MaRS

A fight for a piece of the booming cupcake industry?

Sugar and spice and everything nice might describe cupcakes themselves, but the exploding cupcake industry is anything but.  Just in time for holiday baking madness, the New York Times profiles cutthroat cupcake entrepreneurs, who won’t even disclose their profitability for fear of giving an edge to rival enterprises.

Just how big is the cupcake business?  One market research firm foresees a 20% increase in US cupcake sales over the next five years.  Here in Canada, food and beverage processing is the country’s third-largest industry, with bakeries representing the largest sub-sector.

At Design Thinkers 2009, a very eclectic audience including myself were asked to consider and reevaluate our impressions of what graphic design is.  We were asked to revisit the steps we take towards being “creative” and “innovative”.

This was — and is — no simple feat.

Creative Places + Spaces

Building on a legacy is never easy. Building on the legacy of legendary urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs is particularly daunting.

When the Creative Places + Spaces conferences debuted in October 2003, Jane Jacobs, Richard Florida and 50 other speakers led a captivated delegation from across Canada, the U.S. and U.K. in an exchange about the growing importance of creativity to cities and the new economy. It was a watershed event in the advancement of the creative cities movement in Canada, which expanded in 2005 with the second offering in the conference series.

The dialogue continued in Toronto last week at Creative Places + Spaces 2009 with study tours, dynamic keynotes, provocative panels, video spotlights and breakout sessions for a national and international audience gathered over two days at the Carlu and MaRS.

Social entrepreneurs: Not doing enough?

It takes some guts to stand up in front of 500+ social entrepreneurs and enablers and tell them that they aren’t doing enough to help the world’s poor. Especially if you’re an invited speaker at the Social Enterprise World Forum, which just wrapped up last Thursday, October 8 in Melbourne, Australia. However, it could well prove the most constructive advice as people head back to their enterprises and continue on their good work.

At his annual event, the Clinton Global Initiative this September, former U.S. President Bill Clinton announced Andy Kuper to the audience as the next Muhammad Yunus. Yunus was the founder of the Grameen Bank and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for his micro-credit system, helping break the cycle of poverty. That’s some big shoes to fill and Kuper knows it. At the Social Enterprise World Forum, Kuper spoke to the delegates about his new initiative, Leapfrog – a micro-insurance company similar in spirit to micro-credit, offering coverage to low-income people in developing nations. He aims to reach 25 million people in Leapfrog’s first phase of development. This guy thinks big.

Recently, I spoke about social innovation at Toronto’s first Ignite Talk. Ignite is a speaker series based upon Pecha Kucha, a presentation style used in creative fields like design and architecture, but increasingly popular amongst business and academic communities.

What I learned from this experience is something every entrepreneur needs to know: how to articulate big ideas in five minutes – the space of an elevator ride.