Monday, August 06, 2007

Finland's three T:s

I'm one of those people who crave instant answers. If I could, I'd integrate an audio Wikipedia in something that I always carry with me (most likely the keys, the phone is increasingly left behind these days). Whenever I come across something that I'd fancy knowing, a simple question would be uttered and a definition would be read to me within a few seconds, or perhaps a minute. It would take too long to fiddle with pens on pda:s or googling via 3G and besides, that requires time and effort. No, I want it instantly, without grand energy investments on my part. But then again, such a system would be the end of the fun ways knowledge hits you at times. Like the night before I went on a holiday to Rome. Late, I finished R Florida's book on the Creative class, as he labels persons working in fields such as research, computer programming, art, law etc. People whose jobs somehow revolve around creativity. Florida has found a correlation between high socio-economic development of an area and a large population of creative workers. Florida argues that in order to attract and maintain this much sought for creative class, cities and regions must have functioning “Three T’s”. These are Talent, Tolerance and technology (learn more here). When reading the book, I was wondering how well Finland is doing in this regard. We most certainly do have the talent and the technology, but what about the part regarding tolerance? Well, the answer came to me a couple of days later at one of the two metro lines in Rome, in an Italian Metro paper (No, I don't understand Italian but I do have 20 something ECTS-points in Latin so I figured the stem of the words ought to resemble at least). Apparently we're doing good, we made the top three of the big T:s of creativity.