THANK YOU, for all your input so far! We received ideas and answers through our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and several people even sent in complete articles and worked out ideas. But DON'T STOP yet, we have the time
until the 12th of March to gather our thoughts, enrich them and create new ideas. So please keep sending them in and join the discussion!
We thought it would be nice to give you a short wrap up;
what has been said about the Netherlands and the competitiveness of its knowledge economy?
We began by exploring what should be
changed in NL, some thoughts were:
- Attitude of laziness/ Lack of ambition
- instead of striving for more and more income, striving for a higher quality of living
- Less complaints and more do'ers
- Feel responsable and connected to the rest of the world
- Focus on shared interests from people (who doesn't want a healthy planet?) instead of the current focus on the differences
- too much of unsystemized talks between government, developers and citizens
- open up more to international concepts, people, ideas.
When we asked about our greatest
strength, our water management came up mostly:
- Water engineering
- Dutch Design
- Good infrastructure
- It's lowland position, along with experience building the Delta Works and Zuiderzee Works.
Then we started dreaming of 2020, NL would then be:
- still famous for our
windmills and dykes. And we become known for the development and knowledge sharing on
dealing with rising sea levels and (off shore)
wind energy.
- the
most Livable Delta in Western Europe and decision makers visiting from everywhere to see how this was achieved. They are especially interested in the holistic approach that provided the direction for this situation, in which sectors looked for their
synergy instead of competing for attention, and funding.
- there is
no more private transportation such as cars. In the future the Netherlands has already surpassed the "big brother" fear and works
100% interconnected, with a completely convenient transport system and where people are completely open to it.
-
Four big cities competing eachother in the field of sustainability. In Utrecht all housing is CO2 neutral. Rotterdam has the most sustainable port in the world. In Amsterdam is the most elctric car friendly city on this globe and Den haag generates most of his energy decentralized. Let our pearls be inspriring examples for others!
And some of the first, concrete ideas that have been sent in are:
- Inspired by a column of Pieter Hilhorst;
3 guidelines to foster innovation: "de-regulate, small-scaliness and do-it-yourself" from Carel Muller.
-
Life Long Learning and how to create a safe and positive environment for senior students by Bee from Singapore. And also
Igor Kluin wrote before on our blog about this idea.
-
Build extensive tidal flow energy generation facilities by Jon Brown
-
Penta energetica: 5 principles that form a package of policy principles, that promote energy integration, resulting in a Neterlands with an “High Quality, Low Carbon society”, from Kees den Blanken.
-
From Development Cooperation to Development Investment, by Third Chamber members (amongst who Marlon van Dijk)
If you would like to comment on one of the ideas, leave them below this post. And if you like to send in your own idea, please do:
josine@enviu.org
It's lowland position, along with experience building the Delta Works and Zuiderzee Works, means it's in a perfect position to build extensive tidal flow energy generation facilities. Rising tides will be used to inundate vast reservoirs, filling them via sluices through inlet turbines. When the tide recedes again the reservoirs would drain through through outlet turbines. To manage and store peak performance and cover times when tidal conditions require the turbines to be closed off, spare electricity generation capacity during the night will be used to pump water to additional reservoirs that stand above the high tide line - these can be drained to cover shortfalls in capacity at a higher energy yield than the tidal reservoirs due to the increased 'drop' on the water held in them. An extensive network of tidal energy generation of this nature would fit perfectly with the Netherlands' ongoing requirement to protect against high tides and storm surges from the North Sea, provide energy independence into the future and possibly create enough power to export throughout Europe.
If this technology was to be exported then cheap tidal power generation stations could be established around the world's coasts. This would make short hop 100% electrically powered ships economically viable, as they would only have to be able to reach the next station, where the lower cost electricity would be available to recharge their batteries. Who would make these high tech ships? The Netherlands, of course...
Even with electric cargo ships, it's clear that the future will be one where goods travel short distances from production to consumption, without a fuel as cheap as oil it's obvious that physical goods will not be carried halfway around the world. At the same time, people will travel such distances less as the cost of flights increases. This will create a situation where ideas are no longer transmitted around the world as rapidly as we have become used to. Luckily we already have the Internet, which is excellent for piping any form of data around the world, but rarely useful information. Even today, with telecommunications systems being better than ever, a common way that products and ideas move around the world is by businessmen and entrepreneurs seeing products in different countries, realising their potential in another market and then taking them there. Without today's levels of travel this process will be stifled.
Assuming that commercialisation remains the primary incentive for manufacturing products around the world then the licensing of designs will become more important than a single company expanding its production and exporting its goods and this process will need to be facilitated in some way. Only the web offers a platform where this could possibly occur but even on the Internet the laws of a country define how well it can support different web activities, for instance the UK has gambling laws that make it better suited to supporting gambling websites than most countries, but the royalties system on music impedes the commercial viability of web radio there. If the Netherlands were to tune its laws and legislation appropriately (perhaps automatically honouring foreign patents as rights protection within the country) then it could become the international hub for trading in product licenses over the Internet, acting as a matchmaker and clearing house for ideas from around the world. Money would be made on commissions and fractional side royalties from the system in much the same way that stock market trading does. Indeed, the trade in ideas could naturally draw investment markets to the Netherlands, increasing that side of the economy.