TEDGlobal - Day Four (Part One)

My synopsis of the beginning of TEDGlobal's final day. 

IDEO's Paul Bennett kicked off the morning.  "Small Is The New Big," or at least that's what the green wristband distributed at the door said.  Bennett, a graphic designer by training, explained that the challenge for design is to reconcile what the "big" (nation, company) wants with what the "small" (individual) wants.  One way: bring together the small to create the big.  Bennett organized his presentation around four points:

1. Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious - key to great design: pay attention.  He demonstrated the principle with examples from an engagement in which a hospital asked IDEO to answer the question: "What is our patient experience?"  Their client presentatin began with a 20 minute video of the view of the acoustic tile ceiling from a patient's bed.  Obvious, indeed.  Key: always look from the person-out, not from us-in.
2. Find Yourself In The Margins - look wide and use your peripheral vision. I especially like this one. I'll often take my glasses off when looking at something to get a more marginal perspective; did psychotherapy that way for almost 20 years. 
3. Have a Beginner's Mind - great story of designing a storage system for kids for Ikea.
4. Pick Battles Big Enough To Matter and Small Enough To Win - this was the money point, for me, with ramifications far and wide.

Vijay Vaitaeeswaran of The Economist was next.  His topic: the micro-power revolution.  Vaitaeeswaran's story is another in the growing paean of movement from the mass, centralized world to the power of the distributed grid.  This time, it's literal: micro-power (in the form of solar, micro-turbines, fuel cells and co-generation plants) will someday be bigger than mega, Vaitaeeswaran says.  What we will have will be self-healing (vs. brittle), smart (vs. hard-wired), reliable (vs. blackout prone), digital (vs. analog) power networks.  This will come about because of liberalization of markets, increasing environmental awareness and a continuation of the technical revolution.  This will create a "leapfrog" opportunity (NB - this is clearly a loudly buzzing meme) for the developing world just when it needs it most.  Very solid talk.

Jay Walker then returned with the results of the "turn cell-phones into jobs in the developing world" suggestions.  Top three:

1. Senior citizen contact/visits - call a friend idea for 15 or 20 cents/minute.  Many different friends a day.
2. Children calling hospitalized children - kids love to talk with other kids from different places.
3. Practice another language - not learn, but practice Mandarin, Spanish, etc.

The globally disruptive Niklas Zennstrom closed out the first session.  All he's done in the past few years is create Kazaa and Skype.  Many excellent points:

• Small is fast, and today, fast beats slow.  Incumbents create opportunities that can be exploited by immature players without baggage.
• The network effect is accelerating.  In its first 18 months, ICQ got to 10 million subscribers; Skype got to 30 million in its first 18 months.
• Peer to peer enables very disruptive business models
• Goal: mimimize average revenue per user.  This is exactly the opposite of most business models.  This enable you to get more people into the network, like eBay did.
• Skype implications: carriers can't charge for phone calls anymore; VOIP driving broadband sales; one cost-efficient network will soon drive all services (telephony, TV, music, images)
• Incumbents always fight that which helps them most.  The biggest boon to the music industry was free radio; to movie industry, home video.

I have a sneaky feeling this kid might go far!

TEDGlobal