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The Web, The future of Business and Being Prepared

On Wednesday FutureLearn was launched in the UK. An ambitious initiative which sees a group of Universities entering the MOOC (massive open online courses) learning space offering a range of free courses in flexible formats through a variety of devices.

It’s an extraordinary development and is the logical extension of initiatives like the Open University which tapped into the technical innovations of its time with TV led teaching, distance learning and videotapes.

A fascinating range of courses are on offer, on subjects as diverse as Richard III, Game programming, Branding, Higgs Boson to teeth photography – yes, there is one on teeth photography, I didn’t make it up.

But one that caught my eye is perhaps oddly a nod towards the FutureLearn initiative itself. Called “Web science: how the web is changing the world” it is offered by the University of Southampton and describes the course as being about “how the web has changed our world in the past 25 years and what might happen next.”

That could be fascinating and I hope it looks at the extraordinary impact and possibilities that the web has had on the world of business.

In much the same way as some of us can look back over a period of development in innovation in the delivery of education, we can also reflect on the transformation in our business lives brought about by social and collaborative technology. In my first role in business, at a 50 seat firm more that 30 years ago, we had two phone lines into the building and a manual switch board who might place a call for you if you asked nicely. Manual typewriters, routine casual sexism, bad ties and rigid hierarchy were all de rigueur. Suggesting that everyone in the firm might have had a phone on their desk would have been quickly dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic, had we had the opportunity to speak up about anything. What would my old boss have made of smartphones, social media and wikis? Doesn’t bear thinking about.

But the developments are never ending. Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, open innovation, social business, collaborative consumption, the makers movement and social knowledge are all founded in the possibilities for interaction and collaboration that technology provides. They force us to rethink many of our most soundly held thinking about how business is done, and consider how the previously uneconomic becomes suddenly economic, the impossible possible and the unthinkable thinkable. This constantly innovates new threats and opportunities for all business on all sector and all locations.

In such a fast moving and disruptive environment it can be hard to keep up. And that is where we come in. We are constantly investigating the emerging waves of the digital business world and love to help our clients understand, innovate and thrive in a world changed and enhanced through the advent of social and collaborative technologies and the cultures that underpin them.

We don’t predict the future, we just help guide people through it.

2 Comments
  1. I’m doing a few MOOCs via Coursera and am signed up to FutureLearn. Shall have to check it out and see the kind of things they’re offering. It will be really interesting to see how the whole MOOC thing pans out, and the impact it has on education.

    • Yes Adi – well worth a look – all free as well! I think this is just a beginning. I guess the question has to be what course would you like to see on offer?

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