This waste is affecting business as well but going green isn’t the only problem keeping CEOs up at night. The list also includes:
1-    Boomers retiring, leaving an inexperienced group to take over the business
2-    Hard competition to attract and retain the new Net Gen
3-    “The need for speed”. Companies are seeking to innovate to stay ahead
4-    The need for trained workers quickly

The Eco-Patent Commons initiative that Dan Herman highlighted earlier this week demonstrates another example of businesses opening up to the masses. Crowd sourcing has leveled the playing field in research and development demonstrating that ideas don’t just come from specialists and experts. In fact, in greenbiz Julie Sammons highlights a few more initiatives that are tapping into a younger crowd.

Schools like the Presidio School of Management that has interdisciplinary teams of students work with business to solve problems. From their website: The Better World Project‘s mission is: to promote public understanding of how academic research and technology transfer benefits you, your community and millions of people around the world.

What better way to attract the Net Gen then to involve them and give them a cause? Interdisciplinary teams create innovation and break through silos. Project oriented curriculum keeps students interested and gives them experience. Empower the younger crowd and somehow technology will find its way into the project.
What kind of internship program or other student programs does your company maintain? What are the students doing? What kind of relationships do you have with the local universities? To investigate this further the article gives some other valuable resources:  U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, the business portal for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, and Net Impact, the professional association for socially-minded MBAs.

I’ll end with this: my university flew me out to talk with executives on Wall Street. At one of the huge Investment banks we visited they explained to us that around 80% of their interns were hired upon graduating. What does that mean? Probably an even higher portion came back asking them for a job. In the competition for talent collaboration is vital. Think about it.

Leaders have been scratching their heads trying to figure out what the Net Gen want. Many of the answers may lie in what they pay to watch.

From movies like Xmen, The Hulk, Ironman, and Fantastic Four, to TV shows like Heroes and Smallville, superheroes seem to be on the mind of the Net Generation. So then what do they see in them and why?

1- The Net Generation heroes are coming from comic books. We don’t have any Churchhills we look up to. We are known for scrutinizing leadership. This might be caused by transparency. We know our leaders too well. The bible says, “No man is a prophet in his own country.” When it is so easy to uncover dirt about your leaders you find it hard to respect them so you turn to the comics.

2- We have superheroes because we can affiliate with them. Our Boomer parents gave us the cape growing up. We were taught that we could do anything we put our minds to. We like the idea of being unique and special, and we have great desires to do good.

3- The Superheroes are coming in teams. Even movies like The Hulk and Ironman are being set up to join alliances or leagues. We want to be superheroes but don’t want to do it alone.

So what can leaders take away from pop-culture? Net gen are seeking a better world, they want be the hero, but they want to do it together. I watched a YouTube video by an anthropologist named Michael Wesch studying social media. He called this idea cultural inversion. He said that we live in an interesting time period. We crave connection more than ever but at the same time also want more freedom and individuality.

Here’s the Leadership Laundry List: Create environments that will allow them to “become the hero”. Play off their strengths, mentor them and give continuous feedback, praise them, and include them. Don’t mandate from the top. Give them a vision or “something to fight for”. Share responsibility, and customize their roles to maximize their potential. Give them responsibilities that will allow them to shine but don’t cut them off from the group.

In the end, regardless of generational differences it comes down to proper communication. To get the results you want, give your people the tools to be successful. Those tools will only be identified through constant communication and feedback.

I was looking at the Cool Software community website where members post information about new software companies and then vote on whether or not they like it. One of the websites they identified as “cool” was called Forvo. The site’s mission: to collect the proper pronunciations from across the globe in It was built in 2007 and is slowly growing in popularity, with over 189 languages represented. After recent debates with some of my Canadian friends on the proper way to pronounce words like pasta, milk, and pillow, I’m not sure it can solve the arguments among native speakers but it will give foreigners the opportunity to save themselves from a lot of grief.

Though I have never sunk ships, I was asked to learn Spanish during my service as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Those first few months taught me the importance of properly conjugating and then pronouncing words.

During a small intermission between church meetings one day, I saw a close friend of mine dressed up in a new suite. I was surrounded by elderly women chatting quietly and I couldn’t get out from between the benches so I raised my voice and said, “Wilbur you look really sharp (sharp=look nice) in that suite!”… At least, that’s what I thought I said.

From the looks of horror on the women’s faces and the bright red color of my friend’s, I quickly realized that I was mistaken. What I had actually done was loudly tell my friend that he looked like a prostitute, using very very bad term in Spanish, in the middle of worship services, surrounded by old ladies! The point of the story is that to some this may seem like a neat tool, but for others, like me, it’s a Godsend, even if it is a few years late in getting here.

