Leader: The kids today...

When they're not wearing hoodies and terrorising the good folks of Bluewater it seems 'the kids these days' are busying themselves with blogging, podcasting and all the delights modern technology has to offer.

And it's not all 'happy slapping' and SMS bullying either, whatever you might read in the Daily Mail.

Of course, ever since the very first person remarked how their youngest family member was the only person in the house capable of setting the video recorder - thus setting the cliché in motion - we've known that kids have been early adopters. But two stories came along today to remind us of this fact and to make clear how reliant we are upon the current generation of teens to ensure promising technologies have their day.

Businesses are looking to the developments in the consumer space and are realising they must harness the innovation they see.

Young people are also setting the trends which will determine the shake-out in many industries - most notably in the media market where the web 2.0 revolution and technologies such as IPTV threaten to take chunks out of the revenues of traditional broadcasters, publishers and distributors.

As such, businesses need to take note of what the kids are doing - and not just when they're loitering a little too near the executive car park.

In the past, the lines between business and pleasure have been clearly defined but now those lines are blurring. Whereas your child may have been unlikely to come into work to play with your enterprise CRM software or Sun servers, now your CRM vendor may be the very one modelling its approach on iTunes, which your child would certainly understand.

So businesses are looking to the developments in the consumer space and are realising they must harness the innovation they see.

And the users they will be modelling their own future experiences upon will be their children and their friends' children. Back in the day it used to be something of a chore having to take your kids into the office, now it might just make a real difference.