Unit 4 Macro: Brain Gain with Scientific Advances in Africa
What if Africa were to become the hub for global science? This is a deeply optimistic piece which stresses the low base of higher education opportunities in Africa at the moment but which reveals the potential of cross country collaboration and the gains that will come from reversing the brain drain. A great example to use when discussing human capital and long-term development. More on the Square Kilometre Array
Unit 3 Micro: Small firms and innovation
The success of small firms is crucial to hopes of a sustained recovery in the UK economy and the government is keen to promote innovation within small and medium sized enterprises with a range of tax incentives including the Patent Box. The Patent Box system allows companies to apply an effective 10 percent preferential rate of corporation tax to profits attributable to patents and is introduced from April 2013.
Will this fresh supply-side fiscal policy prompt a significant boost to patent applications from UK firms? The evidence so far is mixed. The number of patent applications to the UK Intellectual Property Office from within the UK was just 15,370 in 2012, almost equal to the 2011 figure of 15,343. (Source: Independent, March 2013). But there has been a large rise in the number of patent applications made in the UK by foreign businesses especially in the pharmaceutical sector.
The reality is that most small businesses are too busy reinvesting their revenues back into growing their businesses rather than going through the lengthy, uncertain and often costly process of making multiple patent bids on their new product and process ideas. In a recent blog from the Wall Street Journal it was claimed that "it is almost impossible to defend software or business process innovation patents in the UK." Others are more optimistic - read this short piece from the Scotsman which claims that the Patent Box fits well with the ambition of the Scottish government to attract inward investment from high-knowledge businesses.
read more...»Coding to Survive - Kuato Studios launches Hakitzu
I am delighted to say that our good friends at Kuato Studios, a pioneer in learning technology, have justt released Hakitzu, the first mobile strategy game that teaches JavaScript coding for kids. Code is becoming the essential communication tool of this age. There will be one million more computer science jobs than computer science students in 2020. As Mark Zuckerberg says, "there just aren't enough people who are trained and have these skills today." Too right! It will be fascinating to follow Kuato Studios on their own journey as their new projects come to fruition.
Unit 4 Macro: Can India lead in Mobile Technology
Indian e-commerce lags behind countries such as China and a growing number of African nations. A new report in the economist looks at the future for the Indian mobile technology sector - can the adoption of cheap smartphones and adoption of 3G and 4G phone networks create new competitive advantages for the Indian economy? Who will investto build the telecoms capacity infrastructure? To what extent is the industry held back by hugely complex laws and endemic corruption? India is expected to have close to 165 million mobile Internet users by March 2014, up from 87.1 million in December 2012 - the potential is vast.
Unit 3 Micro: The battle for 3rd place in mobile operating systems
Lots of companies are battling for third place in the market for smartphone operating systems. Apple's iOS and Google's Android dominate, how much scope is there for more rivals targeting mid and low-tier mobile devices. Mozilla, Microsoft and Blackberry are featured.
read more...»Unit 3 Micro: Winning Bids in 4G Licence Auction
The winning bids for the 4G licences in the UK have been announced. Paying for a licence is an entry barrier into this market - but the total value of the bids was a small fraction of the £22bn gifted to the government in 2000 when the 3G licences spectrums were sold - the latter was an example of the winners' curse in action.In 2013 the telecoms businesses were more savvy - freeing up money to invest infrastructure and capacity. Will this be a kick-start to growth that the UK government expects?
Unit 3 Micro: Samsung surges ahead in global smartphone sales
A Mega example of contestability
Students taking their Business Economics unit exam this week might like to use online file-storage as an example of a contestable market. This comes during the week of an announcement by the colourfully-named internet tycoon Kim Dotcom of a re-launch of his file-sharing cloud-site Mega - which offers up to 50 Gb of free file storage and out-trumps its big and more established competitors at Dropbox, Microsoft and Google. According to Mr Dotcom he already has a quarter of a million registered users and over a million hits on his website within the first day.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: How mobile phones promote economic development
I am linking here to a lecture given recently at the Royal Society of Engineering by Tom Standage from the Economist.
read more...»Unit 3 Micro: DropBox - Network Economics and Market Contestability
Here is a superb blog from the Economist magazine into a digital business built around the Freemium pricing model and where network effects are strong. Also good for understanding market contestability and the impact of new entrants on profit margins. Dropbox is my preferred file sharing system, I am pretty much locked in and wouldn't change!
