Some of the world's most innovative thinkers and strategists have shared their views on how business is adapting to global challenges. Download our podcasts each day this week and hear the presentations made at the recent London Business School Global Leadership Summit:

Web 2.0 - Understanding the substance behind the buzzwords. As part of a panel debate at Webstock.org.nz. Created by Philip Fierlinger. philip@turntable.com http://turntable.com/blog

Young people's views on work and careers Future Innovators commissioned DEMOS to undertake a short study examining young people's attitudes to the future of work. It is based on a survey of 15 and 16 year olds, who are about to make decisions regarding their future, such as the careers and qualifications they are going to pursue. The study The study explores young people's attitudes towards work and skills and argues that a wider set of skills and personal attributes are likely to be required from them when they reach the workplace. The study paints a picture of a generation that understands the value of hard work: 90 per cent believe if you work hard you'll usually succeed. However, with more employers identifying skills like creativity as key to the workforce of the future, it warns of a disconnect between employers' demands and young people's skills and perceptions. It suggests that they may be entering the workforce lacking the full range of skills, which will allow them to contribute to the expansion of the economy. The study also examines some of the key influences on young people, to understand how their world views are shaped and where successful interventions might be targeted in the future. 'Parents and family' were identified ahead of school, showing the importance of both formal and informal learning. 'Ready for the future?' Full report 'Ready for the future?' Executive summary

Examining what people do online as they look for information, communicate with others, make transactions, and entertain themselves.

A new open-source social networking software gains its power to be used in schools and other organizations. University of Brighton was the first to introduce Elgg, a social network to help teachers in their interaction with children and use social networks like MySpace, blogs and document.write(MLnkMk('=b!isfg>#iuuq;00efm/jdjp/vt#!!ubshfu>#`cmbol#?Efm/jdjp/vt=0b?'))Del.icio.us feeds for educational purposes. If earlier, the access to these sites were seen as a an obstacle and were banned, now many teachers see it a helpful tool as this attracts great interest among teenagers. Every participant taking part in the project will have a blog with profile page, and have an opportunity to share photos, ideas and communicate with friends in online communities.

Writing effective text for the Web is more than just stringing words together and hoping for the best. It goes beyond just conveying information. If you really want to capture the interest and engagement of your users and members, the text needs to do much more. Ideally, you want your writing to:attract their attentiongrab their interestpull them into the contentadd real value to their workmake then want to register or return, andincrease their sense of trust in your community.

"Individuals are forced to consider more information and opportunities than they can effectively process. This information overload is made worse by ‘data smog’, the proliferation of low quality information allowed by easy publication. It leads to anxiety, stress, alienation, and potentially dangerous errors of judgment." Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control by Francis Heylighen. Even when we’ll have much better summarizing and other meaning-making tools than we have today, no amount of technology will give us peace of mind when we will need it most - in the midst of rapid technological changes which affect how we live, work, learn, and play. To rightfully trust our capacity to learn as fast as necessitated by the pace of changes which affect us--individuals, communities and organizations--, we need to learn how to learn faster together. Recommendations and pointers to resources, emailed by friends and colleagues in our social and knowledge networks, are some of the signposts that many professionals and managers use for navigating in today’s fast-moving landscapes. If none of us is as smart as all of us, then creating shared resources, shared social and knowledge capital, is one of the smartest things we can do. The intent and core idea of Collaboration Campus™ is to provide a space for mastering the arts of collaborative learning, and building valuable social capital just by participating in the life of the campus community.

George has been designing, facilitating and hosting online communities for 20 years. Out from that experience, he developed his Community Design Architecture (CDA), that he refined and tested during his work at INSEAD. He provides consulting and virtual community architecting services to organizations in the private and public sectors. George is also known for his first-of-its-kind, virtual or hybrid (online/off-line) events he designed and facilitated, which were attended by from 30 to 6,000 participants. George designed and leads an innovative, highly interactive, executive workshops on “Collective Intelligence 2.0,” in which participants are learn to upgrade the collective IQ of their organization, by applying the principles of CDA.

Much of today's organizational knowledge still exists outside of formal information repositories and often only in people's heads. While organizations are eager to capture this knowledge, existing acquisition methods are not up to the task. Neither traditional artificial intelligence based approaches nor more recent, less-structured knowledge management techniques have overcome the knowledge acquisition challenges. This article investigates knowledge acquisition bottlenecks and proposes the use of collaborative, conversational knowledge management to remove them. The article demonstrates the opportunity for more effective knowledge acquisition through the application of the principles of Bazaar style, open-source development. The article introduces wikis as software that enables this type of knowledge acquisition. It empirically analyzes the Wikipedia to produce evidence for the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Do you know the age profile of your staff and their retirement plans? Can you identify those staff members whose knowledge would be most keenly lost by your organisation should they leave? Who’s responsibility is the retention of knowledge? David DeLong’s book begins with a discussion of current developments and provides examples of the types of impact experienced by companies when senior employees retire. DeLong’s studies appear solely within the USA, but nevertheless they offer examples that are deeply worrying should they be replicated elsewhere.

In recent years online and blended communities have become a popular topic among educationalists. In this paper we present a framework that supports the analysis, development and maintenance of online and blended communities. This is applied to two community case studies that differ along several key dimensions such as type of membership, the purpose of the communities, their policies and size. The analysis draws attention to the differences between the two types of communities. It also highlights the advantages and weaknesses of the framework with respect to these two case studies and suggests areas for future development. In the discussion that follows we highlight some key differences between this framework and Wenger’s work on Communities of Practice (COPs).

The scenarios referred to in this workshop transcript can be found at: http://www.knowledgeboard.com/item/53115Helen Baxter Welcome to the KnowledgeBoard online workshop. Today we are talking about Scenarios for the Knowledge Economy with our guest speaker Jeroen Kemp of the EKMF. Jeroen is senior researcher and consultant at the competence centre R&D management of the German Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering and is one of the founders and co-ordinators of the European Knowledge Management Forum.

Jeroen Kemp Lauri, the way we see it is: single trends, integrated scenarios, visions, implications, ACT & PREPARE...

This project task represents the 'think tank'of the European KM Forum as it defines on one hand the project's direction form the very beginning and on the other hand develops strategic visions for KM in Europe. Baseline for all this is the European Council's objective for Europe to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge - based economy in the world by 2002.The document presents five scenarios for future work in the knowledge economy that have been developed on the basis of a formal scenario planning technique. The scenarios are used as a means for identifying directions for future research in KM in Europe. This work is still in progress and thus no conclusions of direct recommendations for future research are given here yet. However, the knowledge economy scenarios provide stimulating means for baseline of discussion and moreover describe diverse potential future European KM environments.The first document contains an extract from deliverable D1.2 of the IST project European KM Forum - European Knowledge Management Forum. The second is the full version.