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net-generation

6 Mar 2009

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Fail To Understand the Net Generation at Your Peril

The Net Generation (born 1977 to 1997), also known as Generation Y or the Millennials, is an ill understood lot. Don Tapscott, noted thought leader on digital technologies, is a real cheerleader for them in his recent book Grown Up Digital.

However, while some of his examples may represent the bleeding edge thought leaders of this generation, almost everything he says is well reasoned and researched. I would suggest this book is a must read for the rest of us who will watch this demographically dynamic  generation increasingly dominate all aspects of our society, including business, culture,  education, politics and entertainment.  Many of us are looking at this generation from the perspective of the previously dominant demographic group known as Baby Boomers or Boomers (born 1946-1964), also known as the TV Generation. I would note that already, the Net Generation outnumbers the Boomers.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of this group is that they are the first generation to have been immersed from birth in digital technologies, such as the internet, computers and online media. Because of this, they are sometimes labelled “digitals“, with others who find these technologies more challenging to even baffling being called “analogues”. The Digitals don’t even think about technology, it is just part of the landscape for them. Analogues, by contrast, either avoid it like latter day Luddites or struggle to keep up with the Net Geners.

I’m part of an interesting hybrid group of people who were born analogue but has adopted many of the digitals characteristics. In essence, people like me might be described as a digital immigrant. Consider my digital pedigree:

  • IBM 2741 Terminal for APLI first used computers at age 14, after being invited with a set of Math Contest winners to the University of Waterloo where I had the pleasure of using APL an early math-based timesharing system running on an IBM 360/44 . It is notable that, rather than learning the standard Fortran and programming on punch cards, I started programming using an IBM 2741, which is like an online IBM Selectric typewriter (typeball and all) connected via modem, with acoustic coupler, at 134.5 baud. Prior to this, I had read about computers and thought about them abstractly, but the plain truth is that computers were only accessible to a very small, privileged elite.
  • Honeywell 6050Recently, a friend sent me the directory listing of an old backup tape for the Honeywell 6050 TSS system which reminded me that I first used email in 1975. Yes, we even had mailbox and mbox files way back then. Of course, the email system only connected the almost 1000 users of this computer, yet barely two years later my friend Bill Pase then working at IP Sharp Associates, connected me into a truly global email system run by that pioneering firm. This is primarily of interest because many people I talk to assume that email began in the late 1990’s.
  • Celling at Capella SistinaAround 1990, while CEO at MKS, I remember being at an X/Open meeting in Rome (where ironically, I ran into the self same Don Tapscott at the Capella Sistina of all places) we were working to develop many of the standards that would shape our modern, connected digital world. I vividly recall after hours discussions with other attendees about my misgivings about how an always-on, multi-media world would impact our overall quality of life. As you can imagine, Rome was a fantastic place to have that debate. Even more important, what was esoteric futuristic thinking 20 years ago has largely come true, for better or worse.

So, like Don Tapscott, having grown up with a constant backdrop of technology and really having been part of making this cultural form, I too am a cheerleader for this emergent generation. However, many others, the most famous being Mark Bauerlein, take a much dimmer view of this generation. His book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) might well be the NetGen equivalent to Reefer Madness for the boomers. For me, this shows that many people totally misunderstand this talented generation. Sure, this generation has its flaws like any other, but like Don Tapscott, I’m pretty optimistic about it.

To give a taste of how fundamental, not to mention transformational, the Net Generation culture is, I list the 8 norms that Don Tapscott found and validated through his research.  I would suggest that the following norms need to be underestand by the rest of society so that the generations can build bridges based on the strengths of each constituency. The alternative is to create a new generation gap based on misunderstandings, a neo-Luddite situation if you will.

