All posts filed under: Strategy

Hong Kong, mon Amour

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Message Personnel. Voici maintenant près de 7 mois que je vis à Hong Kong. Cette ville et ses habitants me fascinent toujours autant. Hong Kong est une ville unique au monde parce qu’à mon sens, elle est ce parfait point de basculement entre l’Ouest et l’Est. Elle vous est à la fois totalement familière et totalement étrangère. C’est une jungle urbaine où l’on peut étouffer de chaleur mais avec des plages magnifiques où l’on peut passer des journées inoubliables. Elle est à la fois très chinoise et pas très chinoise. Elle fait partie d’un pays communiste tout en étant l’économie la plus libérale du monde. Très riches. Très pauvres. Elle est à la fois très belle et très laide. Hong Kong est tout et son contraire. Voilà en quoi elle me fascine. C’est une ville dont se dégage une sensuelle virilité tandis que la feminité de ses habitantes vous frappe au premier abord. A Hong Kong, tout est possible et rien ne l’est. Qu’est-ce qui a construit cette ville? La colonisation britannique avec ses guerres de …

Wikibuilding: The User-Generated Urbanism

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The topic is not really new. At the end of the 2000s,  some sociologists and urban planners had prefigured the emergence of a “city 2.0” referring to the emergence of collaborative practices on the Internet: blogs , Wikipedia and maps that made digital more prevalent in our cities. Even though collaborative planning is not necessarily linked to digital, the consultation process is now common for most urban projects. Thereforce, user-generated urbanism might be the future of cities. In France, the phenomenon has reached a new level with the birth of Wikibuilding. The building would be designed within a wiki process, all plans and experimentations being open source. Any citizen would be able to draw, to use, to improve or to test the building. Promoters or insurers would test the wikibuilding with residents, real estate agencies and 5% of the area would be reserved for a living Lab. Wikibuilding would be a place for experimentation and open to the architecture schools in order to design and include continuous Open Design updates. The Paris School of Architecture is already …

Louvre Abu Dhabi: Can Museums Be Exported?

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Abu Dhabi has a new cultural center on the island of Saadiyat. Importing the expertise of the most recognized institutions, the city brands its image as universal and global. The most famous architects of the post-modernist era such as Jean Nouvel have been selected and are at the source of this new branding approach. Lack of knowledge and experience in creating cultural institutions led the Arabian power to collaborate with the Louvre, the Guggenheim Museum and the British Museum. As a result, a collection belonging to the Louvre was moved to Abu Dhabi for a summer exhibition. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is born. However, this does pose questions. The issue of exporting culture has become crucial as our world becomes increasingly fragmented since global. Can culture be exported? Can art be read in a foreign context regardless its place of creation? For some experts, separate artistic creation from its nation of origin would lead to eliminating its sense and integrity whereas on the other hand, some institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum highlights the history of avant-garde through museums perceived as …

The Geography Of Innovation Is Shifting

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When a prominent venture capitalist of California invested one billion dollars in high risk green technology, Silicon Valley recalled the world that in innovation, geography is karma. What Vinod Khosla’s story tells us is that location is crucial when dealing with innovation and technology. Thirty years earlier Vinod left India to study management at Stanford University in California. In 1981, fresh out, he founded Sun Microsystems, a computer manufacturer . Innovations do not occur anywhere but often in geographic clusters where investors, large research universities, existing technology companies, engineers, designers, artists and scientists are always willing to think outside the box. Those people are part of what Richard Florida calls the Creative Class. His paradigm asserts that innovation is the outcome of creativity, this latter being the outcome of human creation for a concrete realization which then might lead to innovation. As far as geography and clusters are concerned, the Silicon Valley has been for several decades considered as the only creative and innovative hub worldwide. This is clearly changing. The geography of innovation is shifting. For proof, start with Google, …

Questioning The Definition Of Startup

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Steve Jobs often spoke of Apple “startup culture” and the New York Times referred to the airline Virgin America as “a startup”. Today any small company operating in the digital industry tends to be defined as a startup. Hence confusion in perception, consistence and business models in the startup scene worldwide. Steve Blank, one of the most influential people in Tech and teacher at Stanford, defines a startup as “an organisation formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”. The key attribute is not to be a tech company. Neither to be a small company using digital and/or operating on the Internet. The key attribute is a repeatable and a scalable business model. In recent years, popular lexicon has begun equating startups with tech companies, as though the two are inherently intertwined. But let’s face it. Is Uber with a valuation record of $17bn still a startup or rather a multinational logistics company which generated $213 million revenue in 2013? Mark Babbitt, CEO at YouTern, an online community focusing on careers management, expanded …