By Incubator I mean…

I’ve been tracking the term ‘incubator’ on Twitter since last year and am amazed not only by the number of incubators that have sprung up all over the world, but also how many diverse and loose definitions of ‘incubator’ there are.

By ‘incubator’ I do not just mean co-creation space, or consolidated back-office support, or start-up competitions, or a crowd-sourced website of projects, or classes on pitching and writing business plans.

By ‘Incubator’ I DO mean in addition to the above, tactically helping to build businesses through to sustainability by bringing in the needed people/partners, asking the right questions & molding the business model, coming out with a working product/service & organization, and utilizing ready-made launching platforms which include financing, marketing and/or retail/distribution channels.

THE RISE OF INCUBATORS AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON
It is important to first understand the cultural and social significance of incubators in western society to help us gain a comparative perspective on how China incubators will impact a new generation.

The reason why the start-up incubator is enjoying success and widespread popularity in our time and not before has to do with one unique occurrence: The rise of the highly educated, freelance individual. While two other factors have also been vital for the popularization of incubators – 1) macro economic demand for innovation competition, and 2) an abundance of investment capital looking for alternative asset classes and the development of mezzanine financing options – only the rise of the highly educated, freelance individual is unique to this generation and unique to the rise of the incubator.

Tracking the emergence of the highly educated, freelance culture

The expansion of a highly educated mass population happened in western society and North America with education reforms and a greater access to higher education in the Post-War era. The popular expansion of the North American freelance culture (as documented by Douglas Holt in ‘Cultural Strategy’) began in the 90’s as we experienced the early 90’s recession and then accelerated as corporations and industry underwent an intense period of outsourcing, thus shifting us away from the concept of lifetime employment.

And so since the 90’s we’ve witnessed the emergence of a highly educated, freelance generation.  These individuals, being more creative, independent, and autonomous, have been building a new proposition of economic pay-off that rewards ingenuity and seeks not a steady pay-check, but periodic bulk payments that allow for more pivots in a person’s freelance-style career. Additionally, as an economy built on high-educated, freelance culture demands greater creativity, integrated thinking capacity, and greater specialization, these individuals seek an actionable, and reliable form of collaboration that will see their unique capabilities and ideas properly utilized.

It’s therefore understandable why it is this generation, a highly educated and freelance group, which would construct and consider start-up incubators a viable and important vehicle for long-term freelance achievement, and career success. In fact, as chronicled by GigaOm, the first popular wave of incubators emerged over 10 years ago, during the Dot-Com boom, when high-educated freelance culture hit its first period of maturity.

Our current cultural legacy: the Silicon Valley incubator model

The current wave of incubators like the iconic YC, TechStars, and 500 Startups are a product of A) a much more networked, collaborative culture, learned and reinforced by social media’s dominance in our society, B) further maturation and refinement in the venture capital/private equity apparatus, plus C) the justifiable fixation on timelines and incubation processes specifically catered to technology and digital venture types.

The Silicon Valley incubator model is built to graduate start-ups within 3 months of incubation. Fast ideas, fast iteration, fast testing, fast scaling. High independence, high autonomy. This is the incubator’s cultural legacy we’ve inherited from the success of Silicon Valley and American-style venturing from a generation of highly educated, freelance individuals.

There is a growing perception that the Incubator can become a new model for graduate school. I too observe that this generation is beginning to perceive incubators as having the same cultural significance as graduate schools. Indeed, these are important implications for how a new generation of young Americans and global citizens will classify ‘education’, fit for their future world.

instituteB - a Canadian Incubator reframing as a new kind of 'skool'.

But with this understanding of the cultural role of the Incubator for a highly educated, freelance society, the Incubator finds a different role in China and is therefore developing into a different creature.

A NEW FORMATION: CHINA INCUBATOR AS ENTERPRISE

Over the last year, a number of China incubators have either reformed, or newly emerged, as professional enterprises, away from the classic western incubator model that just serves as a prototyping platform for independent start-ups.  China Incubator Enterprises are acting more like niche early-stage private equity acquisition groups – without the private equity.

Incubator Enterprises characteristic #1: A longer timeline with greater vested interest.
These China incubators are elongating the incubation period, bringing the start-up more permanently into the incubator, well beyond the traditional 3-month timeline. Often times the gestation period is dependent upon the start-up’s complexity and development needs. Many times incubators will not graduate a start-up until there is a fully sustainable business model, and there is more to show than just a prototype product.

This is taking a page out of more established corporate innovation processes, like the one system made famous by 3M. Here, what is provided is not only space and supplies for a team to get their idea off the ground, but the host organization also takes a lead responsibility in filling the missing team and functional gaps such as finance, marketing, project management, and strategy. In this way the incubator graduates not only entrepreneurs with a product and some mentoring, but instead a founding team, fully equipped to grow from start-up to small business.

Innovation Works, an incubator I’ve written about before, was one of the very first China Incubators and still one of the most famous. Created by Ex-Head of Google China, Li Kai Fu, they incubate tech start-ups, but bring these companies in-house and build out fully functioning teams around them. They usually graduate only after a product is tested and there are investors lined-up to take it to the next step. This whole process normally takes much longer than 3 months.

Incubator Enterprises characteristic #2: Cut out start-up pitching, instead cultivate investor expectations.
Whereas the mark of a great incubator in western countries is giving the start-up a chance to pitch to a packed room of potential investors, China Incubator Enterprises instead opt to act as agents, selecting the right investor introductions and brokering the right deal.

This deal making has much to do with the fact that each incubator has pre-existing relationships with a set investment community or network, usually specializing in one specific area of interest. In some cases, an incubator’s inception is the direct result of a pre-existing fund’s desired investment objectives, looking to develop investment opportunities.

With the Incubator Enterprise knowing the investor preferences and objectives so well, there is little need for pitching but instead collaborating with the investors on their investment expectations and involvement right from the outset. In this way, the start-up, and the investor(s) are developed from inception to be the perfect partners.

Xindanwei has been the poster-child for Co-working spaces in China since its launch in 2009, with a very distinct and strong open community culture. Last year Xindanwei expanded to build Xinchejian (New Garage), a specialized program for the Open Hardware, hacker and maker communities. Xinchejian provides specific events, workshops, machining tools & technology, plus prototype product exhibitions; all crucially needed to grow this emerging community. What is more, this special unit has developed its own network of specialized partners and investors, people who have a specific interest in funding and prototyping co-hacked gadgets. These partners coming in at the very earliest stages and develop ideas together.

 

Incubator Enterprises characteristic #3: Find industries to fill beyond tech.
The emergent Incubator Enterprise, with the intention of incubating longer, more thoroughly, and molding investor expectations from the beginning, find greater capabilities to nurture new business models. This is proving powerfully applicable for capturing the new opportunities emerging from China’s diversifying economy needs.