Here are Don Tapscott’s 8 norms for the Net Generation:

  1. Freedom: this generation demands the freedom to choose at work, in education and the marketplace. And, for them, freedom is so ingrained that it is not an option.
  2. Cutomization: Growing up with computers and software, has made this the mashup generation. Everything from products to lifestyles can be customized. This generation is the living proof of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail phenomenon.
  3. Scrutiny: Living in the epicentre of the blogosphere, twitterverse, SPAM and nonstop marketing, high levels of filtering and scrutiny are the only defence of a generation which has made separating the signal from the noise an artform.
  4. Integrity: The laser beam clarity and transparency of an always-on, Google-indexed world has heightened this generation’s radar for anything that fails to ring true. When there is no place to hide, a lack of integrity becomes glaringly obvious with often severe consequences for people or companies who fail to understand this new reality.
  5. Collaboration: A generation that grew up on group work and online games, now has adopted global collaboration and teamwork like never before. The Net Generation’s digital connectivity likely are another nail in the coffin for command and control organizational design not to mention one-way traditional education models.
  6. Entertainment: Net Geners expect work to be fun and the line between work and play is much more blurry for this generation. This means that some of the pioneering approaches at the Googleplex, may well become mainstream in the coming years.
  7. Speed: Among fellow computer geeks, many used to pride themselves on speed and belittle the slower blink rate of the old fashioned world. Net Geners have taken this to extreme in their always-on, instantaneous world, expecting immediate feedback on everything they do. This could well be one of the biggest intergenerational challenges.
  8. Innovation: This is a generation of early adopters, living on the bleeding edge. Not content to have products and ideas pushed to them like 20th Century consumers, they push collaborative, user-generated approaches to even the products they consume.

In business, government or ordinary society, I think we ignore this tidal wave of new thinking totally at our own peril. The first step is to understand this generation. Then, and only then, can our generation harness the incredible energy, idealism, passion and drive to help us all build a better future.

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ontariocreativeage

15 Feb 2009

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Getting Creative – “Yes We Can” or “Mind the Gap”?

In today’s challenging economic times, it is extra important for governments, academics and individuals to plan our future economic prosperity. Thus, it is timely that Richard Florida and Roger Martin from the Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto this month published Ontario in the Creative Age, which provides a detailed future-oriented policy blueprint.

It sets a policy agenda to help us unleash our full potential in the Twenty-first Century where economic success is increasingly coming from creatively-oriented enterprise versus our traditional strength in routine physical and routine service occupations. The report is backed by research which highlights both our existing strengths and weaknesses including those in education, income and even the gap in our creative/routine job mix compared to our peers. Starting from the base of today, the agenda suggests four main focus areas to drive future prosperity:

  • “Harness the creative potential of Ontarians”, including businesses’ role in changing job mix, education and even marketing of our capabilities,
  • “Broaden our talent  base”, focused on  significant increases to our post secondary educational levels and broadening managerial capabilities,
  • “Establish new social safety nets”, including early childhood development, better utilization our key immigrant resource and retraining of older workers from declining occupational groups, and
  • “Build province-wide geographic advantage” which strengthens connections (physical and otherwise) within and beyond the mega-region spanning Waterloo-Toronto-Ottawa-Hamilton-Niagara-Rochester.

Having read this paper, it is encouraging to see such a forward thinking analysis that will certainly drive future governmental, business and economic decision and policy making. With that in mind, and being of an optimistic “yes we can” mentality, I was, however, struck by how very little attention was paid to the biggest gap of all — Funding this agenda.

Without proper funding, our ability to transform our economy in these wise and necessary ways, will go unfulfilled. I’ve written about this “funding gap” numerous times and from different perspectives:

I’m certainly not alone in this concern. Many others in positions of thought leadership have raised the issue of funding of investment, some with very specific policy proposals and others just highlighting the gap:

  • communitech-logoAvvey Peters from Waterloo’s Communitech blogged about Magic Words:  Economic Stimulus right before the Canada’s Januaray federal budget, and her post contains some very specific policy measures.
  • MaRS Discovery District - Where Great Minds MeetDr. Ilse Treurnicht, CEO of MaRS Discovery District, a leading Ontario driver of research and commercialization, provided a well-researched analysis of the major institutional and venture funding gaps of Canada compared to other jurisdictions in their latest newsletter.
  • Calliflower - A fresh approach to business conversationsAlec Saunders, CEO of one of Canada’s most promising web/mobile startups, Iotum, addressed the tech startup funding gap in the context of the proposed federal stimulus in his blog post Tech in Canada: Can We Do More Than Play Hockey? Also, a number of international discussions of technology competitiveness have been hosted on their innovative Calliflower service.
  • Peter Childs of BarCamp Ottawa & StartupOttawaPeter Childs, an Ottawa social media strategist and tech luminary, has laid out a framework Tech in Canada: Peter Child’s Framework  for Stimulus

Make no mistake, having surveyed funding sources for startups and social enterprise, Ontario (and Canada) significantly lags most regions in the US and Western Europe — our primary OECD comparables. The reasons for this are numerous and will be discussed in a separate posting, but this funding gap is our extra hurdle before we can be successful in driving the Florida/Martin challenge to transform Ontario to a creative economy.

