Growth, jobs and more

I am still in Seoul where we have just adopted the Seoul declaration . Here are some notes from my intervention on the plenary before the signing: First I'd like to join all who congratulated the organizers, the government of Korea and the OECD for such an excellent event. I think it demonstrates that we are all aware what a vital role the internet plays in globalized economy. What internet is enabling is many more people to get involved in creative and innovative processes. This type of innovation is called ' open innovation ' and for it to work, information and data on which the innovation and creative processes are based, must be made broadly available. One set of such data is scientific data and scientific publications. This is somehow covered in item b on page 6, bullets 2 and 5 and I would like to understand that it covers open scientific publishing as well. While we support the declaration, I would like to invite the OECD to investigate and continue to make po...

Empires stood (Roman) and fell (Napolen's adventure in Russia) with communications technology. Today we are building empires of the mind and we need communication technology more than ever. In fact Europe's global dominance started with the communication revolution that democratized paper. The 2nd communication revolution related to the Internet is democratizing electronic communication and inviting a new wave of talent into creative processes. As Florida put it, creativity is the ultimate economic resource and there is a war for talent going on out there. Technology is something that attracts talent, internet technology definitively. So the Slovenian presidency built a strong emphasis on creativity and internet into the updated Lisbon Strategy. IPv6 makes future growth of the Internet possible. This was in a nutshell the contents of my talk at the IPv6 launch event in Brussels on May 30th. I took my mobile phone with me to the podium and recorded the talk. A colleague synced i...

To address climate change we need to think both with our wallets and our hearts (notes for an intervention at an OECD ministerial meeting in Paris, June 4th, 2008). Climate change is an issue that is global and global solutions should be found. But we must make very clear that politics should define the goals and targets, and that the business and science must, in undistorted competition, find the best solutions. Lets not speak about 50-50-50 until 2050 until we do 20-20-20 by 2020. Politics should not pick winners. We need a third industrial revolution and it will be done by science and business. To be enable it we must create a level playing field for competing technologies and this also means creating a single price for CO2, regardless of its source, and not distorted by widely different taxation and subsidies even if the tax is not called CO2 tax. This would enable the market to identify the cheapest solutions. But so much about thinking with the wallet. At least as important is...