globalization of capital, opportunity, and talent is changing the context in which venture capital firms operate, (click here for a working paper by Martin Kenney, Martin Haemmig, and W. Richard Goe on the subject) and I am curious to see how various aspects of the venture capital ecosystem are experimenting and adapting. One of the challenges of venture investment is navigating the transition from entrepreneurial startup to high-growth firm, e.g. its "professionalization." Venture capital firms have evolved a series of structural and contractual mechanisms designed to mitigate risk, add value to firms, and help them through this process (where "help" often means swapping out the executive team).

One potential solution to the challenge of professionalization is to do it yourself. A venture capital firm, typically an "active" investor that provides value-add at the level of the board of directors, could choose to become a "super active" investor, taking an active role in the management of the firm. This is the strategy enacted by one venture firm located in the Bay Area. Another way to address the problem is to re-think the notion of the entrepreneur-venture firm matching problem by inventing or finding the business models yourself, and then tap your network to assemble the right team, and hiring additional people at the right time. A second firm has been employing this strategy with some success.

Both cases are interesting experiments, but they also have notable challenges. Both approaches require structural and contractual changes to align incentives appropriately and reduce the ever-present risk of opportunism present in venture investment. Both approaches may struggle to scale, but for a small venture capital firm this may not be a concern. I don't think either has taken outside money, and I don't think that either firm would be particularly motivated to do so. However, just like the IIT Clean Energy Panel Discussion, these meetings left me optimistic that the U.S. national innovation system - flexible, adaptable, and filled with bright, motivated individuals - will play a significant role in the transition from hydrocarbons to electrons and carbohydrates.

And how are things in your world? Are you noticing a migration of technical and managerial talent to entrepreneurial opportunities in energy and the environment? What are the factors preventing breakthroughs? Lack of capital? An influx of new talent? A fresh perspective? How much of a difference will technical breakthroughs make compared to, say, changes in public policy or large-scale behavioral change?

One of the keys to building a sustainable, creative economy is leveraging a city or region's assets and engaging the citizens with those assets. A great piece in today's WSJ highlights how Pittsburgh, PA and Carnegie Mellon University (where Richard taught/lived for years) has supported its citizens' efforts to learn about and build robots - including edible robots! Here is the website for Robot 250 (the year-long robot festival).

From the article by Clare Ansberry:

Mickey McManus took five seedless cucumbers, carved them so they looked like fingers and anchored them to a hunk of Edam cheese. To this "hand," he attached a small electronic device, programmed to respond to sound; when someone laughed or clapped, the fingers flexed. He brought his cucumber robot to a wine-and-cheese party as an appetizer, along with a robotic Rice Krispies Treats man that pivoted whenever the lights dimmed...

The yearlong program, called Robot 250, coincides with the city's 250th birthday. Teachers fanned out to 13 neighborhoods, providing materials, instruction and troubleshooting. "We wanted to put technology into the hands of as many people as possible," says Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, who came up with the idea...

People in Pittsburgh have been building robots for decades. Seventy years ago, an engineer at Westinghouse Electric created Elektro the Moto-Man, who could walk and smoke cigarettes and had a 77-word vocabulary. His sidekick, Sparko the Moto-Dog, wagged his tail, sat and barked on command.

Today, there are more than 30 robotic companies in Pittsburgh. They make drowsy-driver warning systems, and robots that help with surgery, unload crates and search for life on distant planets. Alcoa Inc. has a 6-foot-tall robot spokesperson, Al, who hosted a recent Robot Block Party at the Carnegie Science Center.

Part of the Robot 250 event, the block party was billed as the city's largest and most diverse public gathering of robots. A solar-powered robot mingled with hazmat robots that search for explosives. Robots built by teenagers were on display. Red Rover, a four-wheeled robot that has become a local celebrity in robot circles, made an appearance. Red Rover and his creators are vying for the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon and transmit video, images and data back to Earth.

Pittsburgh has had many struggles over the years, but is continually trying to use its historical strengths to claw its way back to the leading edge of the economy. Many cities and regions could take a cue from Pittsburgh's efforts to engage its people and their creativity. What is your city doing? Is it working?

Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Richard Branson. According to this story in Forbes, 73 of the world's 1,125 billionaires dropped out of school along the way. An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal reports on research that says preschool is counterproductive - keep the kids home with mom and dad longer. Finland, where kids start school at seven, is seen as a model of education. Peter Drucker famously said that the resarch university would not survive the shift to knowledge-based capitalism.