Each Incubator Enterprise, in capturing its industry specialization, is also customizing their incubator to fit the specific needs of that industry’s start-up needs and also that industry’s investor requirements. With this evolutionary approach, Incubator Enterprises from different industries will have different incubation timelines and boast different incubator component strengths. It is only in customizing the incubator format can the incubator fill the needs existent beyond tech.

Transi.st is an incubator that seeks to develop tech that has direct impact on social good. Shifting from the ideology that a start-up’s primary path leads to IPO, Transi.st chooses its China incubation projects first for its scalability in social impact.

Yuenfen-Flow has constructed itself as the nexus between tech, business, art, and sustainability. Boasting its offering of methodologies such as IDEO’s Human Centered Design, Yuenfen-Flow chooses its projects for their creativity and the merging of artistic and technical form and function.

Jue.io is perhaps one of the most exciting examples of an Incubator Enterprise, specializing in manufacturing incubation.  Jue,io seeks to attract creative youth culture products; from new iPhone case concepts to innovative RFID key chains for offline social networking. Jue.io was set up to cater to the needs, expertise and interests of its founding investor, who comes from the manufacturing industry. Boasting a vast network of OEM manufacturer relationships, Jue.io offers not only team, product development, and funding for the right manufactured product idea, but also the right manufacturing and distribution partners. Jue.io’s incubator capabilities are specialized for the needs of the industry it serves.

Localized industry contexts force incubators to structure differently

It is easy to see that these incubator innovations come from the different industry forces present in China’s very different economy. As chronicled above, traditional western incubators are a product of a driving macro demand for innovation competition, a mature alternative asset-class investment community, and a highly educated, freelance generation. China does not strongly possess any of these forces. The incubator was started in China not as a reaction to competition need, but with the intention of leading social change. It found itself in an economy with a very immature investor community, and within a generation and culture that is not overtly highly educated nor freelance. And so in order for the incubator to survive, flourish and add value in a different industry context, the China incubator has had to evolve, with a longer timeline, a greater vested interest, a different approach to cultivating investors, and filling opportunities in many other industry fields.

These non-traditional forces are not unique only to China. We are seeing the incubator evolve into Incubator Enterprises in other fields that require adaptation for distinct requirements. In Canada, an Incubator Enterprise exists named InstituteB, a specialty incubator focused on sustainability start-ups and cultivating particular skills for the sustainability field with special relationships with sustainability-focused investors. They also bring in start-ups for a long timeline, build thoroughly, and graduate only with the right investor already in place.

CHINA INCUBATOR’S ROLE FROM A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

And so as people have alluded to the Western incubator as a new form of graduate school for a highly educated, freelance generation, what is the meaning of the emergence of China’s Incubator Enterprises to this new generation of Chinese?

I would offer a suggestion that China’s Incubators act more like the equivalent to an after-school program, or a special summer program, or an extra-curricular sports team. What I mean is that it is within these kinds of environments that many Western-raised children first developed specialized skills, and first learned how their unique skill integrated into a larger team. More importantly it is within these extra-curricular program that many talented youth first developed passions for personal hobbies and interests, and added very important components to their developing self identity.

I feel the China Incubator’s cultural role is providing a similar, and vital service, albeit not extra-curricular, but full-time.

Leading edge Chinese youth, with newly constructed identities and the beginnings of unique talent, are in need of space to refine and sharpen what raw ability they have. Incubators become the place this cohort of creative talent can deepen who they are and sharpen their skill.

This being still one of the earliest generations of Chinese creative talent, these innovators have not enjoyed as comprehensive an upbringing as the young talent in other mature societies.  Therefore Chinese incubators are calibrated to allow participants to specialize on one creative ability, while the incubator fills the other skill gaps.  As a consequence, the incubation period grows longer; to not only allow the business to mature, but also the creative talent powering it.

Incubators in China can develop in this way because China creative talent is still so rare and offers the great potential for highly unique value creation. As the competitive pressures in China continue to rise, the value proposition to incubate talent and new China business solutions is something no investor can ignore.

It is within these incubators that a new generation of Chinese creative talent is realizing that there are other options to their future career and life path.  For the first time China’s creative middle class sees a viable, and socially acceptable path to having one’s own ideas & inventions realized.

The new Chinese incubator enterprises are in part instigating new culture, and may become the modus operandi for a new creative class of Chinese youth.

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Photo Credit: itsallaboutimagination.com

In the past year, I’ve met with scores of new people and talked about how the research & consulting company I help lead, China Youthology, has also launched a non-profit platform to directly engage youth called Open Youthology. The most common response I get is “Are you an NGO?”

It puzzled me why so many people couldn’t see the logic: investing directly in what’s good for the community, will secure what’s good for business. I felt a little anxious; why were we the only ones doing this? Are we totally wrong? How come there wasn’t anything to support what we knew in our gut was right?

Then in January 2011, validation came. Harvard Business Review started the year publishing a seminal article titled “Creating Shared Value: How to reinvent capitalism – and unleash a wave of innovation and growth”. Here is a heavy paraphrase of the top-line ideas:

The concept of Shared Value recognizes that societal needs, not just conventional economic needs, define markets. True long-term, sustainable, and competitive economic value is reaped when business aligns with societal needs.  Therefore the purpose of Capitalism and the corporation must be redefined as creating shared value, not just profit per se. A narrow concept of capitalism has prevented business from harnessing its full potential to meet society’s broader challenges, but by broadening our perspective and adopting a Shared Value mindset, we recognize that the competitiveness of a company and the health of the communities around it are closely intertwined.  A business needs a successful community, not only to create demand for its products but also to provide critical public assets and a supportive environment.

The article laid out paragraph by paragraph, with numerous supporting case examples, everything my partners and I believed and are trying to build at China Youthology. I looked to see who had authored such amazing research: Mark R. Kramer, senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business School professor, and one of the greatest business thinkers of our generation.

Read the HBR article if you haven’t already, or take a quick first glance by watching this talk by Michael E. Porter about “Creating Shared Value”.

This article reaffirmed to us that building Open Youthology was not wrong, we were just early.

In fact, the concept of Shared Value isn’t that new. Porter’ Shared Value Creation codified the business’ new role in a Shared Economy, but the other half of this equation is Shared Value Consumption, which is better known as Collaborative Consumption. Collaborative consumption is based on the concept that access to goods and skills is more important than ownership of them.[i]  People are building collaborative consumption economic models based on sharing, swapping, bartering, trading or renting access to products as opposed to ownership.[ii]

Fast Company thoroughly explains and showcases the world of Shared Value Consumption in an April 2011 article, “The Sharing Economy”. And you can watch Rachel Botsman give a paradigm-shifting TEDtalk titled “The Case for Collaborative Consumption” during the May 2010 TEDxSydney conference.

We must enlarge our purpose for creation to help us discover what really needs our attention. And we must enlarge our definition of consumption so that what we already have can best serve the most of society’s needs.

I believe that Shared Value is the next frontier of Globalization and the true motive behind Free Trade.

