Noted American academic Richard Florida, who spoke last year at the OCE Discovery 07 conference, apparently liked Toronto so much that the University of Toronto was able to persuade him to move north to Toronto, where he has opened shop at MaRS, becoming the Director of the newly established Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Several weeks ago when I dropped in, they were just unpacking boxes and waiting for all the furniture to arrive.A great coup for Canada !!
Author of the new book: Who's your City, Florida writes in a recent Boston Globe story:
"Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.
What's more, it turns out these personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster. And how they cluster tells us much: What city someone might want to move to, the broader character of regions, and even the creative and economic futures of broad swaths of the nation.
Drawing on a database of hundreds of thousands of individual personality surveys compiled by psychologists Jason Rentfrow, Sam Gosling, and Jeff Porter, my team and I were able to map the distribution of personality types across the United States. The result is a fascinating new way of looking at the country's terrain.
Interestingly, America's psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest, long a center for the manufacturing industry, has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams.
The Northeast corridor, including Greater Boston, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin, are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies. While it is hard to identify which came first - was it an initial concentration of personality types that drew industry, or the industry which attracted the personalities? - the overlay is clear."
Toronto and the surrounding regions--is home to concentrations of open-to-experience types...that's why Richard Florida moved here
See Map and full story in the Boston Globe
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Walter Derzko --"Changing the world, one idea at a time" ©
Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on Smart Technologies in the Smart Economy "
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