Movement of People

Next week we are having The Medici Experience in San Jose, CA. It is on September 24^th, and you can find the details here.  I am really, really excited about this project because it is fundamentally a way for us to create change on a larger scale – to help cities and regions grow. Grow ideas, opportunities and jobs. It is terrific that the city of San Jose will host the event and can see the need for innovation in driving growth.

The idea for The Medici Experience came out of my strong desire to avoid just having a whole lot of talks with panels and keynotes while the audience sits still and does little. Instead I am imagining bringing 100s (even thousands as we scale) of people together from different backgrounds and disciplines within a region and have them work together to unleash an explosion of transformational ideas related to their day-to-day efforts, and then move as far along as possible towards making the best ideas happen. All in one intense, fast and furious day.  Everywhere I’ve done this it’s been extremely successful – whether within corporations or for the public such as our event in Trinidad earlier this summer.

Anyway – hope you can join us! We are doing this for the city of San Jose and so the fee is a very reasonable $195 to get a chance to interact with others looking to innovate and a chance to hear me present some of the fundamental aspects of Medici Effect theory.

See below for some indication of the energy that will follow!

I just want to share another example of benefits of migration: In Nigeria immigrants from Zimbabwe have brought with them new methods and new kinds of cattle that have improved agriculture in the country significantly. It is interesting that these things still happen and that the movement of people makes a difference in such a basic way.

/Kristian Ribberström

In a recent post I argue that the influx of Iraqi refugees to Sweden is beneficial to the country in a longer perspective; their knowledge, experience and language skills will be extremely useful as Swedish export industry need to enter into new markets. This aspect of immigration is never discussed since the short-term practical problems with integration dominate the debate about our relatively generous asylum laws.

Anyway, after I wrote that the Swedish Trade Council has identified the Middle East as one of our most important potential export markets. I just wanted to point that out since it supports my argument, doesn’t it?

/Kristian Ribberström

I wrote a post in November from Budapest where I reflected on the way Hungarian society is changing rapidly and the capital is becoming increasingly diverse. Now I am here again and I see further evidence of diversity – in my own subjective way.

Wherever I travel I have the habit of making reflections on how internationally "connected" a certain situation is. I know it sounds a bit weird but it is fun and it will give you some kind of unscientific index on how affected the place or situation is by globalization. This is an example of how it works: When I was visiting Frans in the US earlier this spring I was standing in a shop on Manhattan thinking to myself: Here I am – a Swede in New York, buying an Italian bag from a Russian shopkeeper as a gift for my Hungarian girlfriend. Several nations "involved" in that single purchase. And that is not because New York is a extreme city – you can easily see similar "chains" in places that are not nearly as big or multicultural. That is just the way modern society works.

In Hungary some ten or fifteen years ago, however, it wasn’t like that. The reflection chain would be something like: Here I am – a Swede in Budapest. And that was it. Possibly with the addition drinking Danish beer (which isn’t very exotic to a west-coast Swede.) Now – in 2008 – things are different. Being unable to stop this behaviour, I was thinking while having dinner the other night: Here I am  – a Swede in Budapest, drinking Mexican beer in a Persian restaurant while we are being entertained by a Turkish belly dancer (which is very exotic to a west-coast Swede) and trying to figure out if the people at the other table are from India or Pakistan. Budapest really has changed.

And here is the thing: Everytime I manage to make a "long chain" I am in a situation where I spend money – and where other people spend money. In other words there seems to be some kind of correlation between mixed national perspectives and entrepreneurship. Maybe these overlapping layers of diverse national experiences and skills automatically provide a divergence of ideas – and divergent thinking is what generates innovation. If that is true these longer chains I reflect upon is a sign of fertile soil for what we could call business creativity. Furthermore – an idea that is conventional in one place may be vital and even innovative elsewhere; a Persian restaurant will undoubtedly have less competition and higher profile in Budapest than in Teheran.

Well, this is not research – just thoughts. And I am just a Swede in Budapest. Spending my American money.

/Kristian Ribberström

In his speech at The Medici Summit Omar Hijazi, CEO of Dubai-based Tejari, pointed out that many emerging markets are underestimated by Europe and the USA. In the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America the power to consume as well as produce is growing rapidly and very soon this will have a huge impact on the “old” industrialized countries. The general awareness of this development is surprisingly low in this part of the world.

I was reminded of this when I read an interview (Swedish) in Dagens Nyheter with Ulf Berg, CEO of the Swedish Trade Council. Berg shares Hijazi’s insight and he is very critical of the way Swedish companies are missing export opportunities simply because they lack knowledge of the emerging markets. Or, as he puts it: The problem is not the view people around the world have of Sweden – the problem is the view people in Sweden of the rest of the world. Berg believes that Swedes are too isolated and mostly associate these countries with cheap labour and low-cost production. The global development over the last ten years hasn’t affected Swedish trade much which may be a fatal mistake since the economy depends heavily on export.

