Tag Archives: innovation
#432293 An Innovator’s City Guide to Shanghai
Shanghai is a city full of life. With its population of 24 million, Shanghai embraces vibrant growth, fosters rising diversity, and attracts visionaries, innovators, and adventurers. Fintech, artificial intelligence, and e-commerce are booming. Now is a great time to explore this multicultural, inspirational city as it experiences quick growth and ever greater influence.
Meet Your Guide
Qingsong (Dora) Ke
Singularity University Chapter: Shanghai Chapter
Profession: Associate Director for Asia Pacific, IE Business School and IE University; Mentor, Techstars Startup Weekend; Mentor, Startupbootcamp; China President, Her Century
Your City Guide to Shanghai, China
Top three industries in the city: Automotive, Retail, and Finance
1. Coworking Space: Mixpace
With 10 convenient locations in the Shanghai downtown area, Mixpace offers affordable prices and various office and event spaces to both foreign and local entrepreneurs and startups.
2. Makerspace: XinCheJian
The first hackerspace and a non-profit in China, Xinchejian was founded to support projects in physical computing, open source hardware, and the Internet of Things. It hosts regular events and talks to facilitate development of hackerspaces in China.
3. Local meetups/ networks: FinTech Connector
FinTech Connector is a community connecting local fintech entrepreneurs and start-ups with global professionals, thought leaders, and investors for the purpose of disrupting financial services with cutting-edge technology.
4. Best coffee shop with free WiFi: Seesaw
Clean and modern décor, convenient locations, a quiet environment, and high-quality coffee make Seesaw one of the most popular coffee shops in Shanghai.
5. The startup neighborhood: Knowledge & Innovation Community (KIC)
Located near 10 prestigious universities and over 100 scientific research institutions, KIC attempts to integrate Silicon Valley’s innovative spirit with the artistic culture of the Left Bank in Paris.
6. Well-known investor or venture capitalist: Nanpeng (Neil) Shen
Global executive partner at Sequoia Capital, founding and managing partner at Sequoia China, and founder of Ctrip.com and Home Inn, Neil Shen was named Best Venture Capitalist by Forbes China in 2010–2013 and ranked as the best Chinese investor among Global Best Investors by Forbes in 2012–2016.
7. Best way to get around: Metro
Shanghai’s 17 well-connected metro lines covering every corner of the city at affordable prices are the best way to get around.
8. Local must-have dish and where to get it: Mini Soupy Bun (steamed dumplings, xiaolongbao) at Din Tai Fung in Shanghai.
Named one of the top ten restaurants in the world by the New York Times, Din Tai Fung makes the best xiaolongbao, a delicious soup with stuffed dumplings.
9. City’s best-kept secret: Barber Shop
This underground bar gets its name from the barber shop it’s hidden behind. Visitors must discover how to unlock the door leading to Barber Shop’s sophisticated cocktails and engaging music. (No website for this underground location, but the address is 615 Yongjia Road).
10. Touristy must-do: Enjoy the nightlife and the skyline at the Bund
On the east side of the Bund are the most modern skyscrapers, including Shanghai Tower, Shanghai World Financial Centre, and Jin Mao Tower. The west side of the Bund features 26 buildings of diverse architectural styles, including Gothic, Baroque, Romanesque, and others; this area is known for its exotic buildings.
11. Local volunteering opportunity: Shanghai Volunteer
Shanghai Volunteer is a platform to connect volunteers with possible opportunities in various fields, including education, elderly care, city culture, and environment.
12. Local University with great resources: Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Established in 1896, Shanghai Jiao Tong University is the second-oldest university in China and one of the country’s most prestigious. It boasts notable alumni in government and politics, science, engineering, business, and sports, and it regularly collaborates with government and the private sector.
This article is for informational purposes only. All opinions in this post are the author’s alone and not those of Singularity University. Neither this article nor any of the listed information therein is an official endorsement by Singularity University.
Image Credits: Qinsong (Dora) Ke
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#432262 How We Can ‘Robot-Proof’ Education ...
Like millions of other individuals in the workforce, you’re probably wondering if you will one day be replaced by a machine. If you’re a student, you’re probably wondering if your chosen profession will even exist by the time you’ve graduated. From driving to legal research, there isn’t much that technology hasn’t already automated (or begun to automate). Many of us will need to adapt to this disruption in the workforce.
But it’s not enough for students and workers to adapt, become lifelong learners, and re-skill themselves. We also need to see innovation and initiative at an institutional and governmental level. According to research by The Economist, almost half of all jobs could be automated by computers within the next two decades, and no government in the world is prepared for it.
