Taking these principles to their logical conclusion suggests a shift in the strategic-leadership role of the CEO and other members of the C-suite: from “all-knowing decision makers,” who are expected to know everything and tell others what to do, to “social architects,” who spend a lot of time thinking about how to create the processes and incentives that unearth the best thinking and unleash the full potential of all who work at a company.⁷ Making this shift doesn’t imply an abdication of strategic leadership. The CEO and other top executives still have the right—indeed, the responsibility—to step in if things go awry, and of course they continue to be responsible for making the difficult trade-offs that are the essence of good strategy.

Worth considering, particularly for public sector leaders, who are usually required to crowdsource such decisions.

[A] wooden pedestrian bridge dubbed the Luchtsingel will span 350 meters and require 17,000 planks. Citizens are invited to chip in and help fund the effort with donations of anywhere between EUR 25 for one plank and EUR 1,250 for an entire bridge section — whatever the size of their purchase, they can inscribe the result with their name or any other text of their choice. Perhaps most interesting of all is that the length of the bridge will depend on the number of planks purchased. With more than 1,000 participants to date, roughly 14 percent of the bridge has been built so far.

Check out the project website here.

You can check the lists out for yourself here.  It is worth noting that Burlington, VT–many people’s favorite small metro area doesn’t show up on anywhere on the site.  See if any of your favorite places made it.

Moody’s Investors Service, in a report earlier this year, said it had a favorable outlook for the nation’s most elite private colleges and large state institutions, those with the “strongest market positions” that had multiple ways to generate revenue. Ohio State, for instance, received a stable outlook from Moody’s last fall, though the report cautioned about the school’s debt and reliance on its medical center for revenue.

But Moody’s issued a negative outlook for a majority of colleges and universities heavily dependent on tuition and state revenue.

“Tuition levels are at a tipping point,” Moody’s wrote, adding later, “We anticipate an ongoing bifurcation of student demand favoring the highest quality and most affordable higher education options.”

Not only is this potentially devastating to students and their families, the institutions in the middle of that bifurcation could face ruin unless they find a new business model.   We’ve discussed this before (here and  here, for example).  The Times piece is here.  Don’t miss their interactive graphic on college costs and debt levels.

Responding to a growing demand for library services in east Mesa, the city in 2011 opened an express library at a vacant strip mall for $360,000 rather than building a stand-alone library for as much as $10 million.

In Scottsdale, the city court in 2010 expanded an at-home detention and electronic-monitoring program for DUI offenders with no history of violence, making sure defendants stay employed and receive counseling. The move saved the city an estimated $1.44 million in jail fees the first nine months of the program.

Phoenix improved the city website in 2011, making it easier for businesses to pay taxes. The city has collected $3.7 million in tax payments electronically, eliminating administrative time. . .

It helps to ensure that the government’s culture supports innovative thinking by employees:

The Maricopa County Manager’s Office appointed an innovation manager who last year helped launch Idea Factory, an internal social network that allows its approximately 13,000 employees to submit ideas to increase efficiency or to save costs.

The system allows crowdsourcing of ideas, and employees can both pitch ideas and vote on them. Employees whose ideas get implemented receive a monetary reward.

Idea Factory has been recognized nationally as the first project of its kind launched by a large local government entity.

The study, “New Tech City,” conducted by the Center for an Urban Future, concluded that the technology industry is growing faster in New York City than anywhere else in America and that the city now trails only Silicon Valley as a hub for the development of new technology companies. The study’s authors, Jonathan Bowles and David Giles, identified 486 technology companies that had been founded in the city since 2007 and determined that the financial crisis and the recession that followed did not slow the industry’s growth.

Mr. Bowles said the technology investors he interviewed agreed that in the last few years, New York had eclipsed the Boston area as the second-leading breeding ground for tech companies in the country. Silicon Valley, around San Jose, Calif., is still by far the dominant center of the industry, but New York was the only place where the number of deals to finance tech start-ups rose between 2007 and 2011, Mr. Bowles said.

The full story is here.  This is very interesting news.  It suggests New York is seeing a surge in its technology sector before Mayor Bloomberg’s tech campus comes on line.  Maybe this is just the beginning of an eastward shift in the tech sector.

The basic answer, I think, comes early on in the report:

Investing in venture capital in the early to mid-1990s generated strong, above-market  returns, and performance by any measure was good. What has happened since?….Longtime venture investor Bill Hambrecht notes that, “When you get an above-average return in any class of assets, money floods in until it drives returns down to a normal, and I think that’s  what  happened.”

Yep.  There’s no such thing as an asset class that consistently outperforms the market on a risk-adjusted basis.  If it does, money will keep piling in until it doesn’t.  But things are worse than that. According to Kauffman, VC fund returns aren’t just average, they’re lousy. This means that money should be exiting until returns go up. But that’s not happening: “Despite more than a decade of poor returns relative to publicly traded stocks, however, there appears to be only a modest retrenchment.

You can read Mr. Drum’s piece here.  The Kauffman Foundation report is here.

Most of the Kickstarter projects under the Design tab congregate around the themes of bikes, cheese, typography and iAnything, yet there is now a subset of urban interventions. A plastic tent for a livability conference in Prague. Uni, a portable open-air reading room for New York. A rooftop farm in Mumbai. The filtration system for +Pool.

What do these projects have in common? First, they are in famous cities. Second, they access hot-button urban topics: rooftop farms, reclaimed railroads, (self-reflexively) urban conversation itself. And third, they are gizmos. Critic Reyner Banham, in the oft-quoted essay “The Great Gizmo” posited that it wasn’t massive infrastructure projects that changed our world, but devices. Urbanism would lose out to industrial design. And that’s just what’s happening on Kickstarter. You wouldn’t Kickstart a replacement bus line for Brooklyn, but you might Kickstart an app to tell you when the bus on another, less convenient line might come.

The whole thing is worth a read.  You can find it here.

“This year marks the year that we’ve seen Kickstarter enter the real world in a number of ways,” said Perry Chen, one of its founders. “At Tribeca Film Fest, there are a dozen different Kickstarter-backed films, there’s an installation at the Whitney Biennial that was a Kickstarter project and we just had our birthday party at a Kickstarter-funded restaurant.”

Much as the introduction of cheap Web services lowered the barrier to entry for people seeking to create a start-up, and as offshore manufacturing gave entrepreneurs a chance to make products without having to build a factory, Kickstarter offers budding entrepreneurs a way to float ideas and see if there’s a market for them before they trade ownership of their company for money from venture capitalists.

The full story is here.