Free Trade is built on the law of Comparative Advantage: everyone benefits when everyone can offer what they do best and most efficiently.

Shared Value Creation and Consumption is taking this one step further: We now recognize that by ignoring externalities, especially negative externalities, we are in fact ignoring or even building barriers to other forms of value creation that in the end would help the entire societal ecosystem.

The Shared Value Economy is shifting us away from only thinking about assets, capital and traded goods to repositioning Capitalism for what the law of Comparative Advantage originally intended: the holistic betterment of society.

These concepts of Shared Value Creation and Shared Value Consumption are currently early adopter trends, enjoying niche acceptance and having their first initial success cases. But what will allow the Shared Value Economy to gain mass adoption, and benefit an entire society?

Looking at the examples from the rise of past major societal systems – Capitalism, Communism, Feudalism, Imperialism, etc. – we know it takes the right generation of people with fitting cultural traits to collectively buy-in and believe the new model works and must be realized. So will there be a generation that culturally fits to truly push mass adoption of a Shared Value Economy?

It is not a coincidence that it is this current generation that birthed the genesis of the Shared Value concept. The rise of Participatory culture in social media, Web 2.0, Open Source, mobile networks, is teaching us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. An entire global generation is now raised with this experience and truth, and we are starting to want it enacted in the other areas of society, from commerce to government to family.

But wanting it and having mass adoption are two separate things.  It still takes the right generation with the right cultural traits and the right environmental circumstances to really embrace the concept and adopt it systemically.

Michael E. Porter believes that this generational tipping point may come from places at a disadvantage in the current capitalist system. From the HBR ‘Creating Shared Value’ article:

“Equal or greater opportunities arise from serving disadvantaged communities and developing countries. Though societal needs are even more pressing there, these communities have not been recognized as viable markets. Today attention is riveted on India, China and increasingly Brazil, which offer firms the prospect of reaching billions of new customers at the bottom of the pyramid… As capitalism begins to work in poorer communities, new opportunities for economic development and social progress increase exponentially.”

This and next generation of China’s youth may be the pivotal group the Shared Value Economy is looking for. Here’s why:

1)   Chinese youth are already in-step with the newest global ideas.

Participatory culture from the Internet, social media, and mobile has been the experience of Chinese youth, similar to those in other countries. New concepts such as Shared Value not only have a receptive audience with Chinese youth, they are actively advocated and spread.  Isaac Mao, one of China’s earliest bloggers, leads Sharism.org in China, an organization dedicated to educating and advocating the philosophy and practice of Sharism. “The more you give, the more you get, the more you share, the more you’re shared”. Frequent meetings and conferences are held in Beijing and Shanghai, attended by some of the top thought-leaders and internet influencers in China.

photo credit: bergstromtrends.com

Other than the Internet & Social Media, Youth growing up in China have few other social spaces to call their own. So Participatory culture and derived concepts have become important for them to cling to, as it makes up a larger piece of their generational identity.

2) Hyper growth means less entrenched traditional norms.

Chinese youth have only known fast and radical change. New is normal.  Therefore Chinese Youth are seeking new meaning in all aspects of their life; the meanings of self-identity, of being an individual, of being a society. This extends to re-examining old ideas that older generations hold so dear. Chinese youth are less resistant, and more willing to re-define the meanings of ‘business’, ‘industry’, and ‘capitalism’. Unlike other developed societies where the definitions of these concepts are treated as sacred and entrenched at an early age, in China these terms are newer, and much greyer. Other developed capitalist countries will take longer to extricate themselves from what they know and dare to reconsider the validity. China’s youth do not have that problem. They are re-defining traditional capitalism right now.

3) China’s next generation cannot keep up with traditional consumption.

This is one of the most important drivers for China’s potential leadership in Shared Value. Young people’s job and income prospects are far worse in China than in many other developed countries, while competition is several times greater. Even the hopes of achieving middle class consumption levels are a real struggle in China. A young person would need to take out a 70-80 year mortgage to buy a small apartment in one of China’s major cities.  The traditional expectations of a consumption economy are not possible in China’s reality. Chinese youth are driven towards different solutions to survive and flourish. Shared Value can fit this need.

4) First chances for creation, making new rules

If we had the first 3 reasons but a completely restrictive government and market, there would be no chance for this generation of China’s youth to champion Shared Value. Luckily this is not the case. China’s emerging marketized economy means there is room for new Firsts in everything. Few legacy systems or processes means entrepreneurs and organizations have the chance now to re-structure the market and industries to newer business concepts. In addition, few legacy ecosystems and competencies mean entrepreneurs and organizations must develop new clusters to create markets and pool resources to gather strength enough to build something of value. This is Shared Value in action.

We already see Shared Value Consumption taking root in China.

Swap shops are opening and swap markets are being organized by normal members of the community. Chinese youth love the feeling of surprise they get from thinking they can turn old, under-used items into something useful they need – all without spending more money.

Swap Shop in a popular Beijing Hutong

Buy42.com is a new website and service that asks people to donate their second-hand clothes. The people at Buy42 then mix and match the donated clothes to create fashionable vintage or alternative, edgy ensembles to be resold. This provides a few important societal values: 1) educates & leads a larger mass population about vintage and alternative fashion styles 2) makes it easy for them to buy whole outfits at low prices 3) does it all using existing products without new manufacturing.

Buy42.com now has a fast-growing following on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter.  It has set up dedicated channels for the clothes donated by leading indie designers and influential arty-youth.  Buy42 only takes a percentage of the money made from the resale of clothes to run the website and staff the company; the rest of the income is donated to charity for China’s poor.

Shared Value Creation in China is still in its infancy, but companies large and small are finding numerous fertile opportunities to align business value chains with society. One important role companies can play for this Chinese generation is creating Shared Value in culture.

Nike China invests in underground street-ball tournaments, sponsoring local rap artists to write street-ball anthems, and even designing and freely giving away customized street-ball Nike products. Nike understands that directly investing in a strong street-ball culture builds Nike’s future China market.

China Youthology also strives to lead by example in Shared Value Creation.

Open Youthology, a platform offering youth free inspirational conferences, equipping community research, and funding for innovative new cultural assets, is China Youthology’s current strategy for Shared Value Creation.  Developing China’s youth in cultural creativity, the courage to explore, and critical questioning, we are enlarging and strengthening our own market.

By helping Chinese youth grow as bright, inquisitive minds, we benefit from a larger and stronger pool of young researcher talent that we can hire. We also benefit from deeper acceptance into youth subculture communities because of the added credibility and legitimacy gained from our youth engagement. This benefits our research insights as we can dive deeper than normal researchers, into the lives of Chinese youth. We then in turn offer better research to our clients, who keep us profitable so we can continue investing in youth engagement and building China’s youth communities.

Through this Shared Value business model, we not only create a competitive advantage for our business and ensure greater market sustainability, but more importantly, Shared Value enables the leaders of tomorrow’s China a greater youth experience and more positive life inspiration.

