From the monthly archives:

September 2015

Cambridge – Its all in the DNA

September 28, 2015

– “How do grow the perfect English lawn?” -“Oh, it’s quite straightforward sir. You just cut it, roll it and water it for about 400 years.” Old English joke Being known for years as a Silicon Fen, an analogue of the Silicon Valley, the University of Cambridge has fully deserved its reputation of Europe’s top […]

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The Strategy Potential of Uppsala City

September 26, 2015

This week, Bearing has delivered a strategy report to the Swedish city of Uppsala. The report is an interim delivery in the Uppsala county RIK strategy development project, which aims to prepare for a new regional development strategy to be decided in 2016. On the macro level and in the context of competitive smart specialisation, […]

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Innovative Sustainable Re-development – Masdar City

September 25, 2015

This blog article is about Masdar City, a new city project in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The dual core of this project is innovation and sustainability. The goal is to extend the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation throughout the new city, by growing new neighbourhoods around the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. The institute is […]

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How European Countries Spend Their Money

September 24, 2015

Earlier this month, The Economist published a chart with comparisons how households in leading selected countries prioritise their spending. Now the newspaper has published the same comparison for selected European countries. Looking at figures from just a handful of European countries reveals surprising contrasts. In Malta, an island nation of 450,000 south of Italy, almost […]

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Culture and Heritage–Transmitting Place Identity Through Museums

September 20, 2015

Much of place identity is communicated through its heritage, of which museums form a significant part. A local or national museum can convey a great deal about a place: about its values, its priorities and how it sees itself, both in an historical and a contemporary sense. Today’s post is based around a recent interview […]

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How Countries Spend Their Money

September 16, 2015

The Economist has published a chart with comparisons how households in leading selected countries prioritise their spending. According to The Economist, it seems a country’s spending reflects its national stereotypes, according to household expenditure data compiled by Eurostat: Russians splash 8% of their money on booze and cigarettes—far more than most rich countries—while fun-loving Australians […]

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The new Global Competition for Corporate Profits

September 15, 2015

The world’s largest multinational corporations have been riding a three-decade wave of profit growth, market expansion, and declining costs. Yet this unprecedented run may be coming to an end. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, Playing to win: The new global competition for corporate profits, projects that the global corporate-profit pool, which currently stands at […]

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Recent Trends of Innovation in Advertising

September 13, 2015

Encourage innovation. Change is our lifeblood, stagnation our death knell. – David Ogilvy The advertisement industry is innovating at a breakneck pace. They must do so to survive. Their clients demand innovation as they go through a pace of change combined with a pressure to redefine, which is having significant impact on all business industries. […]

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The Shifting Global Business Landscape

September 10, 2015

Emerging markets are changing where and how the world does business. For the last three decades, emerging markets have been a source of low-cost but increasingly skilled labour. Their fast-growing cities are filled with millions of new and increasingly prosperous consumers, who provide a new growth market for global corporations at a time when much […]

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Place Branding of Uppsala

September 7, 2015

Bearing has won a contract to analyse and recommend the components of an updated place brand for the city of Uppsala in Sweden. This is a follow-on assignment from the strategy  analysis project which we are working on for Uppsala county and Uppsala city since January this year. The global competition of cities is estimated […]

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The Innovator who Rebuilt Lego

September 5, 2015

“In some ways, I think he’s a better model for innovation than Steve Jobs” – David Robertson, Professor of Innovation and Product Development at the Wharton School and an author of “Brick by Brick” about Lego. One of the most popular articles here on the Bearing Wave is The Lego Innovation Story, about how the […]

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The Worlds Largest Cities – 1955 and 2015

September 4, 2015

The last six decades have been a period of rapid urbanisation. More than half of the world’s population now live in cities and towns, compared to just over a third in 1955, and that figure is expected to grow to two-thirds by 2050, meaning a projected additional 2.5 billion people living in urban areas. At […]

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