Creative Class

My essay on Korea 2020 featured in the JoonAng Daily:

South Korea has clawed its way out of poverty by becoming a manufacturing powerhouse. But to stay a world-class economy will require the country to draw on a different set of skills. In the future, it will be the ability to create – as distinct from the ability to produce – that will foster innovation, and with it, sustainable economic growth.

Whether it is new ideas, new business models, new cultural forms, new technologies or new industries, it is creative capital that will drive the world economy. The ability to harness creativity will be the biggest challenge, as well as the biggest opportunity, for Korea.

Our analysis of data from 45 countries shows that the following four key factors – we call them the “4Ts” – drive economic growth and prosperity: technology, talent, tolerance and territory assets. Each is critical to generate the social and cultural conditions forming the ecosystem of an enduring, successful creative economy.

(more…)

The Florida Report is an eight-part video series from The Atlantic featuring Richard Florida.

The third installment in The Florida Report is titled “Why Cities Are Idea Factories.” Richard discusses the forces that give rise to innovation in urban areas.

That’s the question I asked earlier today at Twitter.  You answered a combination of new tech, like broadband and the internet; high-speed rail; and greater concentration, density, and walkability. Here with a sampling of responses from the twitterverse.  I’ll add more as they come in:

carlos9900: the equivalent of the highways today are the broadband internet, public transportation, electric & energy system

jamesschwartz: We can learn a lot from China (I’m in China now). High speed electric trains and segregated cycle tracks (more…)

Creativity ranks as the number one most important leadership quality for business success, according to a new study by IBM. The study is based on personal interviews with some 1,500 corporate and public CEOs across 60 nations and 33 industries. The table below (via Fast Company) summarizes the key results of the IBM research.

Fast Company quotes Steven Tomasco, a manager at IBM Global Business Services, being surprised by this new finding, noting that it’s “very interesting that coming off the worst economic conditions they’d ever seen, [CEOs] didn’t fall back on management discipline, existing best practices, rigor, or operations. In fact, they [did] just the opposite.”  Indeed!

Here’s the intro from my interview with Newsweek.com’s Nancy Cook.

As the economy recovers and Americans get back to work, the wage gap between white- and blue-collar work is expected to grow. According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 60 million people—46 percent of the American workforce—in 2009 worked in the service sector as cashiers, office clerks, cooks, nurses, retail salespeople, or customer-service representatives.

But rather than consign nearly half of the nation’s workers to relatively low-paying jobs, why not use the recession as an opportunity to make over service work into something fulfilling and analytical, hopefully with higher wages? So asks Richard Florida, professor, social scientist, and author of the bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class. Following the release of his latest tome,The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, NEWSWEEK’S Nancy Cook asked Florida about his vision for “upgrading” the service economy.

Read the full interview here.

How to revitalize America’s great industrial cities? How to balance people- vs. place-oriented policies? And why mega-projects and bailouts don’t work, but organic, community, bottom-up efforts do. The Montreal Gazette excerpts a section of Chapter 12, The Death and Life of Great Industrial Cities, from The Great Reset.

One response to the problems of rusted-out industrial cities such as Detroit has been a new urban reclamation effort called “shrinking cities.” The idea, perhaps inspired by Pittsburgh, has caught on in smaller cities in the American Midwest, such as Youngstown, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan, and their European counterparts. The basic notion is that older industrial cities need not grow to improve. They can be better places by making do with less, by focusing on improvements in the quality of life for their residents, and by bringing their level of infrastructure and housing into line with their smaller populations. A June 2009 story in the U.K. newspaper the Telegraph bore the wince-inducing headline “U.S. Cities May Have to Be Bulldozed to Survive.”

(more…)

I have a new post over at BNET responding to Mike Mandel and a BNET piece earlier this week. The gist of my post is that when you look at real income levels and housing values, creative metros that score high on the 3T’s outperform others.

While we’re at it, The New York Times has a nice piece today on the rise of Boulder, Colorado, as a mecca for new high-tech startups. Here are some stats:

From 2007 to 2009, venture capitalists invested $1.9 billion in 275 Colorado start-ups, up from $1.6 billion in 247 companies from 2004 to 2006, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The money is coming from Colorado venture firms — including the Foundry Group, a prominent firm in Boulder — as well as from Silicon Valley and New York.

(more…)

The Florida Report is an eight-part video series from The Atlantic featuring Richard Florida.

The second installment in The Florida Report is titled “Moving to the Suburbs.” Richard explains why long commutes used to make sense… and why they no longer do.

Detroit has become the veritable poster child for the emerging movement to downsize and shrink older industrial cities. Here’s the Detroit Free Press on “10 Tips for Downsizing Detroit.” These five strike me as imperative:

• Stop calling it downsizing
• Never try to forcibly relocate residents
• Stop selling vacant land to speculators
• Don’t expect urban farming to solve all the problems
• Use data to understand Detroit’s neighborhoods

While you’re at it, check out Roberta Gratz’s terrific article over at Planetizen where she asks if the shrinking cities construct is really “urban renewal revisited” and this response.

The Florida Report is an eight-part video series from The Atlantic featuring Richard Florida.

“The Birth of Urban America” is the first installment in The Florida Report. Richard talks to Don Peck, deputy managing editor of The Atlantic, about how the great American cities rose out of the Industrial Revolution.