Anyone else have horror stories about learning a new language?

The website is filled with research papers, news, and reports highlighting what innovative governments, businesses, and educators can do to empower the people. It also breaks them down into a variety of case studies like Debate Europe where European citizens can share their opinions, concerns and ideas on the future of the European Union. The French National Commission of Public Debate (CNDP) has an innovative site that allows citizens to debate on infrastructure projects in France. Chunceon, Korea citizens have direct web access to the Mayor’s office to submit ideas and then receive feedback on them. Seeing case studies like these can really help allowing people to interpret and to better understand the opportunities available to their countries, states, provinces, and small towns. They even have some of our own Anthony Williams’ stuff in there.

As I went through the website I discovered that the information has been posted for a while now but a large portion hasn’t even been viewed.

The old saying, “knowledge is power” comes to mind. The United Nation’s purpose is to bring the people of the world together to make it a better place to live. Ken Leebow wrote an interesting comment on my blog post a few months back suggesting that, education is the most effective way to protect us. It was in regards to protecting children from pornography, but the benefits of knowledge are universal; protection, innovation, empowerment.

The great power of web 1.0 was transparency and access to incredible amounts of information…the power to inform. Now we have web 2.0 that, if used effectively, can connect people, ideas, and resources…..the power to innovate and execute.

I have mixed emotions about finding this site. I am excited at finding the incredible resource but disheartened that the important information is just sitting there untouched.

It seems to me that the United Nations Website would be a pretty important one to take advantage of. Are there other “goldmines” out there like this that are stagnant? How have you seen websites like this one take off? Finally, people can view the information but then what can they do with information like this?

Many of you educators are picking up the Wikinomics standard in your communities and starting grassroots movements to make sure that students are being given better opportunities to learn. So, to extend the olive branch I have decided to write a blog post to try to help you out.

Recently I have come across some pretty cool sites and blogs that might be able to help you as you seek to better understand what needs to happen to make your class education 2.0. I would encourage the other educators that are reading this to share their thoughts and resources in comments.

Ok here goes:

There is an organization known as The Center for Learning and Performance Technologies. It is dedicated to staying up to date on learning trends, technologies and tools and finding ways to implement them into organizations.

The Founder and Head of the center, Jane Hart, also writes a blog called Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day in which she highlights and then breaks down how to use the learning tools.

Epistemicgames.org has developed a variety of videogames that educators can use to teach. Games like Digital Zoo, allows students to develop real-world skills in science and engineering. Journalism.net allows players to become reporters for an online news magazine and The Pandora Project allows players to become high-powered negotiators deciding real-world medical controversy.

classroom20.com is a community of professors and educators that share information, talk and share best practices with one another on how to better help their students.

The Institute of Play, The Digital Media and Learning Center is sponsored by The MacArthur Foundation. The foundation coordinates research programs with other universities and institutions to investigate new methods of education.

So to all you teachers working hard for Wikinomics, am I forgiven?

Trips to the gas station have turned into quite painful experiences lately. I used to hate riding bikes and walking places but now it is becoming a necessity. The horse and buggy is becoming more appealing every day.

It isn’t just your car you have to worry about. Airline ticket prices are on the rise. You almost have to create a budget just so you can have the money to get to work. This presents a problem for a global workplace.

This week’s New York Times highlights Accenture’s move to into videoconferencing and telepresence. The technology consulting firm estimates that it has avoided over 240 international and 120 local business trips so far. Their goal is to have 35 videoconferencing rooms set up in their firms across the world by the end of this year.

“These technology tools are going to change the way corporations think about travel and work in the long run,” an analyst at Forrester Research, Claire Schooley, said.

Although videoconferencing cannot replace the important face to face contact that is needed in many circumstances, it can be a great tool to save time and money.

The article also mentions, Darryl Draper, the national manager of customer service training for Subaru of America, who estimated that her reach went from 220 to 2,500 people and her cost dropped from $300 a person to 75 cents a person.

That beats the horse and buggy. As companies like IBM, Mircosoft, HP and Cisco continue to make improvements on the technology we will see more and more company leaders heading to their local boardroom rather than the airport for their next overseas meeting.

The University of Waterloo has taken notice and is currently building a “Dormcubator” to link 70 of their best and brightest tech students together. According to an article in PC World the University of Waterloo is revamping one its dorms to make room for these students. The $400,000 project is designed to give them a place to live and interact with other like minded individuals.