Perhaps Shared Value Creation as a business model came quicker and more naturally for us because China Youthology is so immersed in Chinese youth’s mindset and culture – or because we are Chinese youth ourselves. But as we see other young entrepreneurs building Shared Value Creation business models, we think we’re only at the beginning, with the potential to bring the Shared Value Economy into greater mass adoption.

Someday when I introduce Open Youthology, instead of a confused responding question about maximizing profits, I hope I get a response of illumination: “ah! You’re creating Shared Value!”

Youth attending a Butter Youth Conference by Open Youthology

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[i] http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/155/the-sharing-economy.html

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_consumption

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First I’d like to quickly apologize for being absent from blogging for so long. The exciting and intoxicating challenges of leading a growing company means I have less time for other pleasurable endeavours, but it won’t keep me away forever. With that, lets ease back into genYchina.com with a review of Gerald Clayton.

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In the past year that I’ve had Gerald Clayton in my playlist, there are countless times that I’ve heard his songs and had to flip through my iTunes to check who it is. Every time I expect it to be Robert Glasper, because their playing styles are very similar — lyrical, light and elegant, yet with deep-seeded funk and soul driving the course of their musical compositions. While Robert Glasper uses a lot of hip-hop and RnB elements in many of his jazz-fusion pieces, Gerald Clayton utilizes a traditional jazz ensembles but can still capture the same rhythm and blues attitude we’ve come to know and love.

It doesn’t surprise me therefore, that Gerald Clayton, a Jazz Pianist, has for some years been a fixture in Roy Hargrove‘s quintets.  Roy Hargrove has been one of the main stalwarts of Jazz-Funk and Jazz-Soul fusion for over 10 years with both the RH Factor and his Quintet. Gerald Clayton toured with Hargrove’s Quintet throughout the 2006-2007 seasons and was the pianist in Hargrove’s 2008 ‘Earfood’ album. I am sure these were important formative years for Gerald Clayton and did a lot in forming his sound today.

I believe the ‘Earfood’ album was when I first noticed Gerald Clayton. If I go back to that album I am sure we would find a few tracks that showcase some exquisite piano playing.

Clayton’s edginess is matched and rounded-out by his deliciously intricate playing. Growing up trained in classical music, he brings the full breadth of his repertoire and experience into his jazz music. His 2006 work on two Diana Krall albums may have brought good seasoning to this side of his sound.

What is even more impressive is Clayton’s youth. Graduating with a bachelors of Arts from USC Thorton School of Music in 2006, at the age of 27 Clayton already has 2 albums under his own name. He’s already garnered 2 Grammy nominations, one for the song “All of You” on Clayton’s 2009 ‘Two-Shade’ album, and another for his work in “Battle Circle” on the 2010 ‘The New Song and Dance’ album from his father and uncle’s band, The Clayton Brothers. While Gerald Clayton’s first grammy win eludes him, it is obvious that it is an inevitability. Gerald Clayton is defining himself as one of the leading figures in this new generation of Jazz.

I’m still working through Gerald Clayton’s newest album, ‘Bond: The Paris Sessions’ released earlier this year, but what I’m hearing so far is a continued maturation of Gerald’s sound; drawing on his classical piano training, he is wisely being patient with his compositions, letting them simmer and ripen at their own pace.  Clayton is not afraid of the nakedness of raw, articulate jazz. Instead, he boldly fills the space with unwavering, refined, independent piano that demands your attention and respect. At each moment you can hear he is in complete control, and is aggressively driving you, the listener, to meet him at the middle in the world he is creating.

I’m thoroughly impressed by this young pianist and have already gained hours of enjoyment from his music. I have nothing but continued high hopes and expectations for what is to come.

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In the Nov/Dec 2010 Issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine, there is a fantastic article entitled “The Demographic Future” by Nicholas Eberstadt, where he introduces what the world of 2030 will look like from a demographic standpoint. As he explains:

“It is already possible to draw a reasonably reliable profile of the world’s population in 2030. This is, of course, because the overwhelming majority of those who will inhabit the world 20 years from now are already alive. As a result, one can make some fairly confident estimates of important demographic trends, including manpower availability, the growth in the number of senior citizens, and the resulting support burden on workers.”

Mr. Eberstadt spends a portion of his essay on China’s future situation, and he paints an outlook most people familiar with China’s demographic trends have known for some time: a doubling of the number of senior citizens, a shrinking of the younger working class, and rudimentary social welfare and pension systems that incapable of coping with the massive imbalance.

This coming reality is shared by the US and all developed nations, except China’s is pushed to the extremes because of its much larger population, much poorer per capita income, much lower education levels, and a more ill-equipped pension system.

Yet, for all these colossal national challenges, Eberstadt’s essay adds one more demographic trend unique to China that will have significant social and cultural implications:

“…China will face a growing number of young men who will never marry due to the country’s one-child policy, which has resulted in a reported birth ratio of almost 120 boys for every 100 girls…By 2030, projections suggest that more than 25% of Chinese men in their late 30s will never have married. The coming marriage squeeze will likely be even more acute in the Chinese countryside, since the poor, uneducated, and rural population will be more likely to lose out in the competition for brides.”

Can you even begin to comprehend living in a society where 1 in every 4 adult men you meet will have never married, and not by choice? How could this change the social and cultural dynamics of China?

Here are some ideas to get you pondering:

Men Marrying Younger Women

If a man cannot find a woman to marry in his peer group, perhaps he will find greater opportunity to marry a girl of a younger generation. By then, perhaps this man will have saved a little more money and may be desirable enough for a younger woman (and that young woman’s family) to consider. In fact, this is already a part of China’s reality today. It is quite common to meet Chinese couples where the man is 10, 20 or 30 years older than his wife. Chinese men are already putting off marriage until they can properly afford to provide for a wife and family. Chinese pragmatism and a continued income-imbalance based on gender play roles here. Perhaps the demographics of 2030 will show this trend to strengthen and become even more commonplace in the population instead of shrinking.

Sexuality in Question

There is great support on both sides of the argument as to whether Homosexuality is a genetic or social outcome. However, if you are persuaded that Homosexuality is in part influenced by social factors, then it is worthwhile to explore what impact such a large population of unmarried men might have on the issue of sexual orientation. There is already a thriving LGBT community and subculture in China, but as ‘coming out’ continues to find acceptance and support in the younger generations, will this significant gender imbalance have any effect on the perspective of the LGBT community in the China’s future mainstream consciousness?

Anger and Frustration

The prospect of never finding a life partner can be one of the greatest fears in a person’s life. In a culture like China’s, where the mainstream societal expectation continues to put heavy emphasis on progeny, family network strength, and family unit establishment as a benefit to status-building, for these one in four adult Chinese males, being single adds extra dimensions of undesirability. Deep personal anger and frustrations must inevitably be a byproduct of these societal pressures.