While many see the current trend in automation as a terrifying threat, others see it as an opportunity. In Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun proposes educating students in a way that will allow them to do the things that machines can’t. He calls for a new paradigm that teaches young minds “to invent, to create, and to discover”—filling the relevant needs of our world that robots simply can’t fill. Aoun proposes a much-needed novel framework that will allow us to “robot-proof” education.
Literacies and Core Cognitive Capacities of the Future
Aoun lays a framework for a new discipline, humanics, which discusses the important capacities and literacies for emerging education systems. At its core, the framework emphasizes our uniquely human abilities and strengths.
The three key literacies include data literacy (being able to manage and analyze big data), technological literacy (being able to understand exponential technologies and conduct computational thinking), and human literacy (being able to communicate and evaluate social, ethical, and existential impact).
Beyond the literacies, at the heart of Aoun’s framework are four cognitive capacities that are crucial to develop in our students if they are to be resistant to automation: critical thinking, systems thinking, entrepreneurship, and cultural agility.
“These capacities are mindsets rather than bodies of knowledge—mental architecture rather than mental furniture,” he writes. “Going forward, people will still need to know specific bodies of knowledge to be effective in the workplace, but that alone will not be enough when intelligent machines are doing much of the heavy lifting of information. To succeed, tomorrow’s employees will have to demonstrate a higher order of thought.”
Like many other experts in education, Joseph Aoun emphasizes the importance of critical thinking. This is important not just when it comes to taking a skeptical approach to information, but also being able to logically break down a claim or problem into multiple layers of analysis. We spend so much time teaching students how to answer questions that we often neglect to teach them how to ask questions. Asking questions—and asking good ones—is a foundation of critical thinking. Before you can solve a problem, you must be able to critically analyze and question what is causing it. This is why critical thinking and problem solving are coupled together.
The second capacity, systems thinking, involves being able to think holistically about a problem. The most creative problem-solvers and thinkers are able to take a multidisciplinary perspective and connect the dots between many different fields. According to Aoun, it “involves seeing across areas that machines might be able to comprehend individually but that they cannot analyze in an integrated way, as a whole.” It represents the absolute opposite of how most traditional curricula is structured with emphasis on isolated subjects and content knowledge.
Among the most difficult-to-automate tasks or professions is entrepreneurship.
In fact, some have gone so far as to claim that in the future, everyone will be an entrepreneur. Yet traditionally, initiative has been something students show in spite of or in addition to their schoolwork. For most students, developing a sense of initiative and entrepreneurial skills has often been part of their extracurricular activities. It needs to be at the core of our curricula, not a supplement to it. At its core, teaching entrepreneurship is about teaching our youth to solve complex problems with resilience, to become global leaders, and to solve grand challenges facing our species.
Finally, with an increasingly globalized world, there is a need for more workers with cultural agility, the ability to build amongst different cultural contexts and norms.
One of the major trends today is the rise of the contingent workforce. We are seeing an increasing percentage of full-time employees working on the cloud. Multinational corporations have teams of employees collaborating at different offices across the planet. Collaboration across online networks requires a skillset of its own. As education expert Tony Wagner points out, within these digital contexts, leadership is no longer about commanding with top-down authority, but rather about leading by influence.
An Emphasis on Creativity
The framework also puts an emphasis on experiential or project-based learning, wherein the heart of the student experience is not lectures or exams but solving real-life problems and learning by doing, creating, and executing. Unsurprisingly, humans continue to outdo machines when it comes to innovating and pushing intellectual, imaginative, and creative boundaries, making jobs involving these skills the hardest to automate.
In fact, technological trends are giving rise to what many thought leaders refer to as the imagination economy. This is defined as “an economy where intuitive and creative thinking create economic value, after logical and rational thinking have been outsourced to other economies.” Consequently, we need to develop our students’ creative abilities to ensure their success against machines.
In its simplest form, creativity represents the ability to imagine radical ideas and then go about executing them in reality.
In many ways, we are already living in our creative imaginations. Consider this: every invention or human construct—whether it be the spaceship, an architectural wonder, or a device like an iPhone—once existed as a mere idea, imagined in someone’s mind. The world we have designed and built around us is an extension of our imaginations and is only possible because of our creativity. Creativity has played a powerful role in human progress—now imagine what the outcomes would be if we tapped into every young mind’s creative potential.
The Need for a Radical Overhaul
What is clear from the recommendations of Aoun and many other leading thinkers in this space is that an effective 21st-century education system is radically different from the traditional systems we currently have in place. There is a dramatic contrast between these future-oriented frameworks and the way we’ve structured our traditional, industrial-era and cookie-cutter-style education systems.
It’s time for a change, and incremental changes or subtle improvements are no longer enough. What we need to see are more moonshots and disruption in the education sector. In a world of exponential growth and accelerating change, it is never too soon for a much-needed dramatic overhaul.
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