So, do we need less school, or different kinds of school, or what?

What is a hipster? Being a DJ in the contemporary North American urban nightlife scene, it's a question that I get to ponder a lot.

Last month, on their cover, Adbusters ran a story called Hipster: The dead end of Western civilization characterizing them as:

one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior [coming] to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.” An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal.

While being more than slightly polemical toward the end, the author's point holds water. Hipsters are very slippery when looking to conventional modes of definition.

In the 1940s, it referred mainly to white youths adopting black urban culture vis a vis jazz music - the precursors to the beatniks in the 60s who extended the culture into its more suburban/hippie incarnation. These days the word has come to mean something very different, but in many ways still related - mostly through space. Despite the fact that Hipsters have taken a lot of flack recently for their eclectic dress, dance, and style there is something about the hipster that seems to have remained true throughout the ages. Their participation is fundamentally urban.

In the original hipster era, participating in urban life was synonymous with participating in black life, and so jazz music, black modes of speech, and cultural leanings on a white person made them easy to mark as a hipster. As the city hurtles toward design-intensivity, the definition of a hipster seems as mercurial as the definition of cool - as the city becomes the main nodes for the absorption of trends, hipsters seem to be the most eager people within the city to express them. Far from being a race discourse as it was in the past, this is a style discourse that seems to be engaging youth culture in all facets. Coincidentally (?) XXL magazine ran a feature that discussed the Hipster-effect on Hip hop in the same month that Adbusters ran their Hipster cover.

How is style in the city becoming a commodity? Is the common culture that it's bringing us toward as banal as the Adbusters article would have us believe?

And now, as always, some music.

Seems the sixties and the hippie movement around the Bay Area had a big impact on architectural innovation a la Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, as well as music, popular culture, food (Alice Waters), and technology. Zahid Sardar, writing in the San Francisco Gate, reviews Alastair Gordon's new book, Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties. Creativity requires self-expression. It also appears to arise in clumps or clusters, not just in time but in space.

Gordon's research makes it clear that the '60s generated many of the ideas about recycling and protecting the environment that we consider normal today ... [T]he '60s may have inspired the most visually arresting buildings by some of the most celebrated and visionary architects today.

Some of those unconventional buildings, it turns out, were created because the amateur builders could not quite figure out how to construct Fuller's dome of conjoined triangular components. Nevertheless, you might see links between those forms and the wild imaginings of architect Eric Owen Moss in Culver City; Frank Gehry's roof forms for the Bilbao Museum Guggenheim and the twisting, shiny Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; the wacky, wonderful main library in Seattle by Rem Koolhaas; and even the Federal Building in San Francisco by Thom Mayne.

What other areas of the U.S. seem to have been affected architecturally by the hippie movement?

A new report out by The Conference Board of Canada states that the culture sector directly contributes about $46B CDN or just under 4 percent to Canada's overall GDP in 2007. The economic impact on the economy is much broader - $85B CDN in 2007, or just over 7 percent of total real GDP. Taking a look at employment, almost 4 percent of total national employment in 2003 can be traced back to arts and culture industries.

Indeed, those are big numbers, eh? How meaningful is the creative economy in your country or hometown? How big (or small) of an employment driver is it?

Zoltan Acs has an interesting report on global entrepreneurship which finds Tokyo as the least entrepreneurial city of any his team measured. What are we to make of this? When I go to Tokyo I am amazed at the creativity. A walk through Harajuku, Omote-sando, Ginza, Kichijoji, or any number of other neighborhoods scream creativity to me. In Kyoto we find Nintendo, Kyocera, Wacoal, and many other firms that are global-class innovators. Some of the new movies coming out of Japan are beautifully shot and fascinating studies of the human condition, as "creative" as anything coming out of Hollywood. Shifting frames, Japanese automobiles, machine tools, and various other manufactures are global-class.

This suggests a question that is worth thinking about. Namely, what is the relationship between entrepreneurship and creativity? We might accept that entrepreneurship is creative, but is the opposite true? Is a non-entrepreneurial society not creative? Or, to go even further, this obviously rhetorical question, are non-entrepreneurial societies not prosperous? What does the community think?

In Who's Your City?, I wrote that the old trend of kids moving home after college was beginning to give way to a new one - boomer parents following their kids to more exciting cities. According to this New York Times report, it's starting earlier than that. I'd heard about affluent parents buying condos for their kids to live in during college. But now, apparently, parents are following their kids to college and buying their own homes there. And to think: I went "away" to college (30 miles down the New Jersey Turnpike to Rutgers College) to get away from my parents' ever-watchful eyes. I guess it's less distance to travel to get the laundry done.