If these single men will be found predominantly in a single demographic – namely rural, poor and uneducated men – what we might see is the emergence of a distinct sub-group of people, or a new class segregation. An entire class of potentially angry, frustrated, relatively poor and uneducated single men can mean serious threats to societal stability, if this group builds a class identity that feels antagonized by society as a whole.  China’s history is full of examples when a group lashes out in defiance and/or violence. This potential new class of single, frustrated men will number in the tens of millions in 2030.

Resilience of Chinese Endurance

There are also a number of examples in history of the Chinese (and other Asian cultures) enduring harsh, distressed, unfair circumstances for generations. It speaks to the resilience and strength of Chinese culture in helping the particular afflicted group align its interests with the general collective society, enabling them to live out their lives enduring the pains of their life situation.

Perhaps this group of single men will not affect anything socially or culturally, but instead stay silent and endure their circumstance as other groups of Chinese have done in the past. For this to happen though will depend on the state and strength of China’s collective culture in the coming 20 years.

(Photo Reference)

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The Chinese government has been aware of these demographic trends for some time now. They have known, likely before the rest of the world did, that China’s fertility rate fell below the minimum population-replacement fertility rate (2.1 children per family) more than two decades ago.  So why hasn’t the government done anything if it can see the problems that may lie waiting ahead?

The more immediate challenges China faces must be addressed first. Enacting and maintaining the one-child policy alleviated growing pressures on agriculture and natural resources to give China a chance to shift industries and redirect capital into transforming China into an industrial nation and then a privatized economy. Without first accomplishing the short-term goals, China will never be in a position with the right resources to solve any longer-term issues.

Second, having a unified, single-minded governing body and a mass society that generally trusts and believes in the decisions of its government have its unique advantages. One of those advantages is the ability to enact sweeping and often extreme changes very quickly.  The Chinese government thirty years ago asked a nation to limit child bearing to one per family. It is not inconceivable that the same government can ask this same nation thirty years later to double its children – for the betterment of the society.

(Photo Reference)

While the official government rhetoric until now has been no changes in the One Child Policy, we are starting to see experimentation in a few selected demographics, and the creation of small policy loop-holes that are allowing more Chinese families to legally have more than one child. A good friend of mine who was a former UN officer working on the issue of China’s birth and fertility concurs with the expectation that China will sooner rather than later reverse its stance on the one-child policy and push some new form of incentive to drive birthrates up.

The question is whether the incentives will be enough. One of the biggest concerns facing Chinese families today is how to afford raising one child, let alone two. As one recent article from Reuters explains, some couples who have the opportunity to have a second child still choose only to have one as the costs of living and education are so substantial.  In our own research work at China Youthology, we observe an increasing number of young post 80’s and 90’s kids who say they have no desire to have any children at all. They simply are not interested in a life with parenting responsibilities.

This could all mean for the Chinese government, that something a bit stronger than incentives may be needed in order for fertility rates to rise again. If there is any country that has the political audacity and executional strength to do something so drastic, it is China.

However, for this coming generation of frustrated, single men, any policy changes now are too little too late. This emerging reality is almost here. The only thing we can do now is develop a richer and stronger Chinese culture so they can find some relief from any feelings of alienation or frustration. New initiatives that will help cohesion of family, community, and collective social units will be integral in enabling those unable to find a life-partner to cope and have other life-meanings to pursue.

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Hi everyone, if you haven”t heard already, China Youthology will be embarking on a short US Tour in June 2011 to share our insights and findings for those who want a greater in-depth perspective of China and China”s youth segment.

This Tour is built for corporate engagement, where China Youthology will come visit the inviting organization at the space of their choosing to give a presentation. If any of your colleagues, friends or business partners are interested in learning more about China”s youth without first coming to China, we invite them to contact us, and secure a date on our Tour.

Thanks!
Kevin

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Q: On Sina Weibo (China”s Twitter), people re-share the same post from an influential micro-blogger more than a hundred times within several minutes. But a post from Brands, fans rarely share… How can Brands generate interaction while transferring the product”s benefits?

A: First, who cares about brand attributes? Only the brand manager of that brand does. Do you as a consumer of media and products yearn to hear and learn about brand attributes or a product”s benefits? I bet the answer is no.

Social Media has been built in part to equalize and democratize interaction and relationship. Brands need to approach social media as if they are any other individual in social media. What do individuals talk about? Do they talk to their friends about their personal attributes? No. Why? Because its weird, no one cares, you”ll piss off your friends and it makes you look like you”re an arrogant narcissist.

So what do real influential individuals talk about, and what is it that other people love them for? Influential individuals talk about the topics that they are passionate about. Specifically, the issues that are important to them and to their community. Other people learn about the individual”s personality by the things that individual talks and cares about. The individual does NOT exclusively tell other people he/she is about this or that.

So Brands need to do the same. Brand attributes and values are the personality of the brand. But then, as a personality, what should the Brand care about that is going on in the real world? How does the Brand, as a real individual, participate in the real world? The continual answering, exploring, exercising these questions is how a Brand should behave in social media.

Brands that build games or entertaining platforms is ok, it allows people to participate and interact. But instead of trying to get people to engage directly with the Brand in its brand attributes, the brand should build platforms and interactions that help individuals participate in the issues that the individual (and the brand) cares about in the world.

Toms: Really talking and doing what they care about.

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Every time I read or hear someone use the term ‘Social Media’ I shudder. That’s because nine times out of ten the term is used for instructing how to Use social media, with little attention paid to what actually Is social media.

A Google search for the term ‘Social Media’ quickly provided a whole slew of article titles I abhor:

“Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business”

“7 tools to monitor your competitors’ traffic”

“10 ways to measure social media for business”

“14 strategies to grow your blog’s audience”

“Losing Control and More: 5 Fears Of Social Media”

“Hidden Social Media ”Gems”: Three Useful Twitter Case Studies”

“Get to Know Your Customers Through Social Media—It’s as Simple as a Digital Handshake”

“Five Things Most Social Media Marketers Forget (and Shouldn’t!)”

“Top-Level Metrics Are Just Candy for the Boss”

“How Blogs Are More Useful Than Email Newsletters”

“15 Tips to Increase Twitter Followers for your Local Business”

“10 Reasons Your Facebook Page Is Not Taking Off”

I’m sure we have all either written, read, or re-tweeted an article like these at one time or another. My grievance isn’t that discussing how to use social media is wrong or somehow false, but the over abundance of these articles shows that the social media professional community assumes social media is static and just needs to be properly optimized. The misconception comes from an error in focus.

People approach Social Media as Media, instead approach it as a way to understand the nature of Social.

Social Media is an evolving, perpetually changing thing. Not simply because technology continues to get better and enables new capabilities, but because the way people interact and the meanings of each ritual & action continues to be interpreted and reinterpreted by different peoples, different groups, and different regions, creating new opportunities and insights about how digital technology can add value to their lives.

