The wood and the trees

The more astute among you are probably expecting some sort of NAMA-tinged rant about now. I can understand this, NAMA has been the subject of much wrath and ire over the last few months here on Booming Back, and yesterday's announcement of the scale of the bail out is simply staggering. You could easily be forgiven for predicting that I would write a castigating and scathing post about our political masters once again mortgaging the nation's future to protect the interests of their paymasters in the financial and property sectors, and indeed in days gone by you would have been Nostradamus-like with the accuracy of your prediction.

However on this, the last day of March 2010, I have reached the end of my initial three month attempt to steer clear of day-to-day ruminations and an accompanying desire to focus on the broader picture, the longer term, to see the wood and not the trees and so and, and so forth. During this period I have abandoned social networks and reduced my RSS feeds, I have rejected commentaries on current events and focused my gaze on more timeless questions of science and philosophy, and ridiculously long trilogies published in the nineties.

I have come to appreciate that what happens today has less impact on my life than what happend last week, or last year, and I have as little ability to change or affect it than I do events that occurred a hundred years ago. What has happened today has happened, and cannot be changed, so instead of spending all my time and effort focused on a past over which I have no control, these last three months have been spent trying to focus on the future, which is infinitely mutable. But talk about the future is for another day's post.

Commenting on a day's events within the same sunrise and sunset of the event is to focus on the tree and not the wood, and is the fatal flaw of the blogger. If you spend all your time recounting the flaws of the individual trees you won't notice that the whole wood has absconded with €21.8 Billion of your money to rescue a morally and financially bankrupt institution so that its shareholders, who obviously can't read or they would have seen the omnipresent notices proclaiming that the value of shares and/or investments can go down as well as up, won't be inconvenienced any further. Those type of woods can be pretty crafty, and if I wasn't such a strong environmentalist I would suggest burning the whole lot down and clearing the way for new growth, that way you wouldn't have to worry about the woods or the trees.

But then what would I write about?

Thus in the absence of the heated diatribe that you have so cruelly been denied, I leave you with a consolation prize of some pretty pictures of a garden full of ornately planted and sculpted trees. On Saturday The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I took a trip down to Powerscourt House and Gardens, and basked in the warm spring sunshine. Last night the nation shivered in arctic snow and sleet, which arrived uncaring and unmoved by the change in the clocks from winter to summer time.

You can blame NAMA for that as well.

Our Friends Electric

Living a life that is unfortunately slightly more sedentary than I would like, I have taken to rambling out onto the city streets for a daily 3 mile constitutional (the equivalent in feet of eight 1937 Constitutionals). Normally my route takes me either up towards James' Gate, or across the Liffey towards Parnell Street and back, but today I chose a more circuitous route along the Grand Canal to take a gander at the ESB's brand spanking new Electric Vehicle Charging Stations.

Yes, my friends, we are officially living in the future, for not one, not two, but four vehicle charging points have been installed around the city centre, one on Adelaide Road in front of the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, a second about 200 meters down the canal on Wilton Place near the offices of Sustainable Energy Ireland, and a further two across the road from each other at the ESB's headquarters on Fitzwilliam Street.

Three of the charging points are of the same design, and look geared towards charging only one car at a time. The fourth on Fitzwilliam Street is slightly squatter, and I imagine is either capable of charging two vehicles at once, or is one of the rapid chargers that should be capable of completely charging a car in twenty minutes.

Use of the chargers requires a RFID card and preregistration with the ESB, and apparently for the rest of the year charging at these four points is actually free, with fees to be introduced in 2011. The plan is to install up to 500 charge points in Dublin, 135 in Cork, 45 each in Limerick, Galway and Waterford and at least 1 in every town in the country with a population of more than 1,500. These are all to facilitate the Government's ambitious target of having 10% of vehicles on Irish roads in 2020 be electric.

While there has been some positive coverage of this launch in the media, almost every article I have read adds the caveat, "of course Electric Vehicles are only as Green as the source of the electricity", the implication being that since the vast majority of Irish electricity comes from coal and gas powered plants, promoting electric cars is a bit of an exercise in Greenwashing.