There is some debate about the necessity for a physical space-based incubator. In the article, Raymond Luk, founder of the Montreal-based business start-up and business consultancy Flow Consulting explains:

“When it’s a physical space-based incubator, there can be a disconnect between the physical presence and what it actually requires to build a company. The challenge for incubators with a physical presence is against empire-building, where (the incubator administrators) just want to protect the infrastructure, which is different than the needs of the entrepreneur. They don’t need office space, Internet access, or Foosball tables–what you really need is people and money, which is what’s lacking in Canada. You need mentors and other successful entrepreneurs–that’s what will be worth everything.”

During the time the article was written, the program was also considering high school student applications depending on their technical ability. This is one more example of people taking the age off innovation.

Mark Hopkins explained that controversy arose around the liberal slant of questions being asked. Close to 30% of the questions were planted by declared supporters of the Democratic Party. TVNZ will moderate which videos get posted but the hope is to get as many videos as possible before the debate.

What are your thoughts? Is there a “best practice” for properly moderating what questions are asked and on another vein, is YouTube, with its snowmen and rednecks the best medium for communicating questions in a leadership debate?

In the movie, people of the future were obese, self gratifying and selfish. They only used telecommunication to talk with one another. Technology had made them both uneducated and oblivious to their surroundings. The movie manifests society’s ongoing debate; is technology hurting or helping us? Shows like  South Park mock, some writers condemn, and others seek ways to better harness the potential of these new tools.

The movie does raise a valid argument. Someone very close to me became so addicted to WoW, that she cut herself off from the world, neglected her children, and it later destroyed her marriage.

Regardless of the horror stories, we can’t toss the baby out with the bathwater. Companies like trusera are linking sick people with others that have been in their shoes. Others like ideaconnection are connecting people with important and innovative ideas to people with great resources.  The private and public sectors are creating alliances through information sharing.

These communication tools, the community focused culture change, and open access to information give people today more potential to influence and improve the world than ever before. So do we need to hop on a treadmill? Sure. Do we need to get out into the sunlight? Of course, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with us. These tools are tools. It’s how we use them that really counts.

In an AP News Report this week, collaborative groups have been utilizing forums, newsgroups, and user groups to pass child pornography images across the internet. This has been a difficult area to regulate but recently Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint removed thousands of those images and agreed to pay 1.125 million to continue the effort.

KidZui has another approach to overcoming pornography challenges. The Houston Chronicle explains that rather than trying to block bad websites, they are working with parents and teachers to identify and gather good ones in an effort to build a safe environment for children between 3 and 12 to surf the net. KidZui has collected more than 600,000 websites that have been reviewed by parents and teachers. Everyday more pages are added based on children’s searches and websites parents submit for approval. The site also has other interesting features such as allowing children to create and personalize their own avatar.

Mrs. Carine Moitier’s blog highlights the Chicago T-shirt Firm Threadless as a good example of Wikinomics.

After reading Wikinomics, Wayne Long explains his views on how Wikinomics applies to Real Estate.

Smite Jonz has more to say on Wikinomics in Real Estate.

In Daptiv’s Greenhouse: Collaboration Grows, BusinessWeek highlights a customer collaboration innitiative called Greenhouse that allows customers to participate in the innovation and design process.

A recent study conducted by Morten Rask entitled The Reach and Richness of Wikipedia investigates the economic factors involved in the use of Wikinomics in developed and developing countries.

According to Wired, in a recent Games for Change conference former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’conner discussed her latest venture to help young Americans… she is making videogames.

“Our Courts”, the online civic engagement project she is developing with James Paul Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is designed to help seventh and eighth graders learn about the legal system. According to O’Conner, “The game lets students engage in real issues and real problems.”

This is a definite turnaround from the past perspective.

The G4C conference website suggests other uses for games, ”as this technology matures, there is a new trend emerging: harnessing the power of this popular medium for more “serious purposes”. Fighting poverty. Training protesters in peaceful resistance to oppressive regimes. Promoting peace in the Middle East. Exploring the processes of gerrymandering. The list goes on.”

Naturally, as I skimmed through Wikinomics this week and saw LEGOs mentioned, I was eager to see what has happened since then. The book mentions the mixture of mass customization and peer production that happens at mindstorms.lego.com and the free downloadable NXT software that LEGO offers to encourage tinkering and programming.

