Click here to download a podcast of Don Tapscott talking about the impact of the net generation

Don Tapscott is down with the kids. Not in an embarrassing dad’s dancing, inappropriate-clothes sort of way. No, he is more interested in admiring “the smart generation” than emulating them. “I know it sounds trite but this is the first time in history when you can really learn from children,” he says. “I am just so focused on trying to listen to them and learn from them.”

The Canadian academic and author practises what he preaches - he created a Facebook community of more than 200 people to gather evidence for his book, Grown Up Digital, he has a network of more than 400 connections on LinkedIn, and he has recently posted a video on YouTube.

He spends a lot of time collaborating with young adults - including his daughter Niki, 25, and his son Alex, 20. He also has a reverse mentoring relationship with two of their friends. “I am constantly looking for the next big thing,” he says. “They tell me about interesting stuff and I try and help them understand the meaning of what they have discovered.”

His obsession with young people’s use of technology forms the basis of Grown Up Digital, which is published today. The book looks at how the net generation (also sometimes called Generation Y, or the Millennials) is changing everything from work to democracy. The author of Wikinomics, Paradigm Shift and The Digital Economy - all bestselling business books - predicts that his latest work will be the biggest seller of his career.

This could be dismissed as overconfident bluster, except that Professor Tapscott has a habit of predicting the future. His “first lucky break” was to lead a team on a research project called The Office of the Future - four years before the first personal computer was launched. “I designed a program whereby we had 50 people essentially using [a kind of] Microsoft Office three years before it existed. Then we had another 50 who were using telephones and paper calendars, writing things out by hand, and having face-to-face meetings for everything. We carried out a controlled experiment to monitor the differences. And it was surprising, looking back, just how accurate it turned out to be.” The research formed the basis of his first book, Office Automation, in 1981.

Employed as a Professor of Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management in Toronto, he admits that he hasn’t always got it right. “I am constantly surprised. The biggest one that I didn’t see coming was the net generation. I didn’t see that in ’78. But in the early Nineties I had these young kids and I noticed how they were effortlessly able to use all of this sophisticated technology. They were using all this stuff, computers and networks, and any technology around the house and at first I thought my children were prodigies, but then I noticed that all their friends were like them. So that was when I started studying young people.”

It would be no surprise if Professor Tapscott’s children were more technologically savvy than most. He wrote a Basic program and used the local GE factory’s computer and telex machine to run the calculations for his psychology master’s thesis in 1970. “I figured it would take six months to analyse the data using an adding machine,” he says. “The entire analysis, rather than six months, took three minutes. I wrote my first book on a computer in the late Seventies. I had a terminal connected to a modem in my bedroom. I’ve always been fascinated by technology.”

Professor Tapscott is impressed by the way in which young people effortlessly harness new technologies. “They have no fear of technology because it is like the air to them,” he says. He is not only defensive of the techno-savvy generation, but angered by the attitudes of some of his peers.

“Youngsters are coming into the workforce and they are bringing with them tools which are more sophisticated than exist in the biggest corporations. They are also bringing a whole new culture of collaboration and high performance. But rather than listening to them and engaging with them we set up this ‘generational firewall’, we ban Facebook, we fight against them, we mistrust them, we misinterpret what they are trying to do.

“I’m convinced a lot of people have got it wrong when it comes to youth today; that there is this cynical and negative view about youth, especially with regard to the use of technology; that they’re net-addicted and that they’re losing their social skills and that it is making them stupid. The dumbest generation. It’s said they don’t give a damn. But my book is full of research which shows that this is just not true. I am on a campaign to get people to look at the real evidence on the character of this generation.”

In his role as chairman of nGenera Insight, a think-tank, Professor Tapscott is looking at the wider implications that the net generation and technology will have on different aspects of society. However, the project that seems to excite him most is called Government 2.0. “It looks at new models of democracy and new models of government for the 21st century.” A recent meeting on the topic attracted delegates from 18 countries, including Britain. He is hopeful that within a year the first large-scale “digital brainstorm”, in which millions of people will talk online to politicians, will have been established.

“In countries around the world they [the net generation] are very engaged in civic activity. In the US, it is at an all-time high and we are witnessing something very historic. Millions of youngsters who have been involved in civic activities are becoming political, and [Barack] Obama has been able to engage them. This is a huge force for change in the 21st century, and the change is a positive one if we listen to them. Let’s face it, my generation has done a bad job. The world is a mess on every front. An absolute mess. We will be placing a huge responsibility on this generation to try and figure this out. So I’m on a campaign here, a mission. This is not about selling a book - it’s something much bigger.”

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