And to be clear, this transition to the creative economy needs to be driven by the competitive, market economy. That implies that it will not the primary role of governments to provide the major funding for our transformation. Fundamentally, governments should not be picking winners and losers, but simply equiping market forces to go to work. And, given our long history and culture of relying on governments for answers, it is important to clarify that point. With the right framework in place, businesses and individuals will compete to drive the path to our future.

Thus, as their primary task, it is imperative that our federal and provincial governments develop a strong and co-ordinated policy framework, dealing with taxation, security regulation, and the like, to encourage the private sector to make such investments. And, in our current times of economic stimulus, the extra icing on the cake should be to channel some of those near term stimulus dollars toward growing the creative sector that is so essential to our future economic prosperity.

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bright-green-led

25 Jan 2009

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A Bright Green Federal Budgetary Stimulus Opportunity

“Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.” – Peter F. Drucker

 

Is there a green lining in the inevitable mountains of cash being channelled into economic stimulus?

The sequence of September’s ho hum election followed by the almost incongruous state of denial about both environmental issues and the state of our economy by Canada’s Stephen Harper Government, renders the proroguing of Parliament and his rapid policy about face almost exciting to watch. As a result, Tuesday’s budget should prove a lot more interesting than the six months that preceded it.

My post from last year, Finding Negawatts Right on your Doorstep, gave background to show how the EcoEnergy program could significantly reduce our collective residential Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, while simultaneously improving our housing stock and lowering operating costs. As noted, even with the current modest levels of uptake, this is an area where relatively small investments by our Federal and Provincial governments are starting to pay off.

Canadian Economic StimulusProper Economic Stimulus Can Lead To …

In the context of Canada’s 2009 Federal Budget, there will certainly be significant funds allocated to economic stimulus, almost certainly with the traditional focus on infrastructure projects. As I discussed in my recent post, Playing the Lottery after the Meltdown, I generally favour a laissez faire approach to government. But, considering our current economic situation, signficant stimulus will be essential.

I strongly urge the government to consider channelling some of these fund to two areas:

  • bright green investments such as reducing the collective  carbon footprint of our homes, as I discuss below.
  • in addition, some package of stimulus focused on our future competitiveness by jump starting the knowledge economy, especially startups.

In the Negawatts posting, I didn’t elaborate enough on the relative merits of different approaches to offsetting our carbon consumption (or indeed all Greenhouse Gases). I would draw a parallel to the 3 Green R’s of Reduce, Reuse & Recycle which form a hierarchy in dealing with the solid waste issue, with Reduce (ie. not creating the waste in the first place) being much preferred to Recycle (reducing the impact of waste already consumed). Similarly to this, there are also choices around offsetting our carbon footprint.

Most carbon offsets involve tree planting in some distant, usually tropical, country. While this gives maximum impact, it does nothing for our local output of carbon (GHGs). While planting trees locally is useful, typically the ROI is lower than in warmer climes, if only because trees grow more slowly in Canada. The best approaches would involve a direct reduction of our local carbon use, instead of a mere offset. And that is exactly what residential programs like EcoEnergy home labelling and retrofit achieve.

Therefore, the timing is right to channel the relatively small amount, as compared to the enormous size of the entire stimulus package, needed to transform our residential housing stock. And, the resulting Negawatts we will generate in return, will be a lasting efficiency we can enjoys for decades to come.

Significant Carbon ReductionSignificant Carbon Reduction

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balsillie-speaks-to-laurier

23 Jan 2009

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Attacking a Canadian Icon

While I’m hardly a shrinking violet, I generally shy away from newspaper coverage. That being said, after saying no several times to Gordon Pitts at the Globe and Mail, I finally agreed to be quoted. Here’s why.

Yesterday, Jim Balsillie won the Laurier Outstanding Business Leader of the Year Award. With his business, economic and philanthropic contributions to our area and Canada as a whole, I can’t imagine a more deserving recipient. It is truly inspirational to have people like Jim making a real difference to all of us.

In an unfortunate coincidence, on the same day, both Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis were the subject of media coverage regarding a possible (and staggering) $100 million penalty regarding a stock options pricing case dating back to 1996.

