Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Cultural business angels

There is a saying that during his life, a man should go to the army, build a house and write a book. The cultural elements of this humorous anecdotes may be changing.
The Finnish business paper Kauppalehti published an article (July 27) on Finnish former businessmen, who are currently working as cultural business angels, investing their money on old mills and mansions. The motivation of working with the old heritage sites is not to make profit but rather to contribute to common cultural and historic good and enjoy and value beauty and restoration. There is money spent on restructuring, rebuilding and refurnishing old sites.
I sympathize with these cultural businessmen. I don´t have a million to invest in an old mansion myself but did my share of cultural wellbeing ten years ago by organizing three big events in an area which I like: dancing. Arranging something on your own time took effort, time and money. These events were new, different from normal weekly dances and are still well remembered.
The negative effect with the cultural investments is that not everybody values and favours the changes and initiatives. There is criticism and complaint. Therefore motivation has to lie elsewhere than just public good.
Another interesting news was that the share of restaurant chains in Finland is decreasing to the benefit of more independent restaurants. Restaurants are eg providing more Finnishness, uniqueness and local flavour to their offering.
Even if Finland as a country may lack in service quality and culture, our skills may very well be in the cultural and coulinaristic content.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

This years innovation trends by Trendwatching.com

Each year Trendwatching.com publishes its view on most promising innovations (www.trendwatching.com/briefing). This year, Trendwatching.com published a pool of 67 trendy ideas, inspiring on improving consumer living and understanding the mindset.
Trendwatching.com split the 67 ideas into various categories and encouraged maintaining a rough approach to innovation - we need not think of R&D labs of ultimate most astonishing innovations. Instead, innovations can be small, frivolous and inexpensive and yet succeed in enchanting and exciting people.
Reading through the 67 innovations following logics were no surprise:
* Innovations as service. Helping for self expression, excitement, making a statement, enjoyment, learning, giving for others. Hotels providing educational classes or sketching a travel accident through an online service.
* Sustainability and social causes. Innovations helping people to recycle, re-use, save energy, make donations and support less fortunate. ATM machines with charity donations, buying things and giving in return.
* Shopping made easy and local. Bringing a shop to the consumer eg at camping site, mobile soup delivery, providing regional flavours, online shopping preferences tools, navigation services, garden-for-rent.
* Personalization. iPhone and online applications for providing your preferences online and ordering unique. Yogurt, shorts, petfood, lingerie, crowdsourcing products, group buying. Having used an online photo album tool for creating a wedding gift, I was excited on BookOfFame. A custom made notebook on Facebook feeds. Having read endless funny email conversations between friends, we always keep laughing about saving the conversations and printing them out for a memory when we´re old. And we never do. Now somebody has actually thought of keeping track of these conversations just as having a photo album, a blog or a diary.
The most futuristic idea to me was RosettaStone: a tablet with an embedded microchip to represent key things of a deceased´s life in a grave. Readable through a mobile device. Is this the future of cemeteries? Will it become a true multimedia presentation in the future of what we were? Or will personal barcodes be a new way of expressing ourselves?
Most positively surprising for me was the limited number of iPhone applications in the briefing. Hooray, there are also other ways to innovate and enjoy life.