I have been writing  in my latests posts about couple of cases of coming of “black and white”. One case example was a shop at Arlanda airport selling only black and white items, the next case was canned peas, tomatoes etc. with black and white cans. These b&W canned Smirnoff drinks were spotted at boat from Finland to Sweden.

At Trollhättan I stayed at hotel Scandic Swania that really seemed to emphasize being an environmentally friendly hotel. Some of those signals appeared in the form of wooden made items (symbolizing somehow environmentally friendly in people’s minds). Forks and knives for one time use were made of wood- even the keycard of the hotel rooms were made out of plywood. The true environmental friendliness of these items in the picture remais a question. Without life cycle analysis (LCA)  it is really difficult to say anything about environmental friendliness. However, issues like energy saving and couraging customers to use towels more than one day hinted to the environmental friendly direction.

Having a presentation is one of the best ways to learn. During the couple of years I have had many opportunities to have my presentation about weak signals in different forums and companies. The questions and comments from the audience are very valuable for me and they push me to think issues from various perspectives. One of the best comment I got was yesterday from one company I visited. When I showed my 5 bullet point ” weak signal test” (check the test for example from these slides) to the audience one person wanted to add an extra  bullet point to the test: if it is illeagal it is a weak signal…He further argued, that he used to be in business that was at one time somehow illeagal, but now it is the common way to operate. Good point!!

Another comment from that lecture was something like: “do you really mean that we should start to collect some stupid things (i.e. weak signals)..?” That good comment pushed me to really rethink about the concept stupid. What is stupid? I think that it is something that does not fit to our mental model. Stupid for you can be very relevant and important for somebody else. And when these people happen to be your major customer segment, you better rethink your concept of stupidity. And on the other hand, when you happen to familiriaze yourself with something stupid, it actually might make sense to you more.

I thought that mobile phones are stupid when I saw the first ones in the early 1990’s. Now I do not think that anymore.  I also considered computers to be stupid innovation in 1980’s, but today I use them all the time.

So be careful when you call something stupid. It might be big issue in the future!

Why shoud learning be boring when it can be fun and inspirating? What I am enthusiastic about is gaming, specially Monopoly. Last year when planning a business foresight course (for about 6th time) to Korean business people coming to Finland to study in MBa program at Helsinki School of Economics, I really started to think about teaching, in more innovative and inspirating way. I came up with an idea to combine futures teaching to Monopoly in the future. So last year my Korean student designed a whole new gameboard for future Korean Monopoly 2023. It included training in megatrends, trends, weak signals, wild cards, making scenarios and planning businesses for certain scenarios. The students had to also think about future monetary system and tokens- of course. The Korean students really loved to design their own game board while at the same time learning the basics in business foresight!

On tuesday I am about to teach some business people, designers, in a big Finnish Company. This time we design a game board for a game: Futuropoly. That is now my new concept of teaching. Check it here (sorry, in Finnish)!

Today I was having a lecture in an advertising agancy Family Inc’s 4 year birthday party. Besides of me there was another speaker, Brand Building Expert Minna Anttonen from Ben&Jerry’s, which is still a quite unknown ice cream brand in Finland even though well known for example in USA. Minna Anttonen had very interesting speak about the brand and she was the first lecturer that I have got some ice cream (very good!!)

Ben and Jerry’s is a premium ice cream brand with fine idea behind it. It does not advertise itself at least here in Finland but it is involved in many “social conscious” campaigns and through that it seeks to get good publicity. For example in last year it promised to give one euro/ sold ice cream pack to some charity. People were asked to what purpose to give the money. The mental health issues of young people got votes the most, and they donated the money to Helsinki Mission crisis phone targeted to help young people.

Ben and Jerry’s has the first fair trade ice cream for sale here in Finlad and it serves carbon neutral ice-cream. They also use green energy sources for ice cream production and are really concerned about the climate change issues- and also act based on their concerns. Doing good for the society is really one of their targets. Specially here in Finland this kind of social counsiousness of companies or brands is unique. I hope that many other companies start to follow the excellent example of Ben&Jerry’s !! One interesting question is that how does Ben&Jerry’s philosophy suit to Unilever’s one. I really hope that Unilever as a megacorporation would adapt one of its brand’s philosophy more. 

image from page: http://www.consortfrozenfoods.co.uk/index2.php

Picture of a toaster spotted at Kodin1 Anttila, a store selling furniture and all other stuff.

Greetings from England, again. This time I visited Lego and had a wonderful possibility to interview their experience and innovation manager Cecilia Weckström. Lego truely is an exceptional case in using crowdsourcing or open source innovation. They use in their product development lego fans that construct all possible stuff with their software Lego Designer. Lego also uses help of their adult fans when designing new concepts and products.

What really astonished me positively in Lego facilities in Slough was that their officerooms were full of all possible lego stuff. Also the employees had a new task to do: to build dozens of packages of lego stuff. Actually, I think that is wrong that people get payed for doing such a nice job

Well, anyway, I managed to spot some weak signals in England. One of them is a gift package in a bookstore. You could buy there a, adopt-a-pony pack. By buying the package you will donate the money for taking care of one pony. You had also possibilities to plant a tree, save the wild life etc. Is this one of the first signs of growing trend of ethical consumption and intangible goods.

I was reading a very local news paper called Avaalehti. It is focused on telling small events about my home town and some of the cities nearby here in Southern Finland. I was very surprised to notice an ad about Hollywood Tailor shop in the news paper. The issue here was that this tailor shop locates in Thailand Hua Hin, which is located about 8000 kilometers from Finland. That is a long way to get a suit for you!  The ad was written in perfect Finnish and it promised that the customers are picked for free from the hotel to the tailor shop.

Well, this is tru case of globalization: get your business cards from China and suits from Thailand.   

When starting my own business I have been questioning about how to do everything in practise. I needed business cards, and I asked my colleague who had just made a new ones to him where did he print those cards.

-In China, he responded to me

-Yes, yes, but seriously!!

-In China, for real.

He told me that people in advertising business here in Finland send quite much things to China for printing etc. According to him it is so much cheaper that it really pays off. And the quality of printing is also good.

This was totally new thing to me. Till that day I had thought that only big companies do outsourcing at China. Well, but we live the days of Internet, so geographical distances practically do not exist anymore.