In the current financial meltdown, many might believe that ever more zealous regulation is the answer, but this really isn’t the root issue here. And, bearing in mind that I don’t have all the facts that the OSC and SEC possess,  I present some key  points in questioning the motives of the timing and magnitude of this regulatory action:

  • from my reading of this case, the company, when made aware of the concerns, proactively launched a board-level investigation and, upon the release of the report, about $1.6 million was repaid, this being the estimated amount of gain based on the differential of pricing and dates of the option strike prices.
  • further, that committee, found that the mis-pricing was inadvertent and not done for the purposes of financial gain.
  • when compared to other securities regulation actions, this case seems minor, especially given the wealth most people have generated with RIM. In other words, there don’t seem to be any real victims here.
  • And yet, over the last 10 to 15 years, the OSC has been colossally impotent when it comes to prosecuting real shareholder frauds, such as:
    • the many cases of equity monetization that allowed senior management of many companies pocket tens or hundreds of millions while ordinary investors ended up suffering staggering losses.
    • real abuses and frauds around income trusts, such as is the case of the many people in my home town of Listowel who lost life savings on the fiasco in which a long term business,  SpinRite, was hollowed out in the process of becoming an income trust.
    • Diane Urquhart, an ex Bay Street investment banker and now expert shareholder crusader, is a great source to provide anyone who is interested the documented evidence of how much of a wussy our own OSC has been in stock market regulation.
  • Jim, and his partner Mike, have each given countless hours and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to major philanthropic initiatives that, in addition to helping to transform Waterloo Region, have national and international stature.

It’s this background that left me feeling compelled to comment to Gordon at the Globe & Mail. Clearly, this feels like a desperate OSC acting on the basest political motives.

I’m not sure why Canadians feel that we have to attack our winners. At a time of economic meltdown and too few national champions left standing, why can’t we celebrate the great heroes we do have?

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social_media_chaos

17 Jan 2009

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Choices, Choices – Sorting Out Social Media

“Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.” – Elbert Hubbard

Being an inveterate early adopter, and loving the fusion of new research and web reach coming from the innovation in social media (see Science Fairs, Social Media & Fads – The New Science for the 21st Century), I decided to seek help of the blogosphere to sort out the social media wheat from the chaff.

Mark Evans recent tweet about Tumblr, made me try out yet another social media property. It could be interesting, but only time will tell.

And yet, with so many out there, I never know which are going to have personal value to me and, even more important, have staying power in a very crowded market. One thing is clear, especially in these lean times for tech financing, and that is that there will be long term consolidation. Therefore, I’d like to seek your help in predicting the ultimate winners and losers, and so . . .

PLEASE CAST YOUR VOTE:

[poll id=”3″]

[poll id=”2″]

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bites-the-dust

13 Jan 2009

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Another One Bites the Dust – and You Thought Business Was in Crisis Mode

“Another one bites the dust.
How do you think I’m going to get along,
Without you, when you’re gone”
Queen

This is a call to action where individual citizens can make a huge difference.

The recent loss of a local cultural gem, namely King Street Theatre:

Curtain Closes on Another Local Local Theatre

and the near death experience of the 87 year old cultural gem the Grand Philharmonic Choir, from cash flow challenges, has shone a spotlight on how the financial meltdown is already impacting the Waterloo area arts and cultural scene. As one who supported King Street Theatre’s original capital campaign, I feel this loss personally. Further, I am optimistic that many in our community share this sense of loss.

Many of the key funders who directly invest in our cultural sector, such as local foundations and individual donors, have seen their financial investments tank along with the rest of us. Given that 2009 contributions will largely be determined by 2008 investment returns, we are probably just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

The media cites lack of citizen interest or poor attendance as the root cause. Many business people working with social enterprises observe that many organizations lack the right management to deliver better results. While all true, I would posit that the challenges of the  cultural sector are much more complex.  I’m as much a believer in economic Darwinism, which dictates that in order to have real success, you also need to have failures. In fact, my recent post Playing the Lottery after the Meltdown underscores this notion in regard to the recent government led auto sector bail outs. Mark McArdle’s post What I Didn’t Get for Christmas makes an even stronger case for economic Darwinism.

