On Viadeo, in the group "Smarter Cities - The Sustainable City" Michel Vandenberghe (co-developer of LENR-Cities) has published a new article "Crisis? Why we should be optimistic ..."
Having seen the current shortcomings, challenges to face, he explains the need for a paradigm shift towards more "Open", communication, agility. He concluded by explaining LENR-Cities will be an implementation of this new philosophy.
there is connection with the emerging concept of social networks, social business, but also connected objects, 3D printings. This is individualisation that paradoxically demand for more relation than usually does hierarchy.
Interesting to hear that Asia have a cultural advantage, as the group is the basic of their values.
Now beyond the article, it is clear that communication LENR-Cities is gently rising , as if they were preparing something for us 
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I can not tell you more, but it should be a reason to be optimistic 
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Here is a google+me translation of the article:
Quote from "Michel Vandenberghe"Display MoreReflection: The crisis? Why we should be optimistic ...
The world is changing. Just obvious. In all sectors, the pressure induced by a multitude of potential innovations grows. Disruption is certain for at least 1/3 of the sectors in the next 3 years and it is difficult to anticipate the impact given the inevitable systemic effects.
If there is uncertainty, it is about when the breach occurs. Given the uncertainty, the markets came into resistance. Companies no longer invest to sustain their activities. Why invest in an activity whose life will be better in a few years. The company knows that new entrants will eventually find ways to circumvent this resistance. Result: global growth slows.
It perpetuates organizations, structures, and men become merely a comodity. Taking those that meet the needs of the moment. They forget that innovation is first appropriation by those who build organizations. Result: growth slows even more, the pressure continues to grow and the ability to innovate, ie to capture the potential decreases.
We do not talk then of a need for transformation but of transition. The risk changes in nature. Only tomorrow is certain. We finance more resistance than innovation, a bottomless pit ... Finance then collapses on the weight of its own risks.
Actors in charge of promoting systemic effects, policies, attempts to limit the pressure with the effect of reducing these effects actually destroy what makes a system itself. We are on the brink.
How not to end up in the abyss? Three options: take a step back, fill the gap or build a bridge. Take a step back might work if the gap did not grow accordingly. Filling the gap? Impossible because the world is finite. Remains to build a bridge.
Why believe that we can build this bridge? It's just a choice. If you want ...
Specifically, a new architecture market emerges. We can start from the concept of "Social Business" to describe it. We need a group-based market organization , a form of multicellular organization. Remember: This is ownership by the group that build innovation. Note that from this point of view Asia has a definite advantage. The group and not the individual is the social and cultural hub.
The move towards social business is aligned with a major evolutionary pattern: The individualization. This is the apparent paradox because we do not understand the concept of co-evolution requires strong interactions. What is true in life is to scale societies. Objects as individuals and as organizations structure subjected to the same logic. Think for example of 3D printing, robotics, connected objects, the drones, the autonomous car, etc ... The internet brings the systemic effect but our human organizations do not follow. However, we understand the importance of what we call the digital transition and many are those who know that the survival of their organizations is at stake ..
It is about understanding how to translate what we know of social business industry. I speak of the organization of the tool across the company, not technological waves. Development type approaches 'Open', Open Innovation, Open Data, Open Source, Open Hardware, etc ... are manifestations of this "transformation 2.0". The industry is a smart and connected industry, organized in network, with mechanisms for aggregation and recycling, oriented to resource regeneration.
In fact, tomorrow already exists, which is not a surprise ... and it faces two major obstacles. Finance should be structured by the economy and not the reverse. Explain to me why the world is in recession, why men suffer because its financial model became inadequate. The second is obviously modes of governance. I am only stating the obvious.
And yet why should we be optimistic? There is another pattern. Every organization first to ensure its own survival objective. This also explains the two previous obstacles. It also has another effect: The development of alternative financial and governance models, led by those who cannot survive in the currently required conditions. The alternatives are many and only lack a systemic effect to overturn the whole.
This reflection has fueled 'The Business Factory' project with a focus on the nature of the structure capable of initiating this systemic effect. Over time, there are lots of papers written by people I admire intelligence. Skip to practice requires marrying these skills and entrepreneurship. This is the real challenge.
This challenge, we try to meet with the LENR-Cities project in a particular area, that of energy (LENR stands for "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions"). To understand what it is, I would say that organizing matter at the nanoscale, we obtain new properties different from those of the base material, consider carbon fiber for example. This is probably true in the field of energy. It would also be possible to release in a 'smooth' way the energy of the atom, a kind of "nuclear chemistry" clean and low cost, capable of producing large amounts of energy without the dangers and consequences known to the nuclear energy.
We focus in this project a beam of innovations. We ask innovators in the fields of finance, law, physics, industry, science to devise a funding model of research, alternative to public funding and private research, to restructure the value-chain "Research-Industry", integrating the know-how that we acquired in the development of ecosystem with the project "The Business Factory" and with the aim to attract some of the world's scientific community engaged for 25 years on LENR field of innovation.
For information, in the United States, it is not surprising to find DARPA, SRI, Nasa or Navy among the actors involved in this work. For those interested the subject, I recommend the website of Jean-Paul Biberian, http://www.jeanpaulbiberian.net/ , one of the few French scientists expert in the field. We believe we are at the inflection point of the project, when forces combine to bring out the obvious.
Because we believe that our project is a good idea, then we know from experience, we are not only working on such an approach. This is our reason to be optimistic.
Michel Vandenberghe
July 30, 2014