I see a very strong connection to cultural diversity in the workforce here and my argument is this: One of the greatest potential benefits of diversity in a country’s workforce is that it mirrors the population, the cultures and the languages of the world – and the world is the export market. This benefit is hardly ever acknowledged.

Let me explain it with an example: Swedish immigration policies are relatively generous – partly for humanitarian reasons but also for demographic reasons. But when immigration is discussed it is mostly in the context of problems that need to be solved. One such case is a town called Södertälje. With some 80,000 people it has become the destination of 5% of all the Iraqi refugees that come to Europe. This means that Södertälje accepts more Iraqi refugees than the USA and Canada together and today there are about 100,000 people of Iraqi origin in Sweden. Because of this situation Anders Lago, the top politician in Södertälje, was invited to speak at the Congress in Washington last week. In his speech Lago acknowledged that immigrants are needed and welcome in Sweden but that responsibility for Iraqi refugees must be more evenly distributed; immigration has become a burden in his town.

However, since we are missing export opportunities because we lack knowledge of the world around us we need to look at immigration in a new way and in a longer perspective. I understand that successful integration is hard to achieve in Södertälje, but the questions we must ask ourselves are the following: Is it good or bad for Sweden to have 100,000 Iraqis in the workforce who speak Arabic and other languages? Is it good or bad to be able to harness the experiences of 100,000 people who have knowledge of traditions, tastes and values in a part of the world where we need to do business in the future? The answers to these questions are quite obvious. I think the conditions for integration would be greatly improved if this perspective was included in the discussion.

/Kristian Ribberström

It has been more than a year since I heard about the Burqini the first time and it has been more than six months since I wrote a post about it. I like the story of the Burqini since it is such a great example of creativity at the intersection of cultures and I often use it to describe the mechanisms that make diversity and mixed cultural perspectives drive innovation.

Over the last months I have realized that the online discussion about this product has been gaining momentum. Opinions about it can be read on blogs about Islam, lifestyle, fashion, integration, politics, sports – you name it. In this media flow a couple of articles from Holland and Sweden caught my attention; it seems that the Burqini is actually being used in these countries and that it has made many Muslim women visit swimming pools and shores in a way that they didn’t do before. This too has caused debate – people react when they see things they haven’t seen before. Many swimming pools have rules about what you are permitted to wear in the water and often it is unclear how the Burqini should be treated in this respect. As I have mentioned before the debate on multiculturalism is continuous in European countries and the integration of Islam is far from friction free.

But friction is an inevitable part of the process that makes diversity drive innovation. If the Burqini makes people come to places where they wouldn’t have gone without it and mix with people they wouldn’t otherwise have met it may be a slow but effective tool for integration. And integration, naturally, makes it far easier to leverage diversity for innovation. Remember – it was such a mix of cultures that created the Burqini in the first place. Wouldn’t it be nice if this Lebanese-Australian invention could catalyze new diversity-driven innovation?

/Kristian Ribberström

Last week Tom Barnett wrote the post Heightened immigration is a global phenomenon in which he refers to a couple of articles in The Economist about global migration and reports about, for instance, Poles in Ireland. (Very good articles!) He poses a question about integration policy which has stirred a rather typical immigration debate among his readers.

Whatever the consequences of immigration are, Poland really is an interesting example that explains some reasons behind people movement: Ever since the country joined the EU large numbers of Poles have moved elsewhere for better paid jobs, especially to Ireland but also to Iceland and other countries. However, over the next couple of years Poland will be showered in EU money to stimulate the economy and there will be a huge demand for labour. This is not unproblematic since emigration to western countries has greatly reduced the work force. According to some analysts this “labour vacuum” will be filled with people from Ukraine and Belorussia. In other words migration drives migration. On the other hand, Philippe Legrain (to whom I have referred in this recent post), describes on his blog how the Poles are starting to return back home from Great Britain. That says something about how difficult it is to predict migration patterns.

The Poland situation is only one example of the forces behind people movement. But whatever the reasons are, migration almost always causes controversy; it seems that for many people it is easier to find the negative aspects of it. I have said it before and I will say it again – it’s a pity that even among those who argue that migration is a positive phenomenon it is merely regarded as a matter of labour supply and demand. The idea that movement of people drives innovation is sometimes mentioned but rarely elaborated or used as a substantial argument. Yet there are many examples: It may be the invention of a new product, an old business concept that prospers in a new setting or award-winning research. It is far from difficult to find such examples.

Researcher Richard Florida talks a lot about tapping the creativity of individuals and clearly moving from one context to another is an effective way of doing that. These processes would probably work even better if people had a more positive attitude towards immigration; if it generated less controversy it might generate more innovation.

/Kristian Ribberström