Luckily this is not the case. According to David MacKay, Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and author of the rather good "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air":

"Assume the electric vehicle's energy cost is 20kWh(e) per 100km. (I think 15kWh(e) per 100km is perfectly possible, but let's play skeptical in this calculation.) If grid electricity has a carbon footprint of 500g per kWh(e) then the effective emissions of this vehicle are 100g CO2 per km, which is as good as the best fossil cars. So I conclude that switching to electric cars is already a good idea, even before we green our electricity supply." - 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air', p131

So even as we wait for the ESB to move towards more renewable sources of energy production, or to open up the charging stations to other greener producers (as it plans to do), switching to electric vehicles in an urban environment is still a much better option.

True, the number of charging points now is rather low, and they still probably outnumber the electric vehicles on the road by a ratio of 2:1, but this is a great initiative, and like the Dublin Bikes scheme, hopefully points the way towards the redevelopment of Dublin as a more sustainable city.

Welcome to the future; Next stop, reserved parking spaces for flying cars.

Oh, yeah!

Links
ESB Press Release on the Vehicle Charging Points
More Photos

On Greenwashing and Innovation

This post is a follow-up to the presentation I made on Innovation two weeks ago, and was crossposted to the event hosts' website. Frequent readers of Booming Back will forgive the lack of overtly cynical tirades and rabid polemics, sometimes it makes sense to hide the grumpy during the day-job.

On Greenwashing and Innovation

While reviewing the notes from the World Cafe sessions at the recent Sustainably Minded Enterprise event, I was struck by the fact that a number of separate groups had raised the spectre of 'Greenwashing' as a challenge to any new sustainable business initiative. With much of the Government's recovery efforts focused on the Green Economy, those who have been working within the Green Economy for many years now are concerned that there will be a dilution of Green standards both in actuality and, perhaps more damagingly, in the perception of the general public, as more and more businesses and activities seek to reclassify themselves as "Sustainable" or "Green" to avail of Government funding, tax relief, or simply as a marketing angle given the media profile attached to the sector.

While an Oil Company trying to portray itself as Green is unlikely to convince many members of the public, its attempts to do so will instill doubt in the public over the validity of any business that uses the label 'Green'. This is the real danger that Greenwashing presents, not that a single company can make erroneous claims, rather that the reputation of an entire sector can be tarnished.

Recognizing the potential for such a widespread negative impact, this week saw the release in the UK of Government guidelines on the use of Green and environmental claims in advertising, particularly on use of phrases such as or "eco" or "environmentally friendly", and according to Fred Pearce in the Guardian the new guidelines call for Green claims to be "clear, accurate and verifiable". While unfortunately these guidelines do not carry the full force of law, they do acknowledge the concerns of the public and seek to reign in some of the more outlandish advertising practices.

This was in my mind last night as I followed the reports of yesterday's Cabinet reshuffle, specifically with the rebranding of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment as the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, and started to wonder are we now entering into an age of "Innovationwashing"? To be clear less than 24 hours after the creation of a new Government department there is no way that any judgement can be passed on the legitimacy of its new name and focus, rather I have been struck by the frequency with which the word "innovation" is appearing in conversations in both the Public and Private sector, alarmingly with little explanation of what exactly is meant by the term. I am reminded of meetings I had with Irish political groups in the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama's successful Presidential campaign in the US, where more than once I heard people profess "well I don't know what the Internet is, but by God we have to have it".

In the last week alone we have seen the launch of the Innovation Ireland report by the Taoiseach, the establishment of an Innovation Center in San Jose to help Irish companies target Silicon Valley, and our own EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Máire Geoghegan-Quinn issue a report that placed Ireland in the middle tier of EU Innovation nations.

But does anyone actually know what 'Innovation' is?

According to the Oxford Online dictionary 'Innovation' is "the action or process of innovating". A search for "innovating" refers you back to the definition for "Innovation".

Innovation is thus a nebulous Ouroboros, forever consuming its own tail. We don't know what it is but by God we have to have it.