Freemium is a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content
The complete guide to freemium business models
Peter Marsh - A New Industrial Revolution
Peter Marsh's talk at our Global economy conference in London on Monday challenged us to think in fresh terms about what manufacturing is and the opportunities for British businesses to make successful headway in premium and precision manufactured products in a fast-changing global environment. Here are the slides from his presentation. The FT special reprot - Making the Future is well worth tapping into - here is the link. We have also linked to some of his recent video pieces for the Financial Times
read more...»Unit 3 Micro: Ingredients for Innovative Businesses
This new short video from the Financial Times looks at what drives innovative activity in small technology businesses. Openness, agility and collaboration are highlighted as ingredients for innovation in twenty-first century businesses in technology spaces. We visit the home of the Mozilla Foundation and the UK web start up Moonfruit
read more...»Thinking outside the box - improving employability
I'll start off straight away by saying this post is not a link to a specific resource for you to use - this is more about reminding you about how important the job you are doing in the classroom is for the future employability of your students. Whilst doing some research into the classroom of the future I came across an article which reminded me of a statistic I had already heard - according to the Department of Labor in the United States 65% of current school children will end up in jobs that haven't been created yet.
read more...»Paul Ormerod: If it can happen to Google, who can feel safe?
The dramatic crash in Google’s share price and the temporary suspension of trading in the company’s shares made headline news. The event was triggered by the 20 per cent year-on-year fall in profits in the third quarter of this year.
As usual, there was no shortage of explanations of why this happened – after the event! A simple search of Yahoo! Finance of more than 40 brokers shows that in the previous three months, all had recommended ‘strong buy’, ‘buy’ or ‘hold’. Not a single one classed the stock as ‘under-perform’ or ‘sell’. Indeed, over the entire previous year, Google’s share price had risen more or less continuously. The total increase had been around 30 per cent.
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Smartphone Penetration and Creative Destruction
The speed with which new consumer product technologies are taken up is
of enormous interest for lots of reasons. Emerging products and services
challenge demand, revenues and profits for established products and
bring about - as Schumpeter pointed out - gales of creative
destruction.
In the United States, fresh data suggests that more
than half of US consumers have smartphones and if the information is
accurate, this means that smartphones have become one of the most
rapidly adopted consumer technologies of all time.
Paul Ormerod: We are all better off than we think
Apple’s iPhone5 has already smashed sales records. The first day on which consumers could make purchases over the web, more than 2 million online orders were placed. Little wonder that JP Morgan has estimated that sales of the iPhone5 could add as much as 0.5 per cent to American GDP. These numbers have attracted criticism. If consumers simply buy iPhones instead of other products, it is hard to see how output could be boosted by such an amount.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Technological Progress and Indian Development
This regularly updated blog will feature news video features on the role that technological progress and advances can play in stimulating growth and development in the Indian economy.
Contour Crafting: Automated Construction as a Destructive Technology
Here is a thought-provoking talk by Behrokh Khoshnevis, Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and is the Director of Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at the University of Southern California (USC). He offers ways in which 3D manufacturing can revolutionise the construction industry and make it possible for customised building projects at a fraction of the financial and environmental cost. But what of the risks of a sizeable rise in technological unemployment?
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Rising Wages and Demand for Robotics
In many production processes, human labour and machines are substitutes. Wages are rising quickly in countries such as China. For some years now the annual increase in wages in manufacturing in China has been above ten cent and this rise in labour costs is causing many businesses to consider investment in robotics to fast-forward the process of automatic in factories.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro M-PESA supporting growth and development
M-PESA is a mobile payment solution launched in March 2007 and credited with having a significant impact on economic development in Kenya. This blog will carry updated resources on M-PESA and it’s economic and social impact. Click below for resources
Basic Background:
* Launched in March 2007
* Named after the Swahili for money (pesa)
* Operated by Safaricom (40% owned by UK mobile phone business Vodafone)
* Originally a micro-finance project
* Less than 10% of Kenyans have access to financial services - huge un tapped / repressed demand for basic banking
* Nine out of ten adults have access to a mobile phone in Kenya
* By 2009 M-PESA had 6.5 million customers, more recent figure suggests 15.1 million on the system
* Around 20% of Kenyan GDP washes through the M-PESA system
* Safaricom is not allowed to make a profit on the interest and neither is the customer
* Interest earnings go into a charitable M-PESA foundation
* M-PESA has been very successful in Tanzania but has had less impact in Afghanistan and India
* Airtel is the main domestic rival, formerly called Zain and now owned by India’s Bharti Airtel,
M-PESA used in myriad different ways - Kenyans pay school fees, collect their salaries, shop for groceries, buy everything from drinks in beer shacks to airline tickets thanks to mobile money, sending transfers at the push of a few buttons on a mobile telephone. As per capita incomes rise, people will make savings using the system or might be able to take out loans.
