“I’ve said that globalization is primarily a technological development, but it has no fixed end-point, no predetermined end-point. It doesn’t tend to yield a single type of economic system throughout the world. One of the reasons for that is that these technological processes which make up globalization and which are very powerful interacted every part of that development with political and cultural and religious and ethnic and other factors, including environmental factors.”

John Gray, political philosopher, author and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics

“Things are so complex, they’re moving so fast that what I know is constantly being outdated and needs to be updated. So I’m turning to the easiest fastest ways to do that. And so we now live in a soundbite society. Whatever soundbite technology will give me information that’s useful and quickly I’m going to go to those things.”

Robert E. Quinn, Author and Professor in Business Administration

“If you move to co-creation, then it needs building new capabilities and new processes as the company. There are 4 building blocks we want to find… understanding the context of the experience is very important and in order to do that you really have to think about what we call DART: Dialogue, Access, the whole Risk management and Transparency issues.”

Venkat Ramaswamy, Professor of Marketing and Director of the Center for Experience Co-Creation

“Experiences are intensifying when you participate in experience. Heineken Music Hall, or events, or viral marketing. It’s all me doing something, me participating, adding excitement to the experience. Actually there’s a kind of anti-trend of consumers going to Disneyland and simply saying: ‘Okay, give it to me. Roll over to me all your experience and I lie flat.’ No, they want to stand up, they want to interact. ‘Give me interactive kicks.”

Carl Rohde, academic trendwatcher

“Right now we live in an era in which the idea of computing, the idea of computational intelligence is restricted in our imaginations to that box. Either the box that sits beside the desk or on the desk, or the laptop that we carry with us. But I think it’s a rapidly outdated notion of what a computer is. All that stuff dissolves.”

John Underkoffler, former MIT researcher, technology advisor, founder of G-Speak

“The container is thirty years old this year. It’s an invention that makes you go: I could have thought of that. What’s a container? A very large iron box. But the idea of globally standardizing it turns out to have been an enormously significant contribution. Imagine having to put all those items from China into cardboard boxes and unloading them like they used to at Rotterdam Harbour. The costs would hit the ceiling.”

Maarten van Rossem, historian and author

While Bush is trying to get his rocket-shield installed in the Czech Republic, the threat is not coming out of the air, but from underground, in Estonia. Estonia? Yes. Estonia is an e-country, it is one of the forerunners in Europe using interactive e-governance. In 2005 it was the first country to have legally binding general elections using the internet. But last month Estonia had another premiere, it has been under an unprecedented attack of so called cyberterrorists. Estonia has labeled the attacks ‘acts of war’. Both the EU and the NATO are supporting Estonia and have responded by sending in computerexperts to aid the country. Are we seeing in Estonia a small scale precedent of the battlefield of the future?

“I dare say that if you don’t get one idea out of it per month that goes beyond the commonplace, you should consider yourself to have achieved below par. Whether it’s within your company or within your familial context, that doesn’t matter much. But then you shouldn’t call yourself an executive, because an executive should rise above sheer routine. Then you should call yourself, whatever your academic level or level of expertise, a routineer: a washed-out, burned-out routineer.”

Roger de Bruyn, author and founder of the Centre for the Development of Creative Thinking