To be fair to the Oxford Online, it does offer a second definition of 'an Innovation' (the object, not the process) as "a new method, idea, product, etc.", so the process of Innovation can best be described as 'The act of creating something new'. However a criticism that has been leveled at the recent Innovation Ireland report is that it simply seeks to expand the loose regulation and tax regimes existent in the Irish Financial sector to other sectors in an effort to attract more multi-nationals to establish operations in Ireland. Within the report are proposals for attracting IP (Intellectual Property) Rich businesses to Ireland on the basis of our tax regime, which as TASC highlights would mirror the current environment where large corporations funnel their global revenue through their Irish subsidiaries without the creation of any local R&D jobs, or the fostering of a local culture of innovation. Again as TASC points out "In this report, the word “tax” is mentioned 127 times, the word “food” eight times and the words “manufacture” or “manufacturing” just 24 times".

To me this does not seem to be "a new method, idea, product, etc.", it simply means the expansion of an existing scheme with no ongoing sustainable benefits for Irish society. While this would see increased returns for the exchequer, it would make no contribution to the creation of a sustainable culture of research and development in Ireland, and we would make no progress towards establishing an environment of Innovation Independence unaffected by the turmoils of the international market. It highlights the need to critically examine the use of the word 'Innovation', and ensure that such claims are "clear, accurate and verifiable".

I would suggest that a successful government policy towards Innovation should not be focused excessively on encouraging international investment into Ireland through Multinationals attracted by liberal tax regimes, rather it should concentrate on fostering a strong native Micro-enterprise and SME sector, developed by a highly educated entrepreneurial workforce who are equipped by a world-class education system for 21st century creative ventures, not 19th century factory jobs.

Anything else is just "Innovationwashing".

Postcards from the edge

This weekend The Very Understanding Girlfriend was mostly in Virginia. Not the Commonwealth of Virginia located on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, no indeed, for she was in the other Virginia, the fabulous plantation settlement in the beatific County Cavan, founded in 1612, a mere five years after its American namesake, itself the first permanent British settlement in the New World.

I know she was there for she sent me this postcard purchased in the late night video rental and electrical goods store, which also indicates to me that she was on a holiday, for nobody sends a postcard from a business trip much less an overnight visit to an inveterate knitter friend and her common-law gourmand as she would have me believe. No indeed, despite the fact that she herself arrived back in our house a day before the postcard did, this officially counts as her being on holiday.

The postcard itself seems to suggest that Virginia remains a monument to the glory days of the early 80's, where the cloth-cap wearing drivers of a Ford Cortina wave a laconic finger at you from their steering wheel as they pass you buy outside the local newsagent where you have just emerged fresh faced and full of the joys of spring with a 99 in one hand and a glass bottle of warm 7-Up in the other, thin white pastic straw being optional. As the postcard itself helpfully explains:

"The town is beautifully situated on the northern side of Lough Ramor, with its wooded shores and many islets. there is excellent bathing at a sandy stretch of lakeshore beside the town, and it is renowned for its boating and fishing facilities. The scenic walks hold a charm for both the tourist and native alike. Many enjoyable hours can be spent on the golf course which is set in a picturesque area overlooking Lough Ramor."

So there you go. When thinking of your next environmentally responsible and sustainably minded vacation, may we offer you fabulous Virginia, Co Cavan, for your consideration.

St Patrick and a Sufi

And so spring finally arrives in Dublin. It always amazes me that we celebrate our national Tourist Day in the middle of March, an action seemingly solely designed to allow us to instantly identify parade partipants later in the day by the degree of frostbite they have suffered, a real souvenir from Ireland that they can show all their classmates back in East St Nowhere, Missouri presumably through the implausible medium of faux show tunes, if my knowledge of US teen culture gained almost exclusively through ads for programs on E4 is in anyway accurate.

And I think we all can agree that it is.

Alas having a dentist appointment yesterday morning I was unable to participate in the traditional celebrations of our culture, forgoing the usual pints before breakfast, brown envelope of cash at lunch, construction of a criminally substandard apartment block in the middle of a flood plain and the granting of a nice bit of tax relief on the side in the late afternoon, followed by a hearty meal of clerical abuse and massive societal inequality and a rather tasty bit of bailing out with public money for all of my criminal misdeeds for dessert. After all this any lesser nation would barely have room for a bit of after-dinner public urination and a fight in the taxi-queue, but somehow we manage to persevere. Makes you truly proud to be Irish.