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Even if social media marketers and professionals don”t get this, social media developers certainly do. Take Facebook as case in point. Its rise to success wasn’t from any breakthrough technology. It was successful because it chose a highly influential and underserved market (Ivy-League students) and created a service based on deep understanding of the social dynamics, social needs, and social capital most prized by that target group. (It also didn’t hurt that the founders of Facebook were at the time Ivy League students themselves, so they were intimately immersed and versed in the micro-social nuances of that community.) You have all heard of Mark Zuckerberg, but how many of you have heard of Chris Hughes? Chris is one of the co-founders of Facebook. And do you know what his job was at Facebook? As described in a Fast Company cover story about Chris Hughes:

“…unlike Zuckerberg and dorm mate and cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, he didn”t write software code and didn”t want to. Instead, he tried to figure out ways that people would want to connect with one another and share stuff more easily. (His nickname among Facebook insiders is “the Empath.”) Hughes began to make product suggestions, “screwing around with the site,” as he puts it. When they decided to open Facebook to students outside of Harvard, he argued that different schools should have their own networks, to help maintain the site”s feeling of safety and intimacy. He became the official Facebook explainer: part anthropologist, part customer-service rep, part media spokesperson.”

The co-founders of Facebook are more anthropologists and sociologists than they are developers.

Twitter is another great example. The three co-founders, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams created Twitter in a matter of a couple weeks as a ‘side project’ while they were all working for a podcasting company back in 2006. The code I’m sure wasn’t rocket science. And yet some people call them ‘lucky’. It wasn’t luck. It was the fact that the founders were probing the nature of how people interact online, and saw an emerging social need that had to be filled. And they filled it.

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This brings us back to social media marketers and professionals. If they could just shift their focus from social media as media to social media as social, they’d be in a better position to create real value for clients. Today’s social media practitioner is occupied with learning these platforms to build clicks, impressions, likes, followers, re-tweets, comments, etc. The problem is 1) these easy-to-count, hard metrics have never fully answered the client’s deeper needs of branding and cultural relevance with the end user and 2) even before the practitioner has successfully learned how to utilize the platforms competently, newer social media platforms, based on new social interactions change the game yet again.

In this fashion, the social media practitioner is constantly playing catch-up, and never fully delivering on the client’s key needs.

Start with the end in mind. Seek to understand what is the user’s social need that is being met with this new social media platform. How does your company, brand, product, engagement, elevate this social nuance? Perhaps instead of thinking, “We need to have a presence in all social media platforms” you should instead ask, “Which kinds of social pain-points does my company, brand, product, engagement, alleviate?” then, “Which platforms have mechanisms that successfully treat that social pain-point?” and then, “How can my company, brand, product, engagement best work with that platform to provide a new value-added mechanism?”

Its even better if there is no current mechanism existing to solve the social pain-point you’ve discovered. That means you can create a whole new platform (or partner with an existing platform to develop) and offer totally new value, to the user and to your client.

Social media professionals need to be experts on social, not experts on media. They need to take the lead and understand why the user is really using that platform. They need to clearly understand why they’ve chosen to engage the user in that particular way. And then they need to elevate that engagement and show users that social media professionals can truly add value to the user’s experience. Marketers need to stop asking, “What kind of interaction is available?” and instead start asking, “What kind of interaction is sustainably beneficial?”

I truly hope one day soon when we use the term ‘social media’ we will be referring to the social meanings being created and enhanced by digital, instead of as a tool and channel to further our communications campaigns.

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Source:http://boldink.co.uk/
The Pains of an Industry:
The Digital Disruption has made interacting with the individual exponentially more complex and nuanced. The plethora of new channels not only makes reaching a segmentation more difficult, but traditional segmentations are obsolete as individualized digital experiences are creating people with multi-faceted, multi-layered and unique identity points.
Digital has lowered barriers of entry to many industries and professional competition is on the rise in all domains. Tech companies are becoming media agencies, management consultancies are becoming digital agencies, and digital agencies are becoming traditional/creative agencies.
Competition is not only rising in the professional practices, but where it actually counts too: the ability to influence. Digital has enabled each connected individual to potentially be the king of their own domain, or the multiple domains in their sphere of influence. The open stream of consciousness that now exists means the work and influence offered by professional services is even more at risk of being belittled and relegated to irrelevance.
The ever-evolving nature of Digital means everyone, including those traditionally seen as ‘experts’, has fallen perpetually behind.
And so clients have lost confidence in the ability of these professional services to provide a reliable and appropriate return on investment. If the professional service’s influence on the end individual is diminished, if they don’t even know what would influence the end individual, and if they may not even have the capacity to learn what could influence the individual, why should clients pay?
What makes matters worse is that most professional services are still organized in large, lumbering, un-adaptive institutions that derive their revenues from over-charging on services that are fast becoming obsolete themselves.

In other words,
Its chaos out there
We’ve got our backs to the wall
And we don’t know what to do

So what is the most promising and versatile business model for the agencies and consultancies in the Insight Economy?

Formation & Scale:

1) Be Lean & Tactical, Modular in Growth
Lets take a page out of the geopolitics strategy playbook. Traditional military units are ineffective in engaging trans-border terrorist groups, but we’ve now created tactical military cells specially equipped to handle specific needs and objectives in specific circumstances in specific locales. Professional services need to be reformed the same way. No longer can we operate with large, generalist divisions. We need to live in small cells of tactical units; each designed to be the expert on a specific purpose, in a specific environment, in a specific localization. Only then can we be flexible and focused enough to stay on top of the learning curve, and adapt to evolving situations. It’s also cost-effective. Operating a smaller group means the unit can survive at a time when the work required becomes more piecemeal while still requiring a high state of intensity.
Lean and Focused doesn”t mean alone. Like terrorist cells or elite military units, professional services need to live in fluid integrated networks that work in tandem, coordinated to achieve one objective. Different units of the same expertise should be built in different localizations to master the nuances of the diverse geographies. Professional services should drop in and out of different situations, working with different partners, and solve different problems.
It”s the only way to operate in this influentially-fractionalized environment.

2) Be Upward+Downward Scalable

Fast Company recently published a fantastic article about advertising, and in it they described a company called Co, a 5-person consultancy that can draw upon a network of 44 multi-disciplinary partner agencies in the event they take on a project more than their 5-person team can handle. In this way they can scale up and down to precisely fit the project size. In addition, they can invite the right combination of talents together that fit the project scope.
Upwards+Downwards Scalability may not be the most job secure, but its more sustainable than the status quo. Clients and the work require greater and greater customization. If you cannot offer the exact solution, a competing team will. The industry can no longer afford or tolerate redundancies. Those that expected an advertising or media job to mean a steady paycheck should wake up. The future of this industry will look a lot more like the film-production industry, where everyone lives project by project.
Such frequent scaling may pose problems for quality control, but this is the challenge of the new professional service. Creating replicable guidelines, procedures and methodologies to ensure highly integrated collaboration from Day 1 will be the mark of a successful company.

