The largest human migration in history...

Interestingly, the largest migration in human history is not between countries or regions, but within China. People living in rural areas migrate en masse to urban areas, with some good sides (income spread reduces somewhat) and some bad (families torn apart). Some provinces in China now equal the economies of Austria and Switzerland...

Interesting stuff:

Trends affecting the pharma and biotech sector, how companies can prepare for them

I had the chance to present at the European Pharma Competitive Intelligence summit in Zurich last week, in my capacity as senior investigator at competitive intelligence experts I.S.I.S. Global. Interesting group of people and highly interactive session. Here's the slides of the presentation, which had 2 major objectives:

• discuss trends affecting the pharma & biotech industry in the next 5-10 years;
• show how CI departments can use such megatrends assessments to increase their strategic relevance within their organization.

Using megatrend assessments in pharma in order to raise the relevance of the CI department within your organization

View more presentations from Frederic De Meyer

Is economic growth the only measure of future well being?

I am not alone in thinking one of the causes of the current crises (financial, government debt and recession) is at least partially due to our focus on 'economic growth' as an indicator of how well we -as 'nations', companies and persons- will improve and be able to develop in the future.

People more intelligent than I have offered alternatives to 'GDP' (Gross Domestic Product, or the economic value created by a nation in a specific timeframe). Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz even got commissioned by French president Sarcozy to write a report on potential alternatives. With no obvious results, since we're still panicking whenever a decline in economic growth (a recession) is at our door.

In a recent report the World Economic Forum goes a bit more practical, and proposes to swap the notion of economic growth with a measurable notion of 'well being' -which it defines as a mixture of effective work, families and communities, each of these containing opportunities we might not be fully aware of.

Interesting document:

Bytheway, here is a summary of Stiglitz' recommendations for a new way of measuring growth:

Facts and Trends in Healthcare

Some interesting stats and insights in this Barco clip (ok, it is a commercial, but a soft one ;-)

Especially the health care spending stats are quite stunning, 30% of it being wasted???

Some surprising things built by a 3D printer

Reflecting on the impact of 3D printing on manufacturing, I went looking at what exactly these machines can produce currently. I was quite surprised to find 3D printed bikes, planes and even bikinis!

Just imagine a world where each home would own a 3D printer...

Will aging population resolve youth unemployment? not just yet...

Okay, I've been struggling with understanding the relationship between aging population and youth unemployment for a while now, so bare with me for a moment.

We're all acquainted with the aging graphics is pyramid form:

the distinction this type of charts makes between male and female is not always helpful -especially not for the point I try to make. Instead, let's take them together and see what happens if we group them together, and follow the total population at working age (16-65).

In the charts beneath I took Spain as an example for its dramatically high youth unemployment (40%). The green bars reflect the population at working age, grey at retiring age and the blue bars reflect age groups under 15 years. The first chart is the population by age in 2000, but for the color coding I reflected the situation in 2010 (so the age group 5-9 in 2000 are at working age 15-19 by 2010). The red bars roughly indicate the % unemployed within the age category.

Being a positive guy, I immediately see two reasons to be optimistic about the future of Spain:

• while the ratio of working people vs. retired people (green vs grey) will indeed rise dramatically, the ratio of working people vs. people who need care (green vs grey+blue) will hardly change (from 1.75 to 1.21). This is stretching it a bit, of course, since retired people cost much more to society than very young people -who are being taken care of by the parents. But then, we might expect that the pension system such as we know it will collapse somehow and that children will partially need to take care of their retired parents in the future (not that I like the thought !);
• Secondly, if you look at the amount of available jobs in 2010 (the green bars) and compare this to the number of people at working age in 2050, you see an almost exact match. There would be 21.7 million jobs, for 22.57 million people -a projected 3% unemployment notwithstanding, which in economic theory equals full employment.

So does this mean youth unemployment will 'naturally' dissolve as the population ages? Not so quickly...

• Plenty of jobs in 2010 are in fact government jobs (either directly -as public servants- or indirectly -subsidized jobs). There's no good reason to believe countries will be able to keep the same amount of such jobs in the decades to come;
• This doesn't take into account efficiency gains, which in fact will reduce the number of employees needed to provide the same output (however, a completely new economic dynamic can compensate for these job losses... but no clue about what this dynamic might look like);
• With youth unemployment at such levels (40%) for -possibly- the coming decades, one might wonder whether these structurally unemployed will ever fit in the job market to take over the roles of elderly.

In short, aging population will partially resolve youth unemployment, but it remains uncertain to what extent it will do so.  

Biomimicry in architecture... a great leap towards sustainable buildings

There's plenty we can learn from nature in how to build a more sustainable world. I've provided some examples of this in a previous post, but here's some ideas on how to imitate nature's intelligence in architecture -through a 'closed loop' of waste management- and as a way to provide solutions to societal problems like desertification.

Quite inspiring:

How future-proof is the mission statement of your company?

Your mission statement is the cornerstone of your exposure to stakeholders. A mission statement -if consequently acted upon- is an instrument for your company to start and build a unique relationship with investors, future employees and loyal customers.

But does your mission statement reflect the changing requirements people have from businesses?

To check this, we've investigated the mission statement of 20 companies in 5 industries, and assessed them on 4 metrics:

• GenY attractiveness: does the mission statement express values and purpose, drive and change, collaboration and solution-driven?
• does the mission statement reflect a social responsibility and shared value?
• does it express a purpose and a solution to one of the challenges linked to megatrends?
• does it show a future direction or at least an understanding of the long-term business environment? 

The results for these 20 companies are in the presentation hereunder -please keep in mind this is a personal opinion, there's absolutely nothing scientific about it ;-) So if you disagree with me feel free to leave a note beneath!

How futureproof is your mission statement

View more presentations from Frederic De Meyer