4 Predictions For The Future of Sustainable Business. There has been an important shift in the past decade around how companies view sustainability. Once a back-of-the-house issue for risk analysts and facilities folks looking to reduce costs and keep the company out of trouble, sustainability has now emerged as a largely untapped front-of-the-house opportunity to create brand value, innovation, and new revenue streams. To help make sense of this, Dimitar Vlahov, director of content development at Sustainable Brands Worldwide, a global network of brand leaders focused on these issues, shares four emerging trends that point to a future where sustainability will be a business game changer.
Supply chains will be tapped for shared value Over the past decade, large companies have become increasingly adept at analyzing their supply chains for environmental and social risks and, in turn, have been extending their responsibility more deeply into the supplier relationship. Data will be smarter and highly personal. Climate Change — The state of the science. Chocolate se acabaría para el año 2020. África Occidental, Costa de Marfil y Ghana son unos de los principales productores de cacao en el mundo, la producción en estas zonas ha bajado su rendimiento en más del 2%, según ha indicado la Organización Internacional del Cacao, mientras que el consumo no solo se mantiene , sino que parece ser cada vez más alto.
Su alta demanda y la reducción de la producción son los dos aspectos que han llevado a los expertos a vaticinar una escasez del producto para el año 2020. John Mason, director ejecutivo y fundador del Consejo de Investigación de Conservación de la Naturaleza, advirtió en entrevista con el diario The Independent que las bajas ganancias que tienen los agricultores frente a la producción de cacao han hecho que muchos de estos abandonen dichos cultivos contribuyendo a una disminución en la producción. "En 20 años el chocolate será como el caviar, se convertirá en un producto tan costoso y extraño que no cualquier persona podrá pagarlo". Why The New American Workforce Wants Better Consumption, Not Just More. America is on strike. But don’t look for picket signs and bullhorns. Instead, one by one, Americans are lifting their collective middle finger and showing it to an economy that’s no longer in line with their values.
In the 2000s bubble era, too many Americans wanted something simple: more. A bigger house. Then came the recession. But the richest 5% of Americans are back to spending like they’ve got Gordon Gekko’s Visa card. And since the recession ended, spending by the rich has risen 17%. We’ve stopped looking for more. We’re saving. It’s a Quiet Revolution, where small choices can lead to big change. It’s no coincidence this thriftier, more conscious lifestyle is growing alongside the rise of freelancing.
Each dollar spent is earned one gig at a time--so the connection between income and value is clearer than ever. By going local and organic, Americans are doing their part to protect the environment, eat healthy, and support local businesses. The Quiet Revolution is getting louder. The Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in India. The Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Israel. The Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in China. The Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in South America. The Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in the U.K. How Ingredient Lists Would Look For All-Natural Foods.
Nothing can put a person off eating a thing like the ingredient list. (Well, except maybe the calorie count.) Once all those unpronounceable words that start with "dextra-" and "benzo-" and "butylate-" start piling up, the dreaded high-fructose corn syrup count becomes the least of concerns. Foods with chemical-rich ingredient lists like these seem far away from the world of biology, but of course it takes a little chemistry for even all-natural foods to occur as well. Australian chemistry teacher James Kennedy recently created a series of posters that offers a light-hearted rebuke toward the condemnation of chemicals in foods.
He is out to show that even when foods come from the earth, like berries, or from the bodies of animals, like eggs, they are still the result of chemical reactions. Have a look at more of the posters in the slides above. 5 Futuristic Trends That Will Shape Business And Culture Today. Trend-spotting shop Sparks & Honey has given us ideas to watch in health care, jobs we might be doing in 2025, and the future of relationships.
Here, the shop takes a deep-dive into the zeitgeist to identify cultural trends. They're themes that could affect business, and therefore how we live, in the next year or two. Pranking is increasingly common. Some examples: a Coloradan sushi restaurant claiming (falsely) to have a cannabis pairing menu; artisanal plunger parodying high-end household tools; Amazon's ridiculous (though highly successful) drone roll-out. The idea of objects shifting easily between virtual and material. Add together "personal brand," life-logging technology, and people's desire to be famous at any cost and you end up with something called "life as entertainment.
" Fears about surveillance and intrusion are stirring people to create shadow worlds. We've come to believe that sharing data freely benefits all; that openness begets democracy and freedom. 8 Unexpected Ways Technology Will Change The World By 2020. How will technology change life by the end of the decade? That's the subject of a new book, called Shift 2020, which explores the future of everything from greentech and health care to 3-D printing and transport. Shift 2020 was edited by Rudy De Waele, a strategist and entrepreneur from the U.K., and includes predictions from more than 70 futurists, thinkers-in-residence, entrepreneurs, think-tank analysts, and academics.