read more...»Unit 3 Micro: On Demand Manufacturing
Peter Marsh the Financial Times industrial editor has written a new book about the future of manufacturing. He has been travelling around the world looking at some examples of cutting edge new technologies in manufacturing that will likely reshape the industrial landscape in the years to come. In this video example we visit a company Phoenix, Arizona at the forefront of made to order manufacturing. After 17 years of development by Dr. James St. Ville, Armor Designs, can, within a few hours, create custom composites for body and vehicle armour.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Electronic Payments Modernise Rwandan Banking
This three minute video from the World Bank looks at how secure electronic banking systems leveraging the fast-growing mobile phone network can act as a spur to economic development in Rwanda. And here is another example from BBC news of some of the benefits of using mobile phone technology. Smart hand pumps promise cleaner water in Africa
read more...»Unit 3 Micro: Microsoft launches a tablet to challenges Apple’s dominance
A potentially important moment for the contestability of the tablet market. Technology giant Microsoft has unveiled its touchpad tablet computer. The “Surface” will face tough competition from Apple’s iPad and many other devices including those made by Samsung. These video resources provide some background. The Surface tablet computer will not be available until the Autumn on 2012.
read more...»Unit 3 Micro: The Third Industrial Revolution
This is well worth watching! It is an 8 minute discussion from the Economist which examines what is being called “The Third Industrial Revolution” - based around the digitisation of manufacturing processes. Concepts such as 3d printing and advanced robotics are discussed, as are concepts such as competitiveness, productivity and product personalisation. One possible consequence of these changes might be that high quality manufacturing may begin to move back from lower-wage economies such as China and back to economies like the USA.
read more...»UK leads the world in commercial use of the internet
How important is the’ internet economy’ as a contributor to UK GDP? According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group, it contributes 8.3% of our GDP, which is a larger proportion than in any other of the G20 economies. The report’s author told the Today programme this morning that this was down to the UKs “great broadband infrastructure” and that British business has taken to the internet and is exporting around the world, “leading the world in e-commerce”. You can hear the interview with him here.
read more...»The Economics of Climate Change - Stern 5 Years On
Lord Nick Stern tonight gave the first of three lectures on the ethics and economics of climate change as the annual lecture series in honour of Lionel Robbins started at the LSE.
It is over five years since the publication of the Stern Report and much has happened in the intervening period. Stern however was at pains to emphasise that his core message remained undimmed, namely that the costs of inaction are enormous but the costs of early action to cut emissions are manageable. We have seen in recent years rapid technological change much of which is hugely encouraging in taking us closer to de-coupling the relationship between production and consumption and carbon emissions. But more is needed, Stern is arguing in these three lectures for a new industrial revolution, a deep set of changes to production processes and technologies that happens across every sector. The economics and politics of how progress might be made in moving towards a new revolution will be the focus of the second and third lectures.
LECTURE 1 - Tuesday 21 February 2012
What we risk and how we should cast the economics and ethics
LECTURE 2 - Wednesday 22 February 2012
How we can respond and prosper
LECTURE 3 - Thursday 23 February 2012
How we can get there: building national and international action
Unit 3 Micro: Inside the iPhone and Intellectual Property
This is a remarkable video featuring Geoff McCormick, director of UK design firm The Alloy that looks inside an iPhone at the component parts. Each and every iPhone contains thousands of patented components, ideas, designs and processes. Fantastic when teaching about the economics of intellectual property and the patent wars dominating the courts.
read more...»Unit 4 Macro: Focus on India - World’s Cheapest Computer
A few weeks ago came the announcement that an Indian business is finally set to launch the World’s cheapest tablet computer. This laptop device will sell for around 18 times less than the price of an iPad in London! How can a laptop be manufactured for less than $US 40?
read more...»Unit 1 Micro: Can the UK Computer Games Industry Grow
Britain is one of the world’s biggest exporters of creative products - from live TV shows and music to books, arts, architecture and films the economy has built up an enviable global reputation for excellence and a growing trade surplus to aid our balance of payments.
Computer games falls squarely into this category but, according to TIGA - the trade association representing the UK’s games industry - unless there is renewed government support, the future of this sector is at risk. TIGA claims that the British games industry is suffering a significant ‘brain drain’ as talented programmers and artists leave the country to work abroad.
read more...»Unit 3 Micro: 3D Printing and a Manufacturing Revolution
Additive manufacturing or 3D printing is an emerging technology that takes product design data which provides a geometric representation of a product such as a pen and that data is then sent over to a machine that allows products to be manufactured ‘on the spot’ typically using additive materials in liquid or powder format.
This TED talk from Lisa Harouni (co-founder of Digital Forming) looks at examples of intricately designed products made using this new and increasingly affordable manufacturing technology. 3D machines can build structures, build replacement parts and parts within parts - the detailed resolution possible is incredible.
read more...»
