“Absorptive capacity […] also means having simple thing like education. Having a reservoir of highly educated people, which China had for a long time. It means the type of education which shouldn’t be too abstract and oriented towards classical literature or history, but more towards technology, towards business, towards practical applications. For instance, this is typical for the United States, which was a catch-up economy in the nineteenth century which had more technical agriculture oriented education compared to the hybrid classical education in the United Kingdom.” Adam Szirmai, Professor of Technology and Development Studies.

“A company like Facebook is valued at 15 billion dollars. But why is it valued on that? They still haven’t discovered a coherent business model. Facebook became very popular, because it was a clean, well led site, which wasn’t as dominated by advertising. But now they’ve become more popular and are trying to integrate advertising into their content as a way of cashing out on their traffic and the size of their community their community rebels against them. It’s hard to see where the money comes from in the Web 2.0 economy. And the crisis, in moral, cultural terms is that the people who are getting screwed are the content people. The writers, the musicians, the film makers, the journalists. They’re the ones who ultimately are not realizing revenue from their creative work. They’re the ones who are having to take jobs as waiters or lawyers or postmen during the day to sustain their creative habit.” Andrew Keen, entrepreneur and author.

“Peer-2-peer represents a really deep shift in the mentality of people, that is particularly strong in new generations of young people who grew up with those tools. Sharing is the default option of a lot of young people in this society. They just find it natural to share their books and their music. The need for meaning is now paramount in many young people. My father, who grew up in the fifties, was happy to have a job. But I’m not happy to have a job. I want a meaningful job. More and more young people are starting to think and feel this way. They’re the ones driving peer-2-peer processes, because what happens is: if you can’t do it within a system, you do it outside the system.” Michael Bauwens,  integral philosopher and Peer-to-Peer theorist

“IT, we’ve seen, can increase productivity in some applications and in some industries, though when you look at other applications in other industries you don’t really see any effect, because the cost and the complexity outweigh the productivity gains. One thing we seem to have seen is that as you link computer systems together, as they become more networked, the likelihood of gaining productivity gains increases. So I think we can make an assumption, and we’re going to have to wait and see if this comes true, that the cloud computing model or the utility computing model because it’s built on an easier sharing of applications and data may in fact boost productivity more than the old fragmented model where everybody had to build and run their own systems.” Nicholas Carr, author of “Does IT Matter?”

“You have irruption, which is slow development of the technology; frenzy, which is very fast development and very visible development of the technology with a lot of finance in it; turning point, where you have institutional innovation, and deployment, when you have the full flourishing of every potential across every industry until you get to a ceiling. When that ceiling is hit, there is social discontent, there is political confrontations and the conditions are set for the next technology to happen.” Carlota Perez, expert on technology and socio-economic development

“What exists in people’s minds is not technology but are metaphors, are boxes, by which they can almost create the catalogue of reality. They can relate it to what they see. I can make you the example of the automotive; at the beginning of the last century in Vienna, London, in a few cities, you would see around the same wagons that were once pulled by horses, they were now pulled by a engine in front of the wagon. The metaphor people had to express the automobile, was a wagon, as they knew, in the same shape, with the same lights and with the same place for the guy who was driving. But instead of the horse, which is the biological engine, there was a mechanical engine.”

Marco Bevolo, Design Director at Philips Design

“You need the physical space in order to have the virtual space. A whole structure has to be in place physically for me to be able to dwell in that virtuality, and at the same time that virtuality is a space in which I can distance myself from that physical reality and alienate myself from it and even become aggressive with respect to it. That’s the dilemma of the modern state. On the one hand that globalizing movement and those identities that are no longer tied to the state, and yet that necessity of the physical organization for which you need a physical community.”

Ad Verbrugge, philosopher and author of Tijd van Onbehagen

(NOTE: VIDEO IN DUTCH)

“In the last forty or fifty years it has begun to face a crisis. Having satisfied so successfully so many of our needs it found itself in a position where it no longer had goods to sell people that they wanted. And that creates the modern crisis of capitalism where instead of producing goods to meet real needs it manufactures needs, so we can sell all the unnecessary goods.”

Benjamin Barber, political theorist and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland

“We created the term ‘freeformers’ to describe this group of people that we believe is going to become the dominant attitudinal and behavioural group in the next era, in which people are consuming much more on their own terms, in the way that they want to. And this has, as you well know, already had massive implications for companies around the world.”

James Alexander, co-founder of Zopa