Scope:
3) Be Highly Specialized, Non-Integrated, and Positioned to Frame the Question
AdAge published an article by TB Song, Ogilvy’s Greater China Chairman that talks about the changing trends in China. Song states:

“Marketers often spend 10% of their budget to produce the average TV spot and 90% to blast it across mass media. In the coming years, budgets will look more like those of movie studios –80% for production and 20% on promotion. The stronger the content, the less one needs to spend on publicity.”

Indeed, today’s individual will only pay attention if there are nuanced, resonating, and timely personal meanings and relationships involved. But in this chaos its not only content production that will grow, the more important issue is What the content production should be, and Who it is for.
Song proposes that Ad Agency Planners will break away and form their own niche practices. I agree with Song’s forecast. Successfully answering “What content production should be and Who it is for” requires long-term, immersed specializations in categories/practices to develop the proper insights and trust. As traditional segmentations give way to tribal rituals, secrets, and micro-social interactions, the important question becomes which tribe, ritual, secret, and interaction should the organization/brand be involved with. Only a highly specialized professional service has the chance to answer this question. Specialists need to detach themselves from their present integrated service units in order to focus on particular areas and find the greatest relevant value – that”s what clients are really ready to pay for.

Unfortunately not all specialists –and by extension agencies– are created equal. Planners are already positioned to capture high individual value because they are helping make sense of the chaos, and helping to frame the question. By the same logic specialized market researchers and management consultants may have a similar value-added.
This leaves Creatives in a particularly difficult position. In an age where one ‘Big Idea’ has a harder and harder time convincing its value and ability to resonate, Creatives are at risk of becoming a commodity. The earlier mentioned Fast Company article suggests that the way to capture higher value is for Creative Strategists to evolve from story-tellers to story-builders, meaning they curate, participate, and add to a never-ending storyline/lines in co-creation with the end individuals. This again would need to be highly specialized, as story-builders need to be adept at maintaining and innovating intricate interactions that are relevant to the cultural nuances of the particular community.
There are some services following de-integration that will be commoditized, and have already begun so. Media buying, media metrics, and to a lesser extent creative production are becoming more interchangeable and will become generally support-services, because they don’t answer the main value question “What content production should be and Who is it for”.
Those that will offer the highest value, and reap the greatest rewards, will be those professional services that can de-integrate, and be highly specialized with the ability to Frame the Question.

Value:
While the above Formation, Scale and Scope sections deal with organizing oneself for tomorrow’s industry, this Value section is about defining and defending a sustainable positioning.
4) Give Free Data-Points, Get Paid for Insights
A great blog article interviewing the founder of PSFK reveals the new nature of information value-creation, and anyone in the Business of Information –professional services, publishers, media– should pay attention. The small team at PSFK navigates through an immense amount of information and data points at a voracious speed. Acting as a media platform, they freely share and broadcast the information they come across with the public. PSFK instead gets work and makes its money consulting on concept development and trends. Their value-added is not from the selection of information they broadcast, but from linking disparate data points, synthesizing patterns into insights.
Why freely publish what you’re looking at? Shouldn’t keeping it secret give you more advantage?
Source: celinecelines
PSFK has embraced the new reality that information flows free, and the benefits gained from free broadcast outweigh the loss of potential revenue from taxing that information access. Consider why you use Twitter. What benefits come from freely tweeting and re-tweeting all those links? For one, you gain a following of people who begin to associate you as a credible source for a specific kind of information — sounds to me like the best kind of advertising you could hope for. Perhaps more importantly, you build conversations and relationships with a growing network of like-minded and equally amazing people. A network that will elevate the quality of information you consume by in turn sharing with you what they’re looking at. In this new insight economy, professional services are only as good as their information community. The traditional model of market research that ignores community immersion and commitment is dead. Give free data-points. Build your information community. Get paid for deeply nuanced insights.
5) Narrow-Casted Community Connectors
Your community is your long-term defendable competitive advantage because it is one of the most difficult assets to build and copy. Ask any Web 2.0 platform and they’ll attest to this. Communities are not just important for social media, but as we’ve just discussed, for professional services as well. Once you have immersed yourself with credibility and trust in a distinguishable community, clients won’t just want to draw on your insights from that community, they’ll want to connect to the community itself. And they’ll hire you to help them do it. This is the professional service’s next value added beyond insight. This is the real influence industry.
As a community connector, a professional service will ‘narrowcast’: strategically identifying and working with a small group of community leaders who influence the influencers. Each company will narrowcast in the community they’re immersed in. PSFK offers connection to high-level creative thinkers. Co, narrowcasts from their extensive network of media, branding, technology and other experts in North America. Victor & Spoils, another company mentioned in the Fast Company article, crowd-sources creative production from their base of operations in Boulder, Colorado. China Youthology, the company I help lead, will explore connection opportunities between passionate organizations and the China Youth community.
Being a connector can produce powerful win-win opportunities, but can only be achieved by first having credibility with the community. This credibility is rooted in deep immersion, commitment, passion and membership.

“Won”t you be my neighbour?”

Where could we see this new model of professional service enter mainstream use?
It would have to be a place that a) Clients are willing to try new things and are thirsty for an edge b) There is less dominance by conglomerate holding companies c) There is a sufficient supply of talented specialists d) There is an entrepreneurial spirit by those in the industry e) There are growing communities of interest
I’d say that China has some challenges when it comes to growing the supply of quality talented specialists, but this problem is already on its way to solving itself as more and more talent migrates to Asia in search for new opportunities. The other hurdle for China are the clients. It is not that China’s domestic clients aren’t willing to try something new, but the unsophistication, immaturity and general lack of standards in the client-agency/consultancy relationship has in the past made progress difficult. A lot of education, hand-holding, and culture-building continues to be needed. But perhaps this is also China’s saving grace. With less legacy impeding the breaking of convention, maybe China will have an easier time embracing a new agency and consultancy model.
However, I can also see other regions being the first to champion this model. All have their weaknesses and strengths, but all are in desperate need for change, and a model — like this one — that can help solve their ills. I would also surmise that the adoption of this model may arise by industry instead of by geography. Ad agencies and Market Research agencies I would expect to be the first.

Some last thoughts:
With all this reinvention going on in agencies and consultancies, the onus is really on Clients. In the new Insight Economy marketers will not be able to rely on a one-stop-shop to answer all their questions and do all their work. It won’t be only a matter of assigning budgets and deliberating on pitches. While able to help clients frame the right questions and connect highly nuanced strategies, new agencies and consultancies will only be able to add value if the client is sophisticated enough to know what kind of professional service they need, and what kinds of value creation really matter to the organization.

If you’re finding yourself in the Insight Economy, and feel the pains of the industry, start your reinvention by first asking, What’s your specific community of connection? How do you immerse to capture the right, relevant insights and build to provide a unique, value-added professional service?

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‘Yesterday You Said Tomorrow’ came out earlier this year to much anticipation and fanfare around the world. Christian Scott, the Grammy-nominated boy wonder who took the jazz community by storm with his 2006 album ‘Rewind That’, this year came out with his 4th album in five years.