As was mentioned in the book, these LEGO enthusiasts are as passionate as they come. This past month the NXTLOGgers’ challenge was to design a NXT robot that would help maintain a healthy, sustainable environment in support of Earth Day. The winners included: The TP-Bot 2008, The Tree Doctor, and Vestas windmill.

Sorry to bring up LEGOs Dad, but look at it this way, at least these ones have the power to put themselves away.
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For past few years there has been a push by government, environmentalists, and the public in general to protect the environment. We see ads on TV encouraging us to use public transit and carpool. News of global warming and environmental projects are everywhere. Now the business world has decided to join the club and “go green.”

The question is, how can companies “go green”?  Robert Wise, Executive VP of Strategic Business Development at InterCall believes that a large portion of that plan revolves around the new generation of collaborative tools that now allow us to work from home.

Rather than spending millions of dollars to retool distribution and server networks, he says, companies can save the environment simply by allowing employees work from home. He states that companies may have to get used to the concept of collaboration but that in the end we can all benefit. So, “With our powers combined” we can save the planet and work with our slippers on.

In last week’s post I stepped onto the, “school is a bunch of hoops to jump through” soapbox. I love that soapbox, but even with all the Net Gener frustration, I think I need to be a little more understanding. As we can see from Anthony Williams’ post last week, there are many educators that are going to great lengths to make change happen.

While Net Geners bang our heads against the wall from frustration, we should also recognize that some universities and professors are doing the same thing. Right now I believe there are many educators seeing the blobs. They are struggling to wrap their heads around the culture change that these technologies have brought about. They have to create an entirely new mindset.

I talked with the IT help desk at my school and some professors are just figuring out that the disc drive is not a cup holder. Now they need to find ways to utilize web 2.0 technology to engage students rather than stand and lecture. However, as they continue to ponder and investigate these things, eventually the stars align, and their eyes are opened and great things start to happen.

An article came out Monday by Nancy Sudheer showing a perfect example of this. Al Ain-based, College of Information Technology (CIT), part of the UAE University. They have developed a culture of applied technology. With twenty state of the art laboratories, students spend their time inside the labs rather than in the classroom. Their education revolves around working together with other departments, supporting R&D at all levels, and using the material and findings students’ discover.

The students have been involved in a number of creations and important projects. One of their current projects is The United Nations Environmental Program, designed to develop a geo portal for West Asia.

So CIT teaches us the moral behind the parable of the 3D posters which is that, while a good portion of academics pretend that there is no hidden picture, we need to remember that there is a large group in academia that are starting to see the blobs and are searching to see for 3D image. They just need some more prodding and pushing with example like CIT to lead the way.

In college, everyone has those professors that can really get under your skin. It drives us crazy because, when they look at you, you can almost see their mind weighing the value of your comments and opinions upon the number of degrees you have. If you’re a freshman, you might as well be five years old. This attitude could be one reason why many frustrated people view school as being “just another hoop to jump through.”

This message is not a shot at professors…well, maybe some professors (the kind nobody likes, that get the frowny faces on ratemyprofessors.com), but more a shot at the way many universities see their students. Are students assets or liabilities to administrators?

If they are seen as “liabilities” that professors have to deal with in between their papers and research, then schools of the future are going to face some trouble. This Net Generation disagrees with the old idea that: Students are blank slates that come to school to learn what the all knowing professors tell them. They quietly do their homework, conform, and in four years jump out from the hoops. Due to a childhood of social networks and parents encouragement to voice their opinions, the Net Generation refuses to do busy work, expects that they will be listened to and empowered to execute their ideas.

For large red tape organizations like universities, that even have “Space Committees” to create policies for picture hanging on walls, this can be hard to swallow. However, some are starting to see the importance of building a “community of assets” from their students and facilitating communication and collaboration between communities, government, businesses and students.

During her inauguration speech, Purdue President France Cordova outlined the importance of making organizational and strategic changes for the future by explaining the plans Purdue has for its students in the coming years. Purdue has seen the United States’ need for talented young people in science and technology. For this purpose they have changed many of their teaching goals to include:

1. Lowering class sizes

2. Steering students toward those disciplines

3. Creating an entrepreneurial culture to attract students

4. Allocating funds and resources to interdisciplinary research projects

5. Creating a culture of collaboration through localizing eleven interdisciplinary centers

6. Building commercial research parks to encourage partnerships with national and global businesses

7. Creating a cooperative “Super Project” between two of their offices

8. Setting a standard for leadership and global awareness

It seems that under the direction of President Cordova, Purdue’s students won’t view their education as jumping through hoops, but making a difference by collaborating, empowering and innovating.