We picked out a few ideas that caught our eye. You can purchase the full copy here. Salim Ismail, a director at Singularity University, predicts education will become an "on-demand service" where people "pull down a module of learning" when they need it. Large bundles of knowledge, as in traditional courses, will be out. Specific will be in. Eze Vidra, head of Google Entrepreneurs Europe says: "School kids will learn from short bite-sized modules, and gamification practices will be incorporated in schools to incentivize children to progress on their own.
" 5 Visions of What Transportation Will Look Like In 2030. The United Nations predicts that roughly 60% of the world's population will live in cities by the year 2030. Hopefully, the 5.1 billion of us negotiating tight urban spaces by then will have figured out a better way to get around. Questioning which new, bold modes of transportation will succeed in the near future is the focus of a new exhibit at the Boston Society of Architects' gallery space, a show entitled, "Rights of Way: Mobility and the City" that runs through May of this year.
Inspired by Audi's Urban Future Initiative, curators James Graham and Meredith Miller (both principal architects at MILLIGRAM-office) were tasked with selecting promising proposals that dreamt up transportation in the year 2030. They chose an array of solutions, from those dealing with the Boston-Washington corridor to a fantastic reimagining of Shenzhen, China.
While several ideas focused on new wheeled gadgets, others looked at revamping city infrastructure altogether. Mobility Prosthetics The “Tripanel" 10 Of the Strangest Homes In the World. EmailEmail Your home is one of the few things that can tell who you are. It can be small or big, bright or dark, full of flowers or full of junk – everyone feels different about what is comfortable, functional or even pretty, and today there are surely enough means to make even the wildest visions come true. From a 1 square meter portable house to a reconstructed water tower or a church, below are some of the most unusual home examples. Where would you like to stay for the night? 1. World’s Slimmest House, Poland The Keret House, inserted between two existing buildings, measures only from 92 to 152 centimeters in width! Designed by: Jakub Szczęsny 2. Inspired by our ancient predecessors, who inhabited trees, this completely transparent “House NA” in Japan offers you a lot of day light, but not much privacy.
Designed by: Sou Fujimoto Architects 3. A 100-feet high water tower in Belgium used to serve as a Nazi hideout during the war, but was later transformed into a living space. 4. 5. 6. 7.
5 Visions For What Families Will Look Like In 2030. Over the past few generations, Western ideas about family have shifted dramatically. People wait longer to have kids and many "boomerang" back to their parents' homes before finally setting out on their own. When they do finally leave, they often scatter far away from their hometowns. The elderly, meanwhile, are sent off into old age homes instead of staying at home with their communities. As more people move into cities, natural resources decline, climate change heats up, and the "sharing economy" continues to pick up steam, our notions of family will continue to shift.
Dragon Rouge imagines five different types of families of the future: the Multi-Gens, the Silver Linings, Ruralites, the Tandem Tribe, and Modular Movers. Multi-Gens The Multi-Gens are exactly what they sound like--multiple generations of families living together. Some of these trends are already starting to catch on, minus the futuristic touches. Silver Linings Ruralites Tandem Tribe Modular Movers. Power-Ups, Virtual Balls, And Quantum Engines: Watch The Future Of Sports. Basketball, soccer, baseball--these are all fine sports. But wouldn’t they be even more fun if they could be released from the boring, been-there-done-that laws of physics? This is what human-computer interaction researchers in Germany were wondering when they created the idea of the “imaginary reality game”--a concept for a hybrid analog-digital game that allows people to play sports as usual, but with an invisible ball and the addition of “power-ups,” low-gravity scenarios, and other crazy schemes dreamed up by developers.
“Unfortunately, physical games are limited by the constraints of the real world, restricting their game mechanics to what is physically possible,” the researchers state, matter-of-factly, in a paper that will be presented at a major conference on human-computer interfaces in the U.K. on Friday. Their prototype version of a new reality, which they show-off in the simulation above, is called “Quantum Basketball.”
100 Ideas For Cities, From A Department Of Listening To Pay-Per-Honk Cars. When thinking about the ideas and trends that will shape the future of cities, there’s no shortage of opinionated experts to turn to, from urban planners and designers to environmental justice activists and wastewater engineers. We write pretty often about what they think. But how often do even these experts actually ask regular people who actually live in cities what they envision for the future? That’s what the Participatory Cities project from the BMW Guggenheim Urban Lab was all about.
From 2011 to 2013, teams of four facilitators constructed mobile labs--temporary buildings in vacant and unused urban spaces--in New York City, Berlin, and Mumbai. Curators at the Solomon R. Here are few highlights from 100 trends crowdsourced and curated from people in among three of the most innovative cities around the world. Upcycling: Berliners who participated in “Rethinking Garbage” discussed how waste could be transformed into raw material for functional objects.
