The Creative Entrepreneurs Club met on the 8th of July in the Lighthouse, to discuss the future of networks in terms of new ways of working and generating new ideas for the creative economy.

London based Future Laboratory, a trend forecasting company whose clients include Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Unilever, Ogilvy & Mather and Proctor & Gamble, were on hand to introduce attendees to their version of the future. The team charted the arrival of the ideas century and looked at how brands, products and design attitudes and practices are set to change irrevocably with the advent of copyleft processes and an economic model in which ideas, and the people who share them, are becoming more important than those who manufacture products and deliver services.

In the course of the event, a review of network types and the way they impact work habits and productivity was also presented. The Association of Integrated Media- Highlands & Islands is what the jargon would label a distributed network, relatively unusual in the context of traditional European organisational structures. A network with no hierarchies, no visible hubs and no link that seem to contain more links than the next bolted onto it. The structure is egalitarian and the potential is massive, perhaps the most high profile example of such a network would be the Al-Quaeda terrorist network (not that aimhi members have any inklings towards unseemly violence). This kind of network was first noted by Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation in 1964 as the sort of military/power network that would best survive a Cold War nuclear holocaust.

Terrorists and doomsday hawks? We seem to be in unusual company here. The next thing they'll be telling us is that Highlanders & Islanders are not a sweet-natured and civilised tribe of pacifists. Tut-tut....