Scott, since the last time I wrote about him, has been hard at work creating new music and gaining priceless experience touring. Scott’s last album, a live recording of his concert at the 2008 Newport Jazz Festival, was solid and provides a more raw experience of his work and sound. But I feel this year’s ‘Yesterday You Said Tomorrow’ is the rightful continuation of Christian Scott’s journey last visited in 2007’s Anthem.

Seven of the ten tracks on this album have titles that try to elicit sharp commentaries about hotly debated issues in American politics and society. Songs like “The Roe Effect”, “American’t”, “Jencide”, and “Angola, LA & The 13th Amendment” are examples of this. While the album ‘Anthem’ was fiercely angry, crying out in anguish and pain, ‘Yesterday You Said Tomorrow’ has internalized this grief much more. You can clearly feel that the same feelings of frustration are present in this new album, but they are now coming from a much deeper place, and have shifted Scott’s music to be more muted, more reserved, more pensive. But I feel this album has even more energy than ‘Anthem’ if that is all possible. I think what I am hearing is evermore maturity coming from Christian’s horn.

The music, as it has since Scott’s first album, signifies another step forward in the sound of contemporary Jazz. He takes every opportunity to display his “Whisper Technique”, a distinct breathy, airy, hazy effect on his sound. Scott is said to have perfected this technique over the past couple of years, and found his breakthrough when trying to mimic the sound of his horn to the sound of his mother’s voice. The “Whisper Technique” is also accentuated by Scott’s custom-designed, custom-made trumpet, nicknamed “Katrina”. To elevate this whispering sound, Scott’s music is dark, deep, and moody, the perfect atmosphere to envelope an eerie, whispering lyric.

Christian Scott’s music is rich in deep, tonal hues. It is, admittedly, very impressionistic of Miles Davis’ earlier era, though with very contemporary arches. One of these contemporary pillars is Matt Stevens’ guitar work. Having been with Scott since the beginning, these two have matured their sound together, and have almost become two halves of a whole. Pay attention to Matt on each of the tracks he plays on.

My favourite songs on this album are: American’t, Isadora, and most of all, The Eraser. There is an edginess to these songs that is so deliciously subtle. The songs move forward at a hypnotic pace, and I often find myself swaying back and forth or nodding relentlessly to the onslaught of their tight tempo. These songs make my forehead frown in concentration. I am exhilarated.

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Hiromi Uehara

Over the past couple of years I”ve been attracted to the progressive sounds of the electric guitar as it has been one of the more defining voices of contemporary jazz in the past couple decades. Lately though, I”ve found myself listening and buying more albums from jazz pianists. Similar to my last jazz review of Rober Glasper, a pianist from the US, today I”m writing about Hiromi Uehara, a pianist from Japan.

At the age of 31, Hiromi is still a toddler in Jazz-years, but her accomplishments already show she will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most accomplished jazz musicians of the modern era. Starting piano at the age of 5 and introduced to jazz at the age of 8, Hiromi played with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of 14 and played & recorded with Chick Corea, one of the leading jazz pianists of our time, at the age of 17. Talk about a great start to a career. She went on to study under Ahmad Jamal, another of Jazz Piano”s great”s, while at Berklee. Since 2003, she has been touring the world with her trio, sometimes quartet, and has released 6 albums under her name and 2 DVDs. She”s only 31!!!

There is a reason why she is already so decorated. Listen to her Music. Just listen to it. Every single song an intimate masterpiece in its own right. Thoroughly trained in the Classical tradition, you can the heritage and structured theory in her music. It is almost unbelievable that her sound is only a trio/quartet, when in fact it does often sound like an entire orchestral composition. Her music is colossal. I think it is a pleasurable by-product of those Jazz composers that try to utilize more of their classical roots in their music, very much like Brad Mehldau.

Hiromi still keeps it swinging though. She plays with a ferocity and fire that only comes from a jazz syncopation. But her swing is one that is very rare in the jazz world. While many contemporary jazz greats, like Roy Hargrove, Christian McBride, Esperanza Spalding, push the boundaries of jazz style, jazz theology, jazz rhetoric, Hiromi pushes the boundaries of jazz”s definition. The only apt metaphor I can think of is from Visual Arts: Hargrove, McBride, Spalding are like Impressionists, Cubists and Surrealists while Hiromi is like an abstract expressionist. The first group explores and redefines the subject matter in new dimensions, while the latter explores the medium itself.
It is such a pleasure to listen to each of Hiromi”s songs. Each one is fundamentally different than the last, in a different paradigm, on a different plane of existence than the last. Hiromi is deeply intrigued by time signatures and musical space. I am guessing this is the direct influence from Ahmad Jamal. Her 2006 album ”Spiral” and 2007 album ”Time Control” are wonderful examples of her exploration in this area.

Hiromi Uehara

Yet, within all of this structural experimentalism, Hiromi is extremely lyrical. I think that is probably what holds all her music together so tightly. She presents to you with a lyrical quest to follow while she challenges you to absorb & engage the redefinitions she places around you. Whenever I play her music, I cannot help but stop whatever else I am doing and just exercise my mind and ears. It is mesmerizing work for both the performer and listener.

One final thought I want to tack onto Hiromi”s post. For all you jazz fans out there, if you have never been to Japan, and Tokyo in particular, GO. It is a jazz lover”s fantasy. I am not totally sure about the clear figures, but Japan represents either the #1 or at the very least the #2 jazz market in the world. Its the reason why so many jazz musicians intentionally build their tours to include Japan when they release a new album. Its the reason why Bluenote jazz clubs, the most successful jazz club franchise, at one time had 4 jazz clubs in Japan versus only 2 in the US. But what is more important, is the density of jazz and real jazz lovers in Japan. With America, even in New York, jazz competes with so many other native and popular music forms like hip hop, pop, electronica. Europe, while loving jazz has a deep obsession with classical and electronica. But for some reason, and I think it is the Japanese”s attraction to technical excellence and complex hierarchy, they have since the second world war, fallen head over heels for Jazz. While they also deeply cherish Classical and many other musical forms like hip hop and electronica, Jazz has captured a much larger portion of the listener”s ear. And as is typical of Japanese culture, when they like something, they get obsessively passionate, geeky, and hardcore about it. Walking on the streets of Tokyo I can often find boxes of second-hand classic jazz vinyls on sale, or their record shops have huge sections dedicated to jazz. Jazz artists, even those that are minor names in North America, have significant followings in Japan and Jazz concerts in Japan command a higher price-point and sell out more often.

With this kind of incubative atmosphere, is it such a surprise that a musical genius like Hiromi Uehara can be identified at such an early age as a jazz prodigy and be so intentionally cultivated to her extreme level?
Listen to her music. Hear and feel jazz at its most refined.

Hiromi Uehara

*Some of facts about Hiromi”s life were taken from her Wikipedia Page.

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