Now just because I chose not to participate in the wearing of the green this week does not mean that I have been slack, far from it in fact. My week has been chock-a-block with meetings, siblings, fillings and wires and the glacially paced writing of Kim Stanley Robinson, none of which unfortunately makes for an interesting blog post. Thus rather than bore you with unnecessary detail, I thought I would present you with a top-level executive summary of the last seven days in the life of Unkie Dave:

Books read: 2
Pages read: 1449
Business meetings that contributed to the betterment of society: 3
Business meetings where I made money: 0
Meters of speaker cable connected: 52
Width of living room in meters: 3.6
Trips to the dentist: 2
Fillings: 1
New Albums listened to: 3
Trips to the parcel delivery office: 1
Number of weeks a parcel, but not the one I had gone to collect, had been sitting there without them informing me it had arrived: 2
Family members entertained in our house over a 24 hour period: 8
Average number of cups of Chicory consumed per day: .57
Average number of cups of Chicory enjoyed per day: 0
Parades viewed: 0

And thus ends another week in the life of Unkie Dave.

Lest you feel somewhat unsatisfied or shortchanged by this visit to Booming Back, feeling there was nothing that really spoke to you on a personal level, I leave you with one solid recommendation from my week, Gonjasufi's new album 'A Sufi and a Killer', a messy distorted melange of funk, spirituals and hip-hop all filtered through a glitchy lo-fi Warp lens. The track 'Ancestors' has been on heavy rotation here since its inclusion in the Warp 2010 sampler released last December, and the full album is the best thing I've heard so far this year.

Civitas et civis

The Passport Office is flooded this morning. In the absence of any precipitation of note in the last 24 hours I think it is safe to rule out Climate Change as the instigator of this unfortunate event, though given the fact that our own apartment located a number of floors above the ground was the victim of rain-induced flooding last July, such attribution to the fell hand of human-induced climatic misfortune is not beyond the realms of possibility.

But no matter, what interested me most about the report in this morning's Irish Times Online was the following phrase:

"Any citizen who is to collect a new passport today can collect it from Hainault House, 69 - 71 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, from 11.00 this morning. Meanwhile, any citizen who needs a passport on a genuine emergency basis should report to nearby Iveagh House, 80 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, where an emergency service is in operation."

This was of interest to me because of the repeated use of the word 'Citizen', a phrase that one seldom sees in either conversation or print, or rather, one seldom sees in conversation or print unless you find yourself preoccupied with the same sort of source material as I do, for it is a word that I am passionate about.

The word itself derives from a Middle English appropriation of the French 'citezein', meaning inhabitant of a city, itself coming from the Latin 'civitas' meaning city. In both the early French and current English meaning the 'citizen' is defined in terms of the place in which they inhabit, the citizen is one who belongs to the city, or to the state. However in the original Latin etymology this relationship is reversed, for the word 'civitas' was itself more properly defined as being a body of citizens, the 'civis' or citizen was at its core and the city defined its existence in terms of its inhabitants, it was because they were.

The official motto of the City of Dublin, still visible on many street lamps throughout the city centre, is "Obedientia civium urbis felicitas", translated roughly as "the obedience of the citizen is the happiness of the city", and is all too indicative of the reversal of this relationship since Roman times.

However last night I was invited to attend a workshop organised by the City planning office bringing together architects, academics, urban planners, elected representatives and, apparently, grumpy bloggers with a passion for the notion of the Public Sphere and the way in which the right physical Space might stimulate its growth, and over the course of almost four hours around twenty of us discussed aspects of the proposed new Economic Corridors in the draft City Development plan in a facilitated yet free-flowing conversation.

What impressed me about the evening was the genuine sense of duty to the citizens (and the word 'citizen' was used extensively, rather than 'residents' or 'inhabitants') that was conveyed by the city officials and those involved in the planning process. Much of the conversation revolved around ways to engage with and empower the citizenry through the planning process and beyond into the actual realisation of the physical space itself.

It was also encouraging to be able to reference David Harvey, Elinor Ostrom's work on the Commons and the participatory budgetary process in Porto Alegre during the formal workshop and in sidebar conversations during the interval and be received with interest if not always with approval.

