St. Gallen Symposium

I'm helping the St. Gallen Symposium gather student nominations. This is a great program I participated in last year. The 41st St. Gallen Symposium, a student initiative organized by the International Students’ Committee (ISC), takes place from 12 – 13 May, 2011, at the University of St. Gallen. The main topic this year is “Just Power.” Two hundred Leaders of Tomorrow encounter 600 Leaders of today from all over the world and debate this year's topic, "Just Power." In the past, distinguished personalities, such as Dr. Josef Ackermann, Deutsche Bank AG; Prof. Niall Ferguson, Harvard University; Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Minister of Finance of Singapore; and Prof. Dr. Robert John Aumann, Nobel Laureate, contributed to the inspiring, intergenerational dialogue with the Leaders of Tomorrow. One hundred graduate and postgraduate students have the opportunity to qualify for participation as a Leader of Tomorrow at the St. Gallen Symposium until 1st February 2011 by submitting a contribution to the student competition, which was established 22 years ago. The three most outstanding pieces of work will receive the St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award, which is endowed with a EUR 20,000.– prize, and will be presented by the authors of the prize. Additional information can be found at: www.stgallen-symposium.org

Impact Japan

Check out the new organization created specifically to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in #Japan http://impactjapan.org/

Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) 2010

Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) Japan 2010 starts off with today's "Design Thinking" event. Visit http://www.facebook.com/GEWJapan #Japan

Quotes from the book "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation" by Steven Johnson

It's rare (actually this is the first time) that I write about a book.  Anyway, I'm reading the chapters in this book and am finding great paragraphs on things I "felt" but couldn't describe.

"Innovative enviornments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts - mechanical or conceptual - and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.  Envirronments that block or limit those new combinations - by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges - will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovation than environments that encourage exploration." (So true - W.S.)