Think Tanks and Benefits

Think Tanks and Benefits

If we are to analyze and study how academic and corporate thinktankers benefit from what they acquire at their workplaces and also away from it we may need to exactly see what all this fuss is about think tanks, especially in our modern and fast-paced academic and corporate environment where nothing is constant for long but is always an ever changing scenario.

In the academic arena, it is generally senior and junior Think Tanks working together with the junior Think tank carrying out instructions under the strict purview of the senior to achieve the set results which are generally either a study with previously achieved results or a new project to find new evidence on a known presumption.

Here the junior Think tanks stand to benefit from the vast experience and knowledge that the senior would inculcate and from it, the juniors would also pick up some positive signals and construe them into their own perspectives and have a better understanding of what is to be achieved and also what would be achieved.

In the academic field, the challenges could be limited because it is invariably rare that they would work alongside with a third party who would also bring out some positive and also negative signals to drastically change perceptions of the final results.

In a corporate environment the same is totally opposite with the senior Think Tanks placing the challenges right on the laps of the junior thinktankers and encouraging them to pursue and achieve corporate objectives and here most of the junior think tankers would have to deal directly with third parties to collect data and analyze them to bring out results which could be entirely contrary to what the objectives envisaged could have foreseen.

The junior Think Tanks get to work more independently in a corporate environment and the challenges could be very demanding and would need to keep their wits about them if they are to achieve the final results as they would be more exposed to third party influences.

Comparing the two both environments though a distinct difference is seen it still provides immense exposure to pursue very high goals that the junior Think tanks would have never experienced before.

The one factor that both groups would happily take home with them would be the immense work experience that they would have been exposed to during the whole exercise.

Working in a very competitive environment would make young thinktankers into forces to reckon with when they are unleashed into their respective professional careers as they would have gained the knowledge and experience needed to tackle any demanding situation.

They would also have the required experience to work in a networking environment where data, information and much other communication and information technology disciplines are available to help collate available information and analyze qualitative and quantitative substance to come up with the best answers to a specific problem, whether it is academic or corporate.

Young think tankers are the future and they should be encouraged to give their bit to the field that they are engaged in if the world is to see progress as it should in the future for everyone’s benefit.      

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THE EVIL WALL STREET

THE EVIL WALL STREET

The world famous street for financial fortunes to be made and lost is right at the heart of New York City in Lower Manhattan.

An eight-block street that holds the key to the world’s financial secrets too, with the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, the New York Mercantile Exchange, New York Board of Trade, and a host of other financial entities that make it the most valuable bit of real estate under the Sun.

The New York Stock Exchange has made many so called investors to lose all their lifelong savings having taking chances that do not exist to provide a realistic return on what you invest.

It is nothing but a bit of Las Vegas in a smaller area but unlike chips moving away from investors here numbers just vanish making investors poorer than when they walked in through those hallowed doorways with their savings.

On the contrary, it is the middlemen and women who have filled their pockets with the commissions that come their way at the expense of those who gamble away their savings and sometimes more than what they could have bargained for.

It is for this that most who have returned empty handed after walking with hope and confidence that they could make it big by taking on the established systems call this place the Evil Wall Street.

Evil it is no doubt because more people have lost in comparison to those who have made it big walking in and out of Wall street.

It is well known the world over that wallstreet reeks of corruption, underhand dealings we call as insider trading and every other ill that they financial world has to contend with when the stakes are high and this street it is very high.

Evil Wall Street has not only taken gullible investors up the garden path but has created a bigger problem by creating social issues directly as a consequence of the corruption and illegal actions of a few.

A few wrongdoers have been charged, indicted and thrown in the slammer but there are more who have been smart enough to have their fingers in the pie but have still to have been found wanting to such an extent that they are still free from possible prosecution.      

A bribe here and a bribe there is the norm when one has to move a few millions here and there so it is all in the game of snakes and ladders where one wins one day and the other recoups today’s loss tomorrow, hence it is one very big corrupt family at work and if one tries to deviate from the norm he or she is sent as sacrificial lamb to the slaughter.

Statistics show that only about 0.01% of companies who are genuine in commitment make some headway and that does not reflect success as envisaged.

The new binary options with the use of automated robots doing what they think should happen is another disaster waiting in the wings to being blown out of proportion.