That being said, much of the social sector, including arts, culture, the environment and many other social causes, have long operated in a marginal and underfunded state. This, for most organizations, trumps the above concerns about attendance or management quality. It is fortunate indeed that many community leaders met last September at the Prosperity Council of Waterloo Region: Task Force on Creative Enterprise to begin to put together a comprehensive, strategic initiative to invest in and develop our overall capabilities in the Creative and Cultural sphere. While from an early 2009 perspective, this might not at first appear to be the ideal time to launch such a big idea, we need to remember that such initiatives are long term and may need a number of years to properly gestate. Ideally, need to be ready so that our collective efforts can bear fruit in time for the next economic boom in the Waterloo area.

Meanwhile, I would call all citizens who care about the cultural future of the Waterloo area to respond with their support. While each of us may favour different organizations and ways to provide that support, we all need to do our part. The great community we live in depends on each of us to personally help to nurture and invest in its future.

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dot-fades-out

31 Dec 2008

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Who Invented the Dot in Filenames?

Who invented the dot (“.”) that precedes the file type extension, as in document.doc or metal.mp3? As we near the end of what has emerged as a most interesting year, we all could use the diversion of examining the history of something so simple and pervasive, that we all take for granted.

A note from my friend Brad Templeton reminded me that being in the right place at the right time can be profound. In fact, as strange as it sounds, Brad Templeton may well have invented the dot in “.com“, as he discusses here. As he says:

Brad TempletonBrad Templeton

“Indeed if it was me, it was simply by virtue of the fact that having been around at the beginning of these things, and taking an interest in these issues. Being in the right place at the right time. But it’s simultaneously mind-boggling, conceit-building and humbling to think that what I said might have sparked something that became so universal.”

This led me to ask myself, who orginated the ubiquitous dot that separates the extension, denoting file type, from the base file name. A much older concept, clearly the use of dot as an internet name separator was influenced, perhaps subconciously, from the longstanding filenaming convention.

The Windows filenames of today are direct descendents of MS-DOS which lacked tree-structured directories and restricted filenames to an 8.3 format, consisting of a maximum of 8 characters of base filename followed by up to 3 characters of an extension connoting the type of data stored in the file. MS-DOS, in turn, directly inherited this convention from CP/M, and indirectly from the UNIX family of operating systems.

I have directly worked with all of the above systems since their early days, but to go back further, I must rely on the oral history I was hearing at the time. CP/M was directly inspired by the Digital Equipment Corporation family of operating systems such as DOS-11 and RSX-11. The dot convention may well have been inherited via TOPS-10 for the DEC PDP-10 line of computers. Can anyone please confirm or deny this? At the very least, the 3 letter limitation of extension length, still common today, came from those systems which stored the extension in a 16-bit word in a format known as RAD50.

However, filename extensions separated by a dot were also a feature of Multics, which dates back to 1964.

Thus it is unclear to me whether Multics or DEC operating systems were the true originator of this concept, or whether there is an even older, perhaps common, ancestor. Can an alert reader, possibly a computing pioneer, help enlighten us on this important question.

Happy New Year to all. Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2009.

Happy New Year - 2009!

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30trillion-poker

26 Dec 2008

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Playing the Lottery after the Meltdown

Fold or raise? Full house or three of a kind? Eager to jump start an economy that has seen almost unprecedented meltdown, governments around the world are racing to place gargantuan bets with taxpayer and treasury money. Only time will separate the profound from the boondoggle among these bets. Meanwhile, poised on the dawn of a new year, I’ll present my analysis and opinion, recognizing that the complexity of the current situation dictates that no one has the real answer.

Last year’s credit crunch and the ensuing illiquidity has generated a financial crisis whose effect that might have, only a few months ago, seemed totally inconceivable:

  • massive government ownership of banks (HBOS, Northern Rock) and insurance companies (AIG)
  • bankruptcies of some pillars of the financial system (Lehman Brothers)
  • a North American auto industry (GM, Ford, Chrysler) that stared down death, and even with bailouts, may not survive in any recognizable form
  • an estimated $30 trillion of value wiped out of global stock markets in a matter of months, according to Alan Greenspan
  • not to mention a US recession that has already lasted a surprising one year, with almost no country globally, including hitherto unstoppable China, seeming able to escape  severe slowdown.

