“Emerging innovation – what global companies can learn from emerging markets”

Our regular readers will by now have noticed that we’ve been carrying a banner ad at the top of our pages for the upcoming Economist Conferences session on innovation, 2 December in Geneva, with a 15 percent registration discount.

We’re very pleased with our new partnership with The Economist, one of two GenevaLunch media partnerships; the other media partnership we have is with Swiss weekly news magazine l’Hebdo, whose content we have republished on occasion.

These two top quality news groups represent the high level of journalism we believe people need to remain well-informed about the world around them. Whether you agree with what these publications have to say is not the point: their research is solid and their credibility good, providing a starting point for intelligent discussions and reflections about current topics.

Part of our agreement with Economist Conferences is that they will provide a discount to GenevaLunch readers for the conference fee  and we will cover the conference in our capacity as a regional media company.

Our credibility is important to our readers so we do not, as a rule, offer product or service discounts, a commercial operation that implies endorsement. The Economist conference in Geneva is part of the group’s worldwide conference series and an important part of Geneva’s rich fabric of conferences. This is one of the rare times when a significant number of people from the Lake Geneva region’s three business populations mix: local companies, international organizations, multinationals.

GenevaLunch has a third partner, the annual Lift conference on technology and society, which also brings these three groups together, part of the reason we work closely with them, and we expect our new partnership with The Economist to develop in the same way.

GenevaLunch fills an important gap in news reporting with its reliable coverage of Lake Geneva regional and national Swiss news in English. Our daily world news digest uses a balanced international approach appreciated by the mixed population in the region.

We’re an information bridge connecting the three groups mentioned, and we’re delighted we can enrich this with our newest partnership. To kick it off, we’ll be publishing an interview Monday 8 November with Susan Clark, the managing director of The Economist‘s Continental Europe-Africa-Middle East office in Geneva.

For those of you who tend to decide late about conferences, we’ll post a reminder here in two weeks to say time is running out.

To register for the Economist conference with a 15 percent GenevaLunch discount, click on the banner at the top of any GL page.

Geneva's St Pierre Cathedral, by Josh Fassbind, on flickr

Josh Fassbind, a regular photo contributor to GenevaLunch, is appealing to amateur photographers in Geneva for help with a project he’s undertaking. He’s posted this message on the GenevaLunch page on flickr, and I’m posting it here to reach a wider audience:

Dear art/photography lovers,

Are you a foreigner living in Geneva? You feel at home in Geneva and would like to share your vision/experience of the city?

I am a Geneva-based photographer in love with my city. Currently, I am working on a fine art photography project called “Geneva through the eyes of the world”. The idea behind this project is to discover or rediscover Geneva through the eyes of people from different countries and cultures living in the same city. Therefore, I intend to choose one person per nationality to photograph – and as many nationalities as possible.

For each portrait the aim is to highlight:
1 nationality;
1 place: each person chooses his/her favorite place in Geneva for the portrait – it could be an area, a café, a bench in a local park, etc.
1 word: I ask each person to describe their vision/experience of Geneva in one word. Again, this is open to a variety of possibilities. It could be a word describing how you feel about Geneva, how you perceive the life in the city, what you think about its people, etc.

Should you be interested in participating, please contact me in order to further discuss the project.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Josh Fassbind

An earlier accident, with truck overturned on the A1, necessitating a large emergency crew and the autoroute partially closed

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - GenevaLunch, like a lot of other businesses in the area, was caught by the massive traffic jam in both directions, between Geneva and Lausanne Wednesday late afternoon. It lasted more than four hours, had traffic moving at a crawl on the autoroute, and side roads anywhere near the highway were also packed with cars and very slow traffic. The cause was an accident at 14:45 near the Coppet exit, caused by an accident: the driver of a car lost control as she passed a semi-trailer truck, heading towards Geneva. She veered to the left, then to the right and the truck driver, trying to avoid her, ended up overturning his vehicle.

The driver of the car was taken to the university hospitals (HUG) in Lausanne with injuries that are not serious, and the other driver was not injured.

It took more than half a dozen fire trucks well over three hours to remove the truck. During that time part of the autoroute was closed.

The problem with getting older is that you remember the “good old days” that might not have been great, but that were better. Ten years ago I commuted daily between Saint Prex, in Vaud, and my office in Geneva. I could count on traffic being bad between 07:30 and 09:00, and 17:00 and 18:45. There were occasional accidents, but an accident that could block all traffic in the area for four hours was truly exceptional.