Empowering Global Citizens to Improve Education

When we talk about global citizenship education we are talking about a form of civic learning that directly involves the student’s active participation in projects that will address global issues of political, economic, social and environmental nature. Two main elements of global citizenship education are global consciousness, which is the moral or ethical aspect part of global issues, and global competencies, or skills that are meant to enable learners to compete in the market of global jobs. The global citizenship education promotion was a response by governments and NGO's to regional economic blocs, supranational institutions, development of information and communications technologies. These promotions have been more collaborative and globally oriented to approach global citizenship education.

The main hope or goal is to advance ongoing efforts in global citizenship education, the depth to access as it advances the conversation on global education topic and that it will provide resources that will allow collaborations at large scale among the teachers in developing tools needed to offer learning opportunities to our students. There is hope that by enabling the most extensive forms of skill by others, including building on and repurposing curriculums will invite collaboration among many teachers and other educators, students as well, who, together, will build new curricula and other resources that are instructional, using ideas to offer. Teachers, students, and the crowd submit feedback and ideas on Crowdholding to improve digital education websites likeTutorland and Angloville.

The hope in colleagues from other countries will also be inspired to translate into other languages and to build make it relevant to others. Technology provides us one of the most important opportunities and it is to offer us unprecedented forms of collaboration among teachers and students worldwide. We hope that these choices taken will support collaboration that will lead to a collective intelligence, as well as communities of teachers will co-create professional knowledge about how to empower in the best way for students becoming global citizens.  There is another important element of the student-centered participatory nature of global citizenship education and it is that student, through their engagement with other students through social networks so they can create their own ways of global citizenship through dialogue, through action and through learning.

This is an important element, as an example, the activities of grassroots organizations which involve teachers and students in projects that will address very important global issues such as trade rules, deforestation, and human rights.

The opportunity to improve education is now. It could not be postponed. It is very urgent indeed. Goals that are sustainable were adopted by world leaders at the last general assembly of the United Nations, they provided an aspirational vision of how to help construct a poverty free world, with more social inclusion, with prosperity, without violence, and with more sustainability. These precise goals actually provide direction into educating students to help improve the world. There are risks of not doing this and they are also very clear. We are reminded daily by the news about violence and the many challenges to peace which remain in communities all around the world.

Help raise awareness about the need to improve education through collaboration and co-creation of new ideas. We, at Crowdholding wish to inform the public about the opportunities the crowd can create by collaborating to improve education.

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CO-CREATION and INNOVATION

CO-CREATION and INNOVATION

The relationship

Co-creation is a very popular management concept and initiative or a strategy within an economic discipline to bring together customers and marketers to achieve or fulfill a specific objective which would be mutually beneficial to all.

On the other hand, innovation is creativity at its best where new ideas, new concepts or major shifts in thinking brought forward to ensure the successful continuance of an individual, organization or ideology.

Coupling these two effectively could bring about very positive idea innovations, marketing innovations and technology innovations that any person from the crowd can benefit from once on the small business platform - crowdholding.com.

In today’s competitive marketing environment, businesses, whether they are small business enterprises or large conglomerates, need to break the shackles of traditional marketing concepts and think out of the box and for that, they need co-creation and innovation.

Brands and customers

It is imperative that brands are created to keep up with customer expectations and if this relationship is not continuously maintained at the optimum level at all times, marketing strategies which would have been initiated with much midnight oil being burnt would not bring the envisaged results whatever the marketing professionals would have planned.

Technology development is also the same because only if you have the right inputs would you innovate the right things that would be used by your customers and the people at large or you could be innovating something that the customers cannot use or not accepted by the relevant authorities for many different reasons.

Brands on crowdholding.com connect with the crowd to dig deeper into customer requirements and create products and services that would suit such requirements. It is to get this mix right that the new concept of co-creation and innovation comes handy.

Different marketing strategies have been initiated by professional marketers over the years and it has been safely assessed that what is good for the goose may not always be good for the gander.

Selected segments of customers would need new strategies and it would be prudent to initiate new idea innovations that would bring out better results to both sides of the divide with mutual advantages.  

Hence brands could consider co-creation as a close initiative to have your customers involved in the production and marketing platforms which would give a better understanding to marketing professionals to execute their work.

Initiating co-creation marketing strategies

Implementing innovative marketing strategies has taken individuals and companies up the ladder of success and into this equation adding co-creation as an innovative strategy should bring positive results.