Closer to home, in 2009, the Canadian province of Ontario, will for the first time have a slower GDP growth than the country as a whole and, in essence, become a have not province. As a country, Canada has a historical reputation of being:

“hewers of wood and drawers of water”

One could easily add to that old dictum:

“hackers of rock, drillers of oil and bashers of metal”

While Canada thrived on a commodity based economy, Ontario’s strategic proximity to Detroit, made the automotive industry king and made Ontarians as rich as almost any region in the world as a result. Over the last 20 years, as the economy started to transition toward knowledge intensive industries and away from basic manufacturing, Ontario did make some strategic investments in Advanced Manufacturing, involving information technologies such as robotics, automation and MRP increased basic efficiencies.

However, with the unstoppable rush of manufacturing activity to the Pearl River delta in Asia, that strategy is no longer enough.

A few months ago, I wrote a series on Public Policy for the Digital Age, which I wrote in the vain hope of stimulating some real discussion during a particularly unexciting Canadian election campaign. At that time, Canadian politicians seemed to ignore what the general public already knew “It’s the economy stupid”. Now, almost no one believes that something should but done, but the question is what?

Many believe that the making real things are the only real“jobs, and that all other jobs are just glorified hamburger flipping. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the pervasiveness of information technology, in all aspects of our economy, as an example:

  • the average car is really a complicated computer network, or even cloud, or hundreds (and soon to be thousands) of networked computers with unprecedented software. And the trend to IT in automobiles continues to accelerate into areas such as traffic optimization and safety.
  • for even the most sophisticated manufacturers of smartphones, such as RIM, Nokia or Apple, software complexity now signficantly outguns RF Engineering and manufacturing of the devices. The smartphone is essentially a complicated software and services ecosystem which happens to have some hardware to run on.
  • green technologies, such as green energy, increasingly harness complicated IT-based systems, to innovations in nanotechnology and industrial design.
  • healthcare and life sciences for an aging economy, is just starting to be transformed by software, web and mobile based delivery mechanisms, driven both by concerns about escalating costs but also increasingly demanding consumers.

There is no question that, even if all the actual metal-bashing manufacturing were to migrate offshore, the real value adds during the coming decades will be in such knowledge intensive industries.

It is in this context, and with best practice economic theory suggesting that, in times of recession, strategic economic stimulus is critical to drive recovery,  governments have no real choice but to act. And, the global price tag of such economic stimulus will entail trillions of dollars of spending.

Therefore, while government investments in:

  • infrastructure, like highways and bridges
  • an auto industry that has stubbornly refused to invest in future technologies

are inevitable, governments must save some “powder” to invest in our economic future. The old adage of investing in buggy whips at the dawn of the age of the automobile couldn’t be more true (not to mention ironic) today. The fact that governments don’t generally do a great job in picking winners and losers only magnifies the problem.

My message to our public policy makers here in Ontario, and probably most other OECD countries as well, is simple:

  • find a way to channel some of the economic stimulus into sectors that will be the future of the country,
  • resist the urge to make discrete investment decisions, instead finding ways to leverageor top up existing investment decisions made in the private sector, and lastly
  • measure the results so future generations can benefit from our economic experiments.

As taxpayers, it’s our money politicians are spending, topped up by money created by turning the printing presses at the Bank of Canada. Therefore, it is only reasonable that we need to be heard in determining how it should be spent.scotia-richer1

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jonathan-howard-ok

19 Dec 2008

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Congratulations to Jonathan Howard

Today at precisely 11:18 PST saw the fulfillment of a long held and ambitious dream. At that time, my nephew Jonathan Howard, having set out on March 25th of this year, persevered in his epic run and completed it by dipping his toe into the Pacific Ocean at Mile 0 of the Trans Canada Highway in Victoria BC. I’m still awaiting the photo, but at the bottom of this post you can see Jonathan dipping his toe into the Atlantic to kick of this run.

Our March posting first described his ambitious venture, Run The Dream, in which Jonathan and his team of volunteers sought to raise both awareness and a targeted $2.5 million for  Autism Spectrum Disorders. Today, he completed that quest.

Congratulations to Jonathan on this remarkable accomplishment. His passion and commitment are remarkable and this is truly an examplar of the new generation of social entrepreneurism.

Please consider supporting his dream by donating at the Run The Dream website or perhaps attending a Gala fundraiser to be held on 25 March, 2009 in Toronto.

Below I’ve included a YouTube re-broadcast of the completion of Run The Dream and also re-posted the press release.