Any change or innovation tends to beget unexpected consequences. One that Cisco Systems did not expect was that implementing mobile technologies alongside a novel workplace layout can significantly reduce a company's paper usage.

When Cisco Systems created a new concept workplace for its general administrative division, they sought to improve collaboration, not reduce the amount of paper their printers churned through. But that's exactly what happened.

As mentioned last week, Cisco knew that employees were only at their assigned office or cubicle 35% of the time - an indication that this workplace style wasn't really suiting the work being done.

To design more appropriate space, the workplace resource team (WPR) interviewed and studied the 140 people involved to understand how they work. They concluded that people needed the flexibility and mobility to work wherever it made sense - collaborating in teams or pairs, or working individually in silent areas or arenas that invited more informal chats. A variety of workplaces were created and employees can move from one to the next as their work needs chance. Moveable furniture in open areas, rooms for head-down silent work, conference rooms with speaker phones and video conferencing were all made available.

As Mark Golan of Cisco explains:

In many cases, this results in a flexible environment that focuses on collaborative space with little assigned seating. Employees are given a broad choice of work spaces and the technology to do their jobs. They choose where they work, based on the requirements of the tasks on which they are working.

The Connected Workplace is primarily a wireless environment...It also has wired jacks for high-speed communications needs, such as PC backups and video streaming, and technology for audio- and video-conferencing, e-mail, instant messaging, and voicemail.

Armed with the latest mobile computing and telephone technology, most people gained mobility and flexibility in organizing their workdays, but lost their assigned spaces (although the majority reported liking the new arrangement and Cisco measurements suggest that productivity improved).

One consequence is that workers cannot let paper pile up on a desk. Instead they have to file it, recycle it or take it home. Having to do this with every piece of paper printed every day caused most employees to re-think their printing habits.

Golan again:

And if they are just going to throw it out, people start to question why they are printing a document in the first place. This leads to behaviors that eliminate paper - conducting meetings solely with projectors or collaborative software.... Not only does this reduce paper consumption, but information is usually easier to find when digitally stored- instead of searching through paper files.

Could the paperless office talked about decades ago when the personal computer first emerged actually be around the corner? Hands up, who works in a paperless office?

Even if the paperless office is more dream than reality, perhaps the workplace is gradually trending toward something that involves slaughtering far fewer trees than typically occurs today. I'm a bad culprit for printing more than I need and letting it pile up on my desk. However, if I had to file it formally or discard it at the end of each day, this would be a powerful incentive for changing my ways.

Can anyone report on strategies that have worked for your workplace to cut down significantly on paper waste?

I’m already lamenting the end of the shopping bag – the gorgeous kind, you know, with maybe satin or grosgrain handles, like from Hermes or Donghia or Laduree in Paris. The kind you may hold onto for years, can’t bear to toss.

And the whole ritual of having your purchase lavishly swathed in tissue paper, held in place with a beautiful sticker, and then gracefully placed in its coordinating carrier suddenly feels sinful.

That graphic/branding indulgence is coming to an end - I know it and ruefully admit I will really miss it. Carrying bags will always be with us but will reusables ever be as glamorous as their wasteful and glorious predecessors?

Sure, we are all declining shopping bags and bringing in our own, recycling the plastic ones, etc. In my store we keep reusing them (except for gift purchases of course), without the shame we might have felt a couple of years ago. All these new practices are good and necessary and I wholeheartedly support them but I can’t imagine what, if anything, will recreate that little note of luxury when our packaging becomes truly minimal?

Have a look at urban geographer Steven Higley's website which uses maps and graphics to illustrate the overlay of class and race in the richest U.S. neighborhoods. African-Americans make up just 0.1 percent of the 100 richest neighborhoods. Asian-Americans, 2.7 percent of U.S. households, make up 4.3 percent. The full list is here.

New York and its suburbs and greater L.A. dominate the list. Greater Chicago and greater Washington, D.C. are next. The Bay Area has two neighborhoods on the top 100. According to Higley, 22 can be classified as nouveau riche, and 12 are gated communities. Just four of the top 100 are located in central cities: Midtown Manhattan, Pacific Heights in San Francisco, Washington Park in Seattle, and the Westernmost part of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia. Have a look at the geographic pattern of the leading Black, Hispanic, and Asian neighborhoods.