Marketing professionals on crowdholding.com could bring a new perspective into marketing if they could involve a wider spectrum of their customer base prior to implementing new technology innovations. This would give them more inroads into their market and also the added impetus to meet the challenges of the competition that they would face.

The world is moving very fast in all aspects especially where marketing is concerned because new idea innovations are drawing every sinew to the optimum in a very competitive marketing environment.   

If you want to get involved with startups, visit crowdholding.com to learn more about Crowdholding.

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WHY CO-CREATE? - Benefits for Small Businesses

Small Business challenges

There is no distinction between a small business or big business when a product from either has finally arrived on the shelf and standing there to be picked up by a customer who would have had access to all the information he needs to have about which product he would prefer or on the contrary he would not have that information and would depend on what he could assimilate at the point of sale.

Big businesses would have the financial clout to mount aggressive and creative marketing campaigns which small businesses would not have.

Small Business opportunities

Though adequate financial clout could be a disadvantage that small businesses face they could overcome it by directly involving their targeted loyal customers to help co-create products and services and tailor make them to suit specific customer needs.

This would small businesses the advantage that they would need to get the better of the big businesses and to get their products and services to be preferred over those of the bigger competitors.

This is because the inputs that have gone into the product development have been through the direct involvement of the targeted customers who have helped to develop the product or service.

New product innovation

Co-creation is a new and progressive concept in creative marketing and has proved in many cases as a strategy that is working towards better understanding between the seller and the buyer providing opportunities for both to mutually satisfy themselves profitably and fulfilling a need respectively.

New product development is a great opportunity for effectively creating value based products and a small business bringing in their customers to be involved  

Co-Creation

The involvement of targeted customers or consumers in the product development process would immensely help the final product or service to be more consumers oriented hence on the market shelf it would have better chances of projecting what advantages it could provide the customer than a product that has not had customer inputs in development.

It is this aspect that has brought collaboration between the companies and the customers to a new level of understanding with the objectives of both interested parties being met at a much lower cost.

The companies would spend less on market research with the positive help from their customers to co-create the product that they themselves would be the ultimate users.

Creative marketing

This new innovation has brought creative marketing to a new playing field with every business big and small reining in their customers and getting their feedback to bring products tailor made to suit specific customer needs.

In an era gone buy traditional marketing was more or less groping in the dark looking for answers without being fully aware what is in store for their product or service after they had launched it with a big hue and cry.

Today this has changed and companies are able to seek out customer preferences and give customers products and services that would fit their needs with effective co-creation strategies.

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Co-create with a brand you LOVE!

The global network now provides a virtually unlimited access to information, as well as direct contact between companies and consumers. Active users and openness on the part of the companies were prerequisites for the development of such a concept of market relations as the co-creation or co-creation marketing (co-creation marketing). This concept is broader in relation to crowdsourcing (crowdsourcing).

The essence of the concept lies in the fact that when there are no borders between a company and the external environment it becomes possible to use not only internal but also external resources for research and development. Consumers can easily go into the role of participants in the creation of products from designing ideas to its ultimate realization.

Initially, the co-creation concept was described in the article "The combination of consumer abilities" Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000). The authors argued that consumers are able to directly influence the product development, not only to consume or abandon it. It was also stated that the customer has special knowledge and experience and because of this, it is advisable for companies to establish and maintain an open platform for communication with the client so that the latter had the opportunity to share their ideas and knowledge.One such platform that currently exists is www.crowdholding.com

A certain advantage of the concept of co-creation is a reduction of the risk of errors during product development, expansion of the company's understanding of the real needs and desires of end users, as well as the involvement of employees at different levels in the generation of ideas.

The concept of co-creation is being actively used by global brands like Nike, P & G, Starbucks, Dell, Pepsi and many others.

For example listening, Nike in 2009 launched a project to create a user's own footwear design. On completion of the project, the main financial indicators showed an increase in revenue from online sales by 25% and net profit growth - 52.9%.

Another a shining example of co-creation is the creation of Mozilla Firefox web browser. Surprisingly, normal users took part in the development. It should be noted that Firefox is the second most popular, behind only the aggregate market share of all versions of Internet Explorer, and its popularity continues to grow among all types of users.

However, at this moment the concept of co-creation is not popular within startups. One reason for the low activity among users is the absence of an engaging C2B platform where companies establish communication with the client. Another reason may be the lack of awareness of users about the very concept of co-creation, as well as a skeptical attitude towards it. Most consumers want to improve the product, and now they can do it on www.crowdholding.com.

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