Scalability

The week after New York has been knackering. For the first few days it was like I had cotton wool in my head, and I woke up in the middle of the night at least twice for no apparent reason. It was also busy work wise. Ecodesign Centre held another of their E:DN events on the tuesday. The event concentrated on Design & Social Entrepreneurship, with recent work in this area both through Hoffi and also thinkARK, what I came away with during the event was scalability. Over the last year this has come back again and again. I think for many years the idea for many in the social area has been that you pilot a scheme and then scale it up to affect as many people as possible.

The funding and the way these schemes have been developed in the past have all been gauged as successful if they are able to become big – or 'scalable'. Yet what was refreshing about this weeks event was people discussing the idea of projects have a certain size that shouldn't then be increased, because if it did then by scaling it, it may then become unsustainable. This fits with a number of elements within marketing and also with recent projects I have been involved in.

If for example there are a number of businesses that all need space and they may all need admin, and other resources, but they would struggle to provide that for themselves then maybe by producing multiple projects/companies these resources could be shared. Secondly in a social entrepreniual sense, it fits into the old traditional marketing plan of multiple exposures to a brand or product. So by producing a number of businesses/projects that all have the ultimate goal of some kind of 'social good' you could setup a number of small niche type businesses that all do their small things towards 'social good'. you are much more likely to like on of these businesses due to it being niche small and personal and the business then is more likely to be successful. Yet it needs the bigger group to help out with admin etc.

So through a hub and spoke type setup multiple businesses can be setup and be successful each paying for things that they all need.

Back from the second snowiest month on record

A month or so ago I wrote a piece about the snow we had in Cardiff this Christmas. The piece was about who clears the roads and gets the city moving again. Recently me and Allie were lucky enough to go to New York. It was my first time in New York so I was interested in seeing how their service culture compared to our's. We were greeted by the second snowiest month since records began. As you can see from the picture above it was pretty big, all of the snow however had and was pretty much cleared in one evening allowing roads and pavements to be walked on and accessed the next day.

I wondered how this was possible and what had made it possible. I wondered if it had anything to do with it's service culture. Well generally it is pretty much true the service you receive is high and so different than in the UK. There are obvious reasons for this, firstly there is a tipping culture, in general 15-20% of the bill. The tipping culture has gone so far that it is seen as almost a right with people telling stories of waiters chasing after them to ask why they have not been tipped.

There are other things that seem to be reasons how the snow was cleared. Obviously there are a lot of tall buildings in New York with a number of them having a reception with someone working to take delivers and look after the general deals on the apartment block. Interestingly in New York City law residents are responsible for the pavement directly outside their house or shop. So when snow comes they have to clear it. So the mass action of the people of New York clearly has a huge effect on clearing snow quickly.

What about the roads? As well as gritting they have a number of ways they tackled the snow. Firstly they had their own city workforce and also hired in help from the private sector to further strengthen their work force. It is also interesting to see their rubbish trucks were used as snow ploughs, So instead of needing a whole set of new vehicles to deal with the snow they could use vehicles that already existed with an additional bolt on. Finally I also think the personal nature of having a mayor that seemed to be responsible for the success or failures, so people had something/someone to be represented by.



So that's one way to look at how mass actions can be achieved in this case through a mixture of the individual and the state. I am hoping to get out to Sweden to visit a friend soon and will be interested to see how their system differs. While all of this for me is interesting to see how people deal with the same situation. I wonder if there are also other benefits that the New York setup have instigated. Firstly their is a different feel to New York people are more social, brasher, they seem to be part of something that is only for New Yorker's.