I was struck by a phrase used at the start of the evening, that of "Collaborative Urbanism", and it seemed to encapsulate everything that should happen within a city planning process where the citizen is at its heart. I emerged from the evening's workshop feeling that at least in part of the City Council there were people who believed with a passion that 'the Happiness of the Citizens is the Happiness of the City', and while they might not always have the best tools to engage with the citizenry, the willingness and desire are there.

Good news for the Citizen, then.

Of course in the context of the above notice of the flooded passport office the word 'Citizen" is obviously being used less as an appellation of inclusive civil camaraderie, and more to alert the confused readership of Ireland's newspaper of record to the fact that not just anyone off the street can show up at this office and expect to pick up a passport, no indeed, for they must be (deep breath and pause for dramatic effect), IRISH!! No Polish or Romanians, no visiting Germans or lost Americans happening upon Molesworth Street could expect to receive travel documentation wherin the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ireland requests all whom it may concern to allow the bearer, a citizen of Ireland, to pass freely and without hinderance and to afford the bearer all necessary assistance and protection. That privilege is for Irish folk, and Irish folk alone.

and possibly Israelis.

Links
Dublin City Development Plan, an interesting site with summaries of the main themes, videos of public debates and other feedback forums and of course the full plan itself in downloadable form.

Home Alone

An Taoiseach Brian Cowen, accompanied by Minister for Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin, is making the customary pilgrimage to Washington this week, bowl of shamrocks in hand, like the tribal chieftain of a conquered vassal state paying annual tribute to Caesar.

Mary Harney, who remains in government solely on the basis that nobody else wants her job, is in New Zealand on a fifteen day holiday/good-will visit, well timed given both our current economic crises and the recent scandals at Tallaght hospital.

But they are not alone. In fact according to The Irish Times twenty-three Ministers and government officials are away this week, flying the tattered flag for the shattered remnants of our once proud nation:

Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Mary Coughlan will travel to Germany for engagements in Munich, Berlin and Dusseldorf.

Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Brendan Smith will visit Rome and Milan where he will be promoting Irish food exports.

Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern will visit Paris while Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey will travel to Atlanta in the US to meet companies which have major investments in Ireland.

Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan will travel to India while Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe will visit Japan and Korea.

Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Éamon Ó Cuív will visit Poland and Austria.

Minister for Health Mary Harney will travel to New Zealand, the Minister for Social and Family Affairs Mary Hanafin will go to the US, to speak at a lunch hosted by the Irish American Business Chamber and Network in Philadelphia, while Government Chief Whip Pat Carey will visit Houston and Dallas.

The other junior ministers travelling abroad are Minister for Children Barry Andrews, who will speak at an event in New York, while John Curran, the Minister with responsibility for the National Drugs Strategy, will visit London and Birmingham, and junior health minister John Moloney will travel to Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Junior minister for the environment Michael Finneran will visit China while the Minister for Trade and Commerce, Billy Kelleher, will travel to Australia.

Junior enterprise minister Dara Calleary will be in Canada and Boston while Europe Minister Dick Roche will visit Russia.

Áine Brady, junior minister responsible for the elderly, will visit Norway, Sweden and Denmark while OPW Minister Martin Mansergh will travel to Holland and Belgium.

Overseas aid Minister Peter Power will be in South Africa and Lesotho.

Science and Technology Minister Conor Lenihan will travel to Vietnam while the Attorney General, Paul Gallagher, will speak at a function in Dubai.

So, with the loss of Ministers Willie O'Dea, Trevor Sergeant and Martin Cullen in the last four weeks this seems to leave the country in the charge of Minister for the Environment John Gormley and Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan.

Lets work this one through. Brian Lenihan has stated that there is nothing really for him to do between now and the budget so his current illness is no impediment to his job and John Gormley by all accounts can't make up his mind if he is supposed to be a Minister at the moment or not.

These are the folks left in charge of the shop while everyone else has nipped out for a quick bag of chips and a sneaky pint?