I’ve watched the impact of growing traffic density, and I think we have now reached the point where the failure to create six lanes where needed, or to provide workable public transport for people who live in the region’s small towns, is costing the Lake Geneva region a fortune. To do a rough calculation, if only one-third of drivers stuck in that 20 km stretch, going both directions, earn an average of CHF80 an hour and there are 165 cars per kilometre (they were bumper to bumper, so I’m allowing a bit more than a metre between them), and they each spent an extra hour on the road, the wasted work time alone costs about CHF176,000. Judging by the number of SUVs and other expensive vehicles the average wage is higher than CHF80. And maybe some of them didn’t lose an hour.

Add in the additional cost of running the cars, lost productivity rather than just wages, not to mention the cost to the environment. Vaud and Geneva need to redo their sums, look at the number of hours lost in traffic jams, which are larger and far more frequent than in the past. They now must convince the powers that be in Bern to add a third rail line and/or follow up the improvement around Morges with a similar system to widen the autoroute where it is most needed, Nyon or Coppet to Versoix, for example.

The city of Geneva’s free transport tickets for visitors is surely one of its best tricks for selling the city: never under-estimate the power of a free ride. This isn’t the first and the last time we’ll see this mentioned, but in a large US city newspaper, it will have a happy ripple effect, as long as they don’t confuse Geneva and Genoa or Switzerland and Sweden (I used to live in Minnesota, a state with a lot of smart people). Minneapolis Star & Tribune

Last-minute reminder: Americans in Geneva who are looking for fellow citizens for a Fourth of July party have two good options: the American International Club party, which requires registration (contact: admin@amclub.ch), and Democrats Abroad bring-your-own picnic at Parc Bastions in the centre of the city, open to all, starting at 15:00 and running through the evening. Both are free.

Are we surprised that the £1,200 which is a UK taxi company’s biggest fare ever ended up in Geneva? So the businessmen who took the ride won’t be surprised at taxi fares in Geneva.

They were driven from Northhampton to Geneva to catch a flight to Portugal, so they’ll probably be stuck with another large fare since they apparently weren’t aware that they can’t fly out of Geneva.

We’ve added a rich list of events and other information for the holidays to our events page. Be sure to check there to find out about late shopping hours in Geneva, Nyon and Lausanne, how to find the Christmas concert that suits your tastes, and more!

Patrick Liotard Vogt is moving from Zurich to New York. He went to school at rich kids’ school Le Rosey in Rolle, so we can probably safely assume that he spends time on roads between Zurich and Geneva. The very-rich jet-setting 25-year-old who says he is involved with some 40 companies (he’s chairman of Poken, a startup I know and like, founded by IMD graduate Stéphane Doutriaux). The Huffington Post carries a lengthy interview with him. The last line caught my eye: he likes to drive too fast. So that’s who is in one of those cars zooming past on the autoroute.

And another line: “I come from a family that is more about being successful than being rich. We always learned that if you give something you have to get something. My great grandfather was the CEO and Chairman of Nestle. He started at the bottom and worked his way up. That’s very motivating.”

I had to read that quote a couple times to make sure I had it the right way around: it’s not about philanthropy.

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The president of Telecom TV, the company that recorded live many of the highlights of World Telecom in Geneva the first week of October, has been the victim of an unusual form of Internet theft: his online history of what happened has been significantly rewritten and republished by a group of Zimbabwe journalists who describe themselves as exiles – and his name has been left on the story. GenevaLunch, in a blog post Friday, asked Martyn Warwick, if he had given permission for the drastic changes to what he had written. Here is his answer:

“My company, Telecom TV is reporting, writing, webcasting and televising content from ITU Telecom World 2009.
I saw Mugabe on Wednesday. Indeed we were filming him and I was less than a metre from him as he tottered round the show clinging on to the hand of the Deputy Secretary General of the ITU. His visit threw the organisation into a real tizzy, I can tell you.
Read more…

Geneva-based Ago Cluytens, who occasionally contributes guest blog posts on GenevaLunch and who writes marketing blog brandingthroughpeople, picked up on something I sent him to write about the marketing woes the newly re-named Willis Building in Chicago in the US might face. I was intrigued by his point that the foes – Chicagoans have always loved a good fight (think boxing, Al Capone and anti-war protestors) – are using Facebook and Twitter to get the word out, but the Willis insurance group is not. Check back in five years and we’ll let you know if Big Willie is a household name in Chicago. Sounds like the same kind of Pickle a famous building in London found itself in, in 2004.

In fairness, here is a lengthy article from the Guardian in 2004, singing the praises of Norman Foster’s SwissRe landmark building in London.