You won’t miss this orange-colored, 3-wheeled and very noisy transportaion vehicle in Jakarta. Yes, it is what we called: Bajaj. The vehicle is divided into 2 compartment. The driver sit in the from part, and maximum of 3 passengers can sit on the back of it. And…. if you have tried it before… you will remember another characteristic of this vehice, aside from the noisy engine, the vibration . My friends always joke that, you will still feel the vibration even when you left the vehile.

To ride it, just waive your hand, and it will stop. Tell the driver your destination, and always bargain BEFORE you get into it. Then, when you have the deal, get into it. Oh… and another jokes about it, the brake of the Bajaj is not in the steering, but on the shoulder of the driver . It simply means that, due to the noisy engine, don’t bother to talk to the driver. Instead, if you want to stop at your destination, just touch the shoulder of the driver .

Among the people of Jakarta, Bajaj is between the love and hate. Car drivers hate them, because they are slow, sometime has no light, even no sign light. Another joke, only God and the driver know when a Bajaj need to turn left or right . Some people love them, because it is cheap to get to a nearby place.

Anyway, the goverment has planned to replace them with 4-wheeled, less noisy, less shaky, and capable of carrying more passanger, called Kancil. Whether the Bajaj survive or not, people will remember it… the noise and vibration .

Too early to sleep…., and still making up the courage for my master degree…. I encounter this interesting article in this week edition of Business Week: Creative Economy.

Compared with last decade, which it called the Knowledge Economy, the Creative Economy has a slightly different rule of game. Both still based on the same principle: Innovation. What makes it different is the nature of the invention itself. In the Knowledge economy, big corporation research on technology, made a product based on it, throw it to the market, and people will crave for it. While in creative economy, the one who make money is they who do research based on customer experience and make products with creative design, along with creative marketing program.

Name few successful brands of the Creative Economy, Starbucks, and Apple with its iPOD. How many coffee shop out there, and why people love to buy the expensive coffee of starbucks? Or how many MP3 player out there, and yet iPOD still sell with a slightly high price?

So, why the obsolesced of knowledge economy? It always has been that, the western country is the center of technology development. Big Corporation opens their R7D center in US or Europe, employing smart people, inventing new technology, and sells it to the world. But, the advance of Information Technology make it possible to export the R&D job to other location, with the same quality of researcher, but with 1/3 of the cost of western people . Sad but true, the job is being exported to India, Philippine and China.

“How low can you go” might be a good question for western researcher…. if they’re not moving to Creative Economy. My own hypothesis, the westerner still has the leading edge in design innovation. They have the resource and skill to the research, and, being viewed as the center of technology; people will always crave for things that made the hype in western country.

The question is, are you bold enough to be creative? Time to sleep now, thanks to Lionel Richie, with his songs .