Now I'm not explicitly or implicitly suggesting any course of action here, but, you know, if we were a nation with a slightly more equatorial location there would be folks seizing the airport and tv stations right about now, martial music would be playing on the radio and the nice men in the fancy uniforms would be telling us that everything is under control and democracy would be restored in due corse, while wild-eyed unshaven cigar-chomping youths would be dancing on top of overturned buses with fiery women shimmying in floral print dresses and a knowing look in their eyes, swigging from long bottles of purloined rum and consumed with an egalitarian camaraderie and the certainty of their own immortality, and the cries of "¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!" would rise above the rooftops of a city drunk on the possibilities of the future.

But alas we as a nation are cursed by geography, climate, and a hops-fueled apathy towards seizing control of our own destiny and making our world anew. Our silence grants our oligarchs permission to act with impunity, our inaction grants them free will to act with immorality. 70% pay rises for the board of NAMA, 23 state-funded holidays abroad for Government members and there's not enough money in the kitty to pay the teachers. "Tough decisions had to be taken on the economy" said An Taoiseach Brian Cowen at a gala dinner in Chicago to mark the start of his US trip. "Omnomnom" go our political masters.

In other Banana Republics the ruling elite sneak away only for emergency medical treatments to prolong their wizened grasp on the reins of power, fearful that the downtrodden masses will rise up at the slightest sign of weakness or the merest glimpse of an opportunity to act against years of corruption and oppression.

We, however, get postcards from Auckland Starship Hospital saying "food's great, off to the beach now. Wish you were here!"

"Omnomnom" go our political masters.

Hasta manana, compañeras y compañeros!

Na'vi Warrior Dubz

This is a Na'vi oblivious to the impending doom around them and unconcerned by their recent lack of significant Oscar success thanks to the soothing worbworbworbworbworb-worb-wooooorb-worbworb of some old school dubstep, as drawn for my good self by the enviably talented Deirdre Ruane over at Wasted Epiphanies, a web comic exploring the thoughts and tribulations of Ms Ruane, and the occasional polar bear stuck in a dead-end temping job.

Prompted by one of the best conversations in the comments to take place here at Booming Back in recent months I took a visit to her site and spent more time than I actually had reading through her recent output and ended up by ordering her first collection, "One Word for Everything", self published and available for the princely sum of £3.50, or £8.50 with a personalized sketch like Mr Happypants Na'vi above. Her strip is published every Thursday, and definitely worth bookmarking.

And as for the Na'vi, this was the strip that sold me on Deirdre's work, funny 'cause its true, sad 'cause its true.

On Innovation

I was speaking at an event yesterday hosted by the Dublin City Council focused on creating the right environment to stimulate the development of Small to Medium and Micro Enterprises in the Green sector.

The format was interesting, called a World Cafe, with a series of 4 short presentations that each posed a question to the audience, who then broke up into small discussion groups each with a facilitator and a note taker. Notes were captured on a large sheet of paper that was then attached to various walls around the venue to be shared. After each presentation the participants then moved to a different discussion group, though the facilitator remained in place. The level of debate and discussion was very high, with the added benefit of an enforced networking effect. Had there been more time the facilitator would have reported back to the wider group on the main themes and strands that emerged from their discussion, but as it is a summary will be sent out via email to all participants. The level of attendance was also high, between fifty and sixty participants from local government, social entrepreneurs, business owners, activists and others interested in doing more than simply talking about change. The numbers were particularly impressive given the fact that there were numerous other events in the city to mark International Women's Day, which many attendees were also actively engaged in.

As part of my ongoing work to create a Space that stimulates the development of Ireland's Public Sphere I was speaking on the conditions necessary for innovation to occur within a Green Economy-orientated space. While the focus of much of the day was on the concept of a Green Hub, almost an incubator for small Green businesses, I was arguing that bricks and mortar alone would not provide the spark for innovation to occur.

You can find my notes and slides below. Regular readers of this blog will find many familiar themes, and while it is more pro-business sounding than most of my polemics its heart is in the right place. Its not often one gets to draw from Krugman, Žižek, Vandana Shiva and Fintan O'Toole in a presentation on business.

On Innovation


In 2007 a colleague met David Edwards, Professor of Biomechanical Engineering in Harvard. Edwards had just released a book called ArtScience, where he argued that innovation cannot be simply made to happen, that what is necessary is to bring together people from different backgrounds and experience in a conducive mental and physical environment and innovation will then occur organically. My colleague shared Edwards' book with a few of us on the leadership team who were concerned that the creative spark was disappearing from many of the activities in our Dublin operation.

