创投概念：来自未来 走向未来

随着创业板的推出．创投行业的春天即将到来,这个来自未来的行业,定能从容地走向更远的未来。     

万事达卡:继往开来锐意进取

时光如梭,转眼间我们迎来了2010年.回顾过去的一年,在全球金融危机的背景下,中国经济的良好表现使得中国在世界经济舞台上扮演的角色更加重要.对于中国信用卡市场来说,过去的一年可谓挑战与机遇并存.在外部需求锐减的情况下,中国政府采取了扩大内需的经济政策,刺激消费成为其中重要的一个部分.作为一种便利的现代支付工具,信用卡凭借其在促进个人消费中所起到的重要作用正成为促进消费的新动力.     

The missing link: Bringing institutions and politics into energy future studies

Energy future studies can be a useful tool for learning about how to induce and manage technical, economic and policy change related to energy supply and use. The private sector has successfully deployed them for strategic planning, examining key parameters such as markets, competition and consumer trends. However in public policy, most energy future studies remain disconnected from policy making. One reason is that they often ignore the key political and institutional factors that underpin much of the anticipated, wished-for or otherwise explored energy systems developments. Still, we know that institutions and politics are critical enablers or constraints to technical and policy change. This paper examines how analytical insights into political and institutional dynamics can enhance energy future studies. It develops an approach that combines systems-technical change scenarios with political and institutional analysis. Using the example of a backcasting study dealing with the long term low-carbon transformation of a national energy system, it applies two levels of institutional and political analysis; at the level of international regimes and at the level of sectoral policy, and examines how future systems changes and policy paths are conditioned by institutional change processes. It finds that the systematic application of these variables significantly enhances and renders more useful backcasting studies of energy futures.     

The future of Islam after 9/11

This article projects the possible future of Islam in Iran, Egypt, Jordan, and beyond, by analyzing the historical background and extrapolating from survey data collected before and after 11 September 2001. Islamic culture is actively produced, rather than being an inevitable reflection of social arrangements, so it is important to understand how its intellectual leaders and activists perceive and resolve the issues facing their faith. The key concepts are targets, in relation to which ideas are produced, and societal visibility. If these targets are visible and clear, then one may be able to reasonably estimate the kind of religious discourses most likely to develop in the Islamic movement in the future. The future of Islam is most visible in Iran, where there is a move toward reformism and rejection of political Islam. In Jordan, there is a moderate visibility to predict that the country’s Islamic movement will continue its tradition of moderation and conservatism. In Egypt, the future of Islam is least visible. While extremism is on a decline, it is not clear the degree to which a leftist-conservative alliance will dominate the country’s cultural landscape.     

Leading the future

This article examines conceptions of leadership appropriate for a global mind set. The financial value of triple bottom line investing is highlighted as an example of this trend. However, this approach is shown to be dependent upon a given society's stage of values development, thus an outcome of more advanced society's citizens having already met basic survival needs, supporting access to higher order values. Constructivist developmental theory is explored and the idea of a global mind set is linked to the emergence of world-centric value systems in individuals. A dialogical approach is introduced, along with Theory U, which is examined in more detail as a process or approach that can facilitate world-centric consciousness. This leads to exploring the perspective and impact of spirituality in relation to leadership appropriate for facilitating a global mind shift.     

Creating the future

Wendell Bell has had a crucial contribution to the development of the network of futures scholars consisting of diversified talents and network of diversified talents and active organizations in the greater Chinese region. Furthermore, Bell's books and articles in English and Chinese have challenged and transformed people's stereotypes of the crystal-ball futurism into an academic discipline emphasizing images of the future and alternatives developed on the basis of empirical and theoretical knowledge and imagination.     

Communicating the future

A lot of time, money, and wisdom is wasted if the strategic planner fails to communicate his message. A substantial investment in a long and detailed forecasting exercise can only pay dividends if the results of that exercise are effectively brought to the attention of the clients, the people who can act upon the forecast. Here the author argues that this final stage of a forecasting exercise is as important as all the other stages, but that it is an area which is largely ignored by planners. So, using the example of a business environment, he gives simple practical guidance as to how planners can improve their performance in this final stage, the presentation of the results to the executives. Basically, this involves a shift away from the objective of transmitting the maximum amount of information, towards the idea of maximising the amount of information assimilated by the audience.     

In occupied territory: future.con

Creating sustainable, diverse futures involves challenging assumptions that Western civilisation and linear, profit based models of unlimited development are universal. This is deeply threatening to many, but objections to such colonised futures are growing. Challenging these world-views means engaging with the complex and intersecting issues of culture, environment, globalisation, gender and sustainability. This paper tests Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) as a method to excavate the levels that have created the worldview behind one image of a colonised future. Analysis reveals a ‘Future.con’ which excludes most of humanity and pre-dicts a technological future in which humans may only exist to serve the machines they created. It is also the kind of image that, in a higher education context, fits and maintains pervasive but limited world-views. It could be different. Images and some of the tools of CLA can also be used in education to help envision sustainable, culturally diverse futures.     

ESSAY: Attitudes to death and the future changing our thinking

The drive to survive has been extremely strong for individuals and groups over the course of history and across various cultures. Given the rapid increase in population, however, carrying capacity may have already been exceeded. Although limiting births, improving quality of and extent of participation in social life, applying technology and other approaches may help, the likelihood is that there are already more people than can be reasonably accommodated on our planet Earth. Attitudes towards death may need to and may in fact, change from shock and horror to a far greater acceptance than in the recent past.     

Politicians and the future

Politicians have a part to play, a part not of their own choosing. Their actions or motives are not determined by their own views of the future. Thus a gulf exists between politicians and forecasters. For the politician, a forecast that is wrong is irrelevant; and a forecast that is right is superfluous.     

Teaching about the future

Since 1984 UNESCO has been developing a programme of prospective studies. This programme was re-named ‘future-oriented studies’ and is now centred around three groups of activities: a project on the futures of culture; the development of education and training with special emphasis on disseminating the methodology of future-oriented studies; and the creation of an international bibliographic database called FUTURESCO. An invitational seminar, ‘Teaching about the future’, held in Vancouver, 21–23 June 1992, was a direct consequence of the above. It was organized and hosted by UNESCO (with FUTURESCO and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO). It brought together about 20 professional futurists from Pacific Basin countries to consider a range of theoretical, practical and pedagogic issues associated with teaching futures, mainly at the tertiary level.     

Forecasters face the future

The Eighth International Symposium on Forecasting was held on June 12–15 1988 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It was sponsored by the International Institute of Forecasters in collaboration with The University of Amsterdam and the Free University of Amsterdam. This article reports on the proceedings of the conference.