Top Black Neighborhoods

West Mount Airy, Philadelphia

Newstead, New York

Montrose Park North, New York

Flossmoor Country Club, Chicago

Portland Place-Lindell Boulevard, St. Louis

Top 5 Hispanic Neighborhoods

Key Biscayne Southwest , Florida

Biltmore Golf Club, Coral Gables, Florida

Granada Golf Course West, Coral Gables, Florida

Southern Colonial Village-Riviera Country Club, Coral Gables, Florida

Coco Plum-Gables Estates, Coral Gables, Florida

Top 5 Asian Neighborhoods

Mission Peak Foothills, San Francisco

Mission San Jose-Pine Street, San Francisco

Fremont Place, Los Angeles

Avalon Heights-Rancho Higuera Park, San Francisco

Cupertino South-Regnart Canyon, Cupertino, California

A few days ago, I came across an article that suggested in 40 years the whole population will be obese! Well, we know that about 30 percent already is and Richard Posner has suggested that this is individual choice. Well, I would venture to say that the creative class is, by and large, rather fit. They are rich, right. The rich and the creative are not obese. Why, they eat better and exercise more.

So what is the creative class doing to solve this huge social problem? What are the public policy issues? The answer, Victory Bread! Yes, the British response to winning WWII. You would think that the creative class could figure out that the solution to this epidemic would be to throw out the microwave, that menace of modernity, and buy a bread machine: It's cheaper, it's healthier, and it's better for the environment. Is this creative or what?

As originally published in BusinessWeek, this is the third installment in a four-part series that talks about embracing design-shop approaches to problem-solving and how that means having to shed some key characteristics of how traditional companies work. Part One. Part Two.

REVOLUTIONARY CHAIR. Design consultancies value and encourage abductive reasoning alongside deductive and inductive reasoning. Bill Stumpf, head of a Minneapolis-based design shop, and Don Chadwick, head of a design consultancy in Santa Monica, Calif., designed the award-winning Aeron chair for Herman Miller.

Stumpf and Chadwick had lots of detailed consumer research from which to apply inductive reasoning -- and robust sets of design principles to consider deductively. But their reasoning processes went well beyond the inductive and deductive: They imagined what a chair of the future could look like and how that chair could change the way users would think about office chairs forever.

Could they prove any of it in advance? No. In fact, when users first saw the chair, they gave it a decidedly chilly reception -- but only because it looked like no other chair they had ever seen.

WINNING SENSIBILITY. In short order, users warmed to the Aeron chair because Stumpf and Chadwick had indeed created a product that no consumer could have described -- but that met their unarticulated needs and sought to trump anything on the planet. It turned into the best-selling office chair of all time and a must-have for even the fanciest boardrooms, despite coming with a price tag double the prevailing level of a high-end ergonomic office chair. And it won, among other accolades, an award for the best design of its entire decade.

None of this would have happened without the design-shop sensibilities that fostered Stumpf and Chadwick's abductive reasoning.

Source of Status

The primary source of status in traditional firms is the management of big budgets and large staffs. When executives have the occasion to boast about themselves, they tend to refer to the number of people for whom they have direct responsibility and/or the bottom line that they deliver each year -- for example, "I run a 5,000 person organization, and our bottom line this year will be $700 million." And of course, bigger is always better!

In a design consultancy, the source of status and pride derives from solving "wicked problems" -- problems with no definitive formulation or solution and that have definitions open to multiple interpretations. This reality is confirmed by the appearance of the office of any star designer: Desks, credenzas, and shelves are covered with the "best" designs -- the ones that solve the most difficult design challenges in the most elegant fashion.

Designers become known for their great solutions, whether the Apple mouse, the Bilbao Guggenheim, or the Nike swoosh. These designers enjoy the highest status inside their firms and across their industries. As a consequence, everyone in the design field seeks to earn status through tackling and solving wicked problems, not administering the biggest budgets or the highest number of people.

Dominant Attitude

The dominant attitude of traditional firms is to see constraints as the enemy and budgets as the drivers of decisions. The common argument is, "We can only do what we have budget to do." If only budget constraints could be relieved, these managers seem to imply, so much more would be possible.

As a result, budget constraints are the reason why a product's packaging is cheap-looking, or a product is late to market, or its range is too narrow. The budget -- arch enemy of the traditional firm manager -- simply makes it impossible to do any better.