At the time one of my roles was to recruit recent MBA graduates from top-flight European universities into our management program. Our company had grown rapidly, in Dublin alone we had gone from twelve of us to 1200 in less than four years and as an organization we felt that we needed to supplement our company knowledge with external business knowledge to meet the needs of our now more mature operation.

After spending some time discussing ArtScience it became clear that by relying on senior talent recruited almost exclusively from similar MBA backgrounds, an overwhelming element of groupthink, what Vandana Shiva calls "Monocultures of the Mind", had entered into our organization, thus when faced with a problem or challenge the vast majority of our new management team would all approach the problem in the exact same way (The INSEAD way, the LBS way, The Bocconi way), and when that solution failed they were out of options.

They had been taught what to think, not how to think. No amount of funky office decor and free food is going to stimulate innovation, it happens organically when the right people are brought together, and a diversity of thought emerges.


Ireland is strong on Enterprise. One of our greatest successes has been our ability to attract so many Multinational Corporations at the cutting edge of their sectors to Ireland, but in many cases the majority of their innovation and research has remained in their home countries.

We have come under increased criticism recently from those within the MNC community for not being able to supply the caliber of workforce that they require, and this is increasingly being used as a justification for reductions in the level of investment in Ireland, or a withdrawal of operations altogether.

While I am not sure if I agree with this viewpoint, there is an element of truth in Fintan O'Toole's assertion that the Irish mindset is trapped in the 19th century, in that our workforce gravitates towards the security of a stable job, rather than adopting an entrepreneurial attitude towards risk and opportunity.

The problem with this is that international evidence suggests that the majority of Green Economy jobs will not come from large Multinationals, rather they will emerge from native Small to Medium or Micro Enterprises.

Thus for the Green Economy to materialize we need to foster a culture of native entrepreneurs, indeed a national entrepreneurial mindset, that will generate the next cycle of mass employment in Ireland, less affected by the volatility of the international market but still attractive to external investors, generating ideas and innovations that themselves can be exported.

In effect what we need is a culture of Innovation Independence.


Innovation Independence will occur when we are able to overcome our own national trait of risk aversion.

(I'm not talking about the kind of risk that we have seen all too frequently within our financial sector where individuals and institutions gambled with other people's money and with little or no personal exposure, what Paul Krugman calls "heads they win, tails someone else loses" in his op-ed piece on Ireland in today's NY Times. I am talking about the type of risk where someone takes a chance and tries to affect positive change whether by starting a new business, a new social enterprise, a community group or other action that contributes to the betterment of society around them) - added on the day, not in original notes.

Samuel Beckett wrote the best piece of business advice I have ever heard, saying: Try again, Fail again, Fail better.

Innovation Independence will occur when we escape our collective 19th century factory mindset.

Innovation Independence will occur when we overcome the fear of sharing and collaborating and emerge from our mental silos.

Innovation Independence will occur when our business culture is fundamentally transformed to encourage and enable a diversity of thought.

And with Innovation Independence the Green Economy will flourish.

Now for the science

The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile on February 27th moved the Earth's axis by up to 8cm (or 2.7 milliarcseconds), leading to a subsequent shortening of the length of a day by 1.26 microseconds, a microsecond being one millionth of a second.

A day after news of this cosmic shift emerged in the science journals came reports from the University Of California, Davis of a campaign to assign the prefix "hella" to 10²⁷, which is a very large number indeed. Currently the largest prefix in the International System of Units (SI) is yotta (10²⁴), followed by zeta (10²¹), exa (10¹⁸) and peta (10¹⁵).

All of which serves merely as a foil to distract you with pretty pictures taken last year and argue that not only has it now been scientifically proven that there was less time than normal last week, I have also been hellabusy, and that is why there have been no posts of any substance in the last seven days.

Thank you for your patience.

Howth seals

Out in Howth today and stopped by the pier to see the seals, up to six at a time all showing off and looking for scraps to be thrown to them.

Seals are much, much bigger than you think they are.

More photos here

Encounters redux

TASC have now uploaded the video of last week's Encounters conversation between Mark Mortell and Fintan O'Toole, well worth checking out.