Multicultural Cities: Local Food: Egypt's Entrepreneurial Revolution: A Community Of Startups Rises From The Ashes. In post-revolutionary Egypt, where young people make up a quarter of the population, the number of startups, incubators, competitions, and angel investors has grown into a rapidly evolving sector. “After January 25, we took ownership of our country, we do not wait for help from someone else,” says Gamal Sadek, a co-founder of Bey2ollak, a user-driven traffic application that won Google’s first startup competition in the Middle East and North Africa region. Two and half years later, Egypt’s entrepreneurs have seen incredible challenges. After the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi became the first democratically elected leader of the country, his ouster by the military has caused unrest that left hundreds dead and thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters remain in prison. The rapid changes in Egyptian society are forcing startups to hone their ideas and services or move faster to introduce new products in response to a changing security situation and customer demands.
Bey2ollak Mawenly. A Site For Borrowing Power Drills, Kitchen Equipment, And Anything Else You Can Think Of. Daan Weddepohl created Peerby.com--a site for borrowing stuff--after a series of traumatic experiences. First, his apartment burned down. Second, his girlfriend dumped him. Then, his mother became seriously ill. He was forced to stay with friends and get by without all the things he had normally.
"At first, having nothing was terrible thing, but after a while I started accepting it and realizing that it was okay. It helped me create very strong human connections. Weddepohl, who has worked on startup companies before, had been thinking about creating a "location-based messaging service" for a while, and realized that helping people borrow things from their neighbors would be as good a reason as any to create one. Today's sharing economy is mostly known for sites like Airbnb and RelayRides, which let neighbors share high-value and frequently needed items like hotel rooms and cars.
It's free at the moment, but Weddepohl hopes eventually to charge a little for using the site. We're All Narcissists Now, And That's A Good Thing. You open up your Facebook newsfeed to a deluge of engagement ring photos, political slap-fights, and--horror--your little cousin's selfies from the Justin Bieber concert. But your attempt to escape to Twitter is quickly thwarted by a litany of "Just woke up! " and "having breakfast #allaboutme" and "Got in the wrong line at the grocery store again! " tweets. These "public displays of life"--the posts, likes, and tweets that clutter your newsfeed and irritate you even as they stroke your fears of missing out--are part of our current zeitgeist.
Some experts have pointed to this apparently self-indulgent stream of twaddle as proof positive that we're becoming a generation of narcissists. So it might surprise you to find out that the cyber-citizens of today genuinely care about their fellow human beings. To be sure, the critics' basic point stands: yes, as a culture, we seem to believe that it is vital to not only track, but post our personal actions on every possible social network.
50 Creative Ideas To Make Better Cities, Presented On Gorgeously Designed Posters. The Urban Omnibus, published by the Architectural League of New York, has been collecting good "citymaking" ideas since 2009. Earlier this year, the publication assembled 50 of them into a special Ideas For A New City feature, and commissioned eight posters to highlight some favorites (you can buy those here, and see them in the slide show). These are the eight highlights. Capture Energy From Moving People Think of a city and all the energy that's being expended and wasted. Every time you push something open or closed, that's energy that could be harnessed for use. Jenny Broutin and Carmen Trudell, two former Columbia students, came up with the idea for an "energy harnessing door. " Spaces To Share Ideas Everyone's got a good idea: we just need a space to make them heard.
Natural Systems As Infrastructure Hurricane Sandy showed how hopelessly prepared New York was for a serious storm. End Illegal Basements And Attics Illegal building goes hand in hand with affordability. Tecnologías de la información. Autonomous Vehicles, Big Data, And 3-D Printing Are All Nearing The Top Of The Hype Cycle. Microsoft’s Vision Of The Future Is Trapped In A Box. A Map Of Your City’s Invisible Neighborhoods, According To Foursquare. Corporate Activism Doesn't Require Lots Of Cash, Only Creativity. Slavoj Zizek - No actúes. Solo piensa! Our Flooded Future, According To FEMA. Local. 1: JaipurKnee | How To Create Products For People Living On Less Than $4 Per Day. Airbus and Boeing: Seeing the “lite” Independent bookshops: Reading between the lines. Inside Disney’s Plan To Win The Internet. The Future Of War Has Fewer Guns, But It's Just As Dangerous.
Anti-Social Apps Will Help Us Avoid Our Friends ⚙ Co. CReATE_global_synthesis_report_final. THE CURITIBA OF JAIME LERNER | más que verde. CAF Desarrollo Urbano. Genética. Molecular Fountain of Youth Discovered. Found DNA Creates 3-D Portraits of Strangers. Gun Shoots DNA Bullets to Tag Criminals. First Bionic Eye Sees Light of Day in U.S. [AC-CA] International Architectural Competition - Concours d'Architecture | Proyecto.