The newsletter for February: Constraints, LIFT and more

We just sent out our first newsletter for this year (there was none for January). In it, we talk about constraints and the opportunities that arise from them, remind you of our cooperation with the LIFT conference in Geneva at the end of this month and give you the usual selection of good stuff we come across. Read the whole thing after the jump; and if you want to get our newsletter in your inbox every month, just click here.

Dear friends,

This is the Sandbox newsletter for February 2009. If you receive this for the first time, have a look at the notes at the bottom of this e-mail. Reading time is about 5 minutes.

Since there was no January newsletter (sorry about that): We hope that you had great holidays and a wonderful start into the new year. The Sandbox team wishes you an excellent 2009!

The world economy, however, didn’t get off to a great start, and the outlook continues to look quite bleak. This puts a lot of businesses, especially start-ups, in a difficult position. If you have a good (or even great) business model, you will still be able to survive - but in doing so, you’ll have to deal with a lot of CONSTRAINTS on the way. Money, both from customers and investors, is not flowing as freely as it used to only a couple of months ago.

Sandbox, being a start-up, is not an exception. We also have to work with less resources than we originally planned, and adapt our projections to the new economic reality. For us, this means that we will focus almost entirely on the one thing that is at the core of our project: building a community of extraordinary young talents. At the moment, we’re working frantically on our online platform, which will launch within the next weeks (which is also why this newsletter might be a bit shorter than previous editions). Once the platform is up and running, we’ll start with some local events to further strenghten the community.

Not being able to do all the things we wanted to do as quickly as we wanted to do them is of course not that great. But the constraints that have been placed upon us can also be seen as an opportunity: In focusing on community-building entirely, we’ll make sure that we have a strong foundation for when the economy picks up again (and yes, we believe that it’s a question of when, not if).

Constraints, it so seems, are not all bad. In fact, they can be a major force for innovation. Last year, we have been in contact with SIT, a great innovation consultancy based in Israel. SIT’s mantra is that innovation happens when people are faced with constraints - because then, they have to figure out creative ways to work around them. One of SIT’s techniques is called “subtraction“: You remove an essential feature from an existing product and then try to come up with new uses for it.

There are also a lot of constraints in an area where innovation is most needed: in the developing world. This is the point that Ethan Zuckerman makes in a great blog post, where he offers seven rules for innovation in the developing world - work with what you’ve got, don’t fight culture and use existing platforms are among them. We completely agree and believe that Ethan’s rules could very well be applied to innovation not only in the developing world, but everywhere.

***
We’d like to remind you of our cooperation with the LIFT conference that will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, from February 25-27. LIFT explores the social consequences of new technologies, and the 2009 edition is inspired by the question “Where did the future go?”

Sandbox and LIFT will co-host a dinner during the conference, where a select group of talents from the Sandbox network and LIFT attendees will come together to discuss some of issues of the conference in more depth. If you feel like you want to join, please get in touch with us. Places at the dinner are limited.

LIFT also offers members and supporters of the Sandbox network (=you) a 20% discount on the conference tickets. Just use the promotional code “Lift09special20″ when registering at http://liftconference.com/user/register.

***
As always, we’ve put together a rather random list of stuff that we enjoyed last month and that you might enjoy too:

Have you paid attention to the guy playing music in the subway station this morning? If not, chances are you just missed out on great art. The Washington Post conducted an amazing experiment - with surprising results.

How are new ideas born and discoveries made? Steven Johnson tries to answer this question in his fascinating book The Invention of Air“, in which he follows the life of Joseph Priestley, an 18-th century innovator in science, politics, and religion.

Yes, he is. President, that is. And just in case you’re not sure anymore, you can check here. It’s a simple page - but we could look at it all day.

The great thing about social networking sites like Facebook is that you can see how your friends are linked to other people you might know. But chances are that you’re not friends with all the powerful people of this world online - and even if you were, that they wouldn’t disclose their relationships. So here comes LittleSis, an “involuntary Facebook for powerful people”. This is great and reminds us of a project called TheyRule, displaying the relations between board members of the Fortune 500 companies. The site hasn’t been updated since 2004, but is still worth a look.

We all know that Apple boss Steve Jobs is a great speaker. Further proof comes in form of a speech he gave a couple of years back in front of college graduates (scroll down on the page to see the video and transcript). Jobs ends his remarks with the quote: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” We love it.

We’re kinda late with this, but the New York Times’ “Year 2008 in Ideas” is, as every year, still worth checking out.

This is admittedly very, very geeky: A list of the 50 best movie special effect shots ever.

What happens if you ask fifty people one (and just one!) question.

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This post was written on Wednesday, 11. February 2009 at 15:10. It was written by Nico Luchsinger in the category Inspiration, Sandbox.

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