Innovation Environments and Andrew Marr’s Megacities…
I was watching the first episode of Andrew Marr’s Megacities on BBC the other night and as I watched it it struck me that there are some interesting parallels to be drawn between the development of cities and the relationship between institutional, physical and cultural environments within a company.
In the last fifteen minutes or so of the programme, Marr compares Tokyo, Mexico City and London with each other and effectively presents the first two as extremes of institutional control (or lack of it) - and disfunctional as a result - while London, in his view, strikes a fruitful balance. Now the analaysis might be shallow and cursory, as well as biased, but nonetheless I think there’s much to think about here. Especially the idea that a combination of new technology and an institutional environment that allows for certain kinds of ‘illicit’ behaviour create cultural openings that integrate people without resulting in chaos.
It also made me think about the impact of predictability on a culture, and reminded me of Caspar Berry’s excellent talk on uncertainty at Thinking Digital the other week in which he (successfully I think) tried to convince us that unpredictability is what makes life worth living. Unfortunately I can’t link to his talk as the talks haven’t been published yet, but I will when they are…
