System Design and Management Program and Social Media, need some crowdsourcing advice...

Trying to organize SDM seminar on social media and recruiting, what topics and new trends do you think could be interesting for SDM MIT Fellows? I need some crowdsourcing assistance here...

Kiplinger missed Boston and/or Cambridge, MA in its "10 Best Cities for the Next Decade"

Kiplinger's editor argues that the innovation factor has three elements: (1) smart people, (2) great ideas and (3) collaboration. Based on these criteria, Kiplinger presents its top ten ranking for "places to start a business or find a job" (http://alturl.com/vn88):

1. Austin, Tex.

2. Seattle, Wash.

3. Washington, D.C.

4. Boulder, Colo.

5. Salt Lake City, Utah

6. Rochester, Minn.

7. Des Moines, Iowa

8. Burlington, Vt.

9. West Hartford, Conn.

10. Topeka, Kan.

What Kiplinger misses in its criteria, is strength and density of new technology companies. According to MIT Professor Michael Davies, there are "two regions-four institutions" (Harvard-MIT, Berkeley-Stanford) where innovation is concentrated, and Kendal-MIT area by far surpasses all other cities.

Just a thought on "design thinking" in business

It will take some time before "design thinking" is accepted by the mainstream. Unfortunately, there are not many examples of such acceptance in "soft systems," or at least such examples have not been systematized. People tend to apply "design thinking" in organizations at latent level without actually thinking of it. When we are explicitly confronted with the concept of design thinking we disregard it as "common sense." As Marvin Minsky said once “An idea will seem self-evident – once you have forgotten learning it!”.

FT is praising Kazakhstan for handling financial crisis: "demand that creditors absorb all, or part, of the losses"

"...what has just occurred on the Kazakh steppes is looking surprisingly relevant to this hand-wringing about European banks and US reform. Until recently it was generally assumed in the emerging market world that when a bank ran into problems it would either be bailed out by the government (or, more likely, the International Monetary Fund) or go spectacularly bust and close its doors...

...0ption, as demonstrated in Kazakhstan, is to demand that creditors absorb all, or part, of the losses, even as the bank remains a going concern. And indeed, this is precisely the idea that is now starting to gain traction in some regulatory quarters."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/050d003a-6f4a-11df-9f43-00144feabdc0.html

MIT is discussing Should Google Leave China

http://events.mit.edu/event.html?id=11610639

My good friend Edward Steinfeld, Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT (http://web.mit.edu/polisci/faculty/E.Steinfeld.html) is moderating the discussion at MIT today.

The panelists of the discussion are (1) David Clark, Senior Research Scientist, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, (2)  Yasheng Huang, China Program Professor in International Management, Sloan School,  (3) Craig Simons, Knight Science Journalism Fellow and (4) Xiaojian Zhao, Knight Science Journalist Fellow.

I am curious about the delicate dilemmas that the moderator will try to address.

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