It is argued that in our world there are many "pessimists", who do not believe that climate, environmental and natural disasters can still be averted, and therefore want to live today as if there was no tomorrow. And if you have nothing more to expect, why should you also let the pleasures of today be taken away from you? Vacations, air travel, football riots, luxury and increasingly technological "convenience". Dancing on the volcano. It is argued that we must do better than this, with the Inner Development Goals. Gentle optimism, mild on the relationship, sharp on the content. Together we have a world to win.
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The starting meta-trend at the basis of this paper is that lifestyles in the city will continue to “Blur” between work and urban leisure. To describe “Blur”, one might say that the integration of technology and increased connectedness into all aspects of life has led to the hyper-availability of content regardless of setting, breaking down the traditional wall of separation between work and home. Behaviours, activities, and categories will increasingly overlap and complement each other. Business categories themselves will cease to exist as such. They will increasingly blur into new blended propositions, beyond linear innovation. In this dynamic context, perceptions of value and the social construction of notions of luxury will continue to translate into people’s willingness to pay a premium, from mass luxury to high end, restructuring consumption dynamics for commodities, consumables and services at brand, innovation and proposition levels. The paper offers extensive analysis of these themes. Presenting an existing tool from a world-class research programme on urban futures plus two proprietary tools developed for the specific purpose of this paper, as based on reflexivity, anecdotal evidence and a rich apparatus of references.
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This proposal originates from a pilot of the ‘Frontrunners coalition’ on initiatives for the Circular Economy at the city level. This spin off project studies strategizing in hotels, to find innovative solutions how to manage the integration of circularity in the overall business strategy. The theoretical innovation is to better understand the strategizing process by using the theoretical framework of “strategy-as-practices (S-as-P)”. Exploring in two cases the daily challenges of implementing principles of the circular economy at a luxury and a budget hotel (group). The “strategy-as-practices (S-as-P) framework will be used, emphasizing that strategizing is a joint process of (higher) management and other practitioners (within and outside of the company). The data collection and analysis will be executed by Bachelor and Master students of Hotelschool the Hague and faculty of the research centre. The stages of the Design Oriented Research Approach will be used in this project, with a focus on the stages of Analysis & Diagnoses and Solution Design. The hotels will facilitate this research by giving access and support to the operations and (formal) meetings and additional primary data collection. (Small teams of) Student researchers collect qualitative data based on interviews and observations: they will ‘blend’ in during a 10-week period. Faculty of Hotelschool The Hague will safeguard the continuity and alignment in the project in the several rounds in which these steps are executed. The finding will be presented to the participating companies, the coalition in Amsterdam and the Hospitality industry. Direct societal impact is the showcasing of potential initiative and the responsibility of organizations towards circularity in their environment. Another result is the proposal for a larger follow-up project. This larger project will continue this study within a broader set of hotels but will also be studying and developing potential interventions for improvement the strategizing process.