Next week, the fourth and final installment of this topic which talks about constraints and rewards in design…

Do you agree with the dominant attitude in design firms as described here?

A new, international version of the popular board game 'Monopoly' is out next week.

The new version of the game has 22 internationalcities included. The most heavily represented nations are (drum roll please!) - Canada and China. Three cities each from each of those two nations are among 22 selected by more than five million fans of the game who voted online for the best cities.

Of these, Montreal received the most votes and will be paired with Latvian capital Riga as the most expensive property group on the board. Next in rank are Capetown, Belgrade, and Paris. Last-placed of the 22 was Poland's Gdynia and no German, Indian, Russian, or Scandinavian towns made the list.

Click here to see if your city made the cut. What cities do you feel are missing from Monopoly's new international edition? Which places would you include?

George Anders of the WSJ has an interesting piece on how innovation-dependent firms are attempting to extend the longevity innovative capacity in their researchers. According to Anders, Northwestern Prof. Benjamin Jones has found that, "Innovators are productive over a narrowing span of their life cycle."

The article explains that Jones examined biographical data of 700 Nobel laureates and well known inventors of the past century and found that, in the early 20th century, leading innovators averaged slightly more than 36 years at the time of their greatest innovation.

In more recent decades, innovation from those under the age of 30 (think Brin and Page of Google) has become more common. This is because there have been many 'booming' fields over the last few decades that have been wide open to innovation and pioneer exploration.

Occasionally, Mr. Jones says, booming new fields "permit easier access to the frontier, allowing people to make contributions at younger ages." That could account for the relative youth of Internet innovators, such as Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc Andreessen and Messrs. Page and Brin. But "when the revolution is over," Mr. Jones finds, "ages rise."

Unwilling to see researchers at peak productivity for only a small part of their careers, tech companies are fighting back in a variety of ways. At microchip maker Texas Instruments Inc., in Dallas, executives are pairing up recent college graduates and other fresh research hires with experienced mentors, called "craftsmen," for intensive training and coaching.

This system means that new design engineers can become fully effective in three or four years, instead of five to seven, says Taylor Efland, chief technologist for TI's analog chip business. Analog chips are used in power management, data conversion and amplification.

At Sun Microsystems Inc., teams of younger and older researchers are common. That can help everyone's productivity, says Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer for the Santa Clara, Calif., computer maker. Younger team members provide energy and optimism; veterans provide a savvier sense of what problems to tackle.

The article goes on to provide more examples from firms dependent on innovation for continued success and their efforts to extend the "innovation life cycle."

Of course, the piece also sites some examples of "older" innovators that buck Prof. Jones research findings, citing domains where expertise is so specific that it takes a decade or more to truly understand the nature of the problems to be solved and opportunities to be chased.

Does your firm get most of its innovation out of younger or older workers? Does this free or constrain talent?

What about you? Has your innovative capacity increased with age and experience or decreased? For your current field, do you need years of experience before you can innovate?

Canada is upping its game in the global competition for talent, liberalizing immigration for students and skilled workers. As the Globe and Mail reports, the country

is creating a new fast-track immigration route for skilled foreign workers and students who've already proved employable in Canada: an effort to prevent an erosion of talent as global competition heats up for higher-value labour.

Unlike existing programs, the Canadian Experience Class immigration stream will make work experience in this country a key criterion for vetting applicants. It will also allow temporary foreign workers and students living here to apply from within Canada rather than having to leave first. It's expected to grant permanent resident status to 12,000 to 18,000 economic immigrants in the first year, a figure that's forecast to rise to 25,000 annually over time ...

The goal is to improve the quality of immigrants and retain the most valuable workers and educated students: arrivals who've already proven they can integrate into society and meet labour market needs. "If we're going to compete internationally for the best and for the brightest, we need to improve the way that we attract and retain those who want to work in their fields and contribute to Canadian society,” federal Immigration Minister Diane Finley explained.

In Flight, I argued it would be just these sorts of incremental improvements in competing for global talent - by Australia, the UK, New Zealand, and northern European countries, as well as the ability of the BRICs to lure back emigres - that could begin to undermine the U.S. lead in global talent. And with the situation in Iraq, the sub-prime meltdown and credit crisis, not to mention a watershed election, the U.S. seems incapable of addressing this issue.

Do you think the U.S. will be able to turn the corner on this one, or will some combinations of other nations inexorably undermine its long-standing talent advantage?