Intelligent Community Forum Blog

Everybody's Business

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:00:00 -0400

In Lyons, New York, where I was raised, there was typically one complaint that ran straight through the center of town and among those who were leaving for the larger world, as well as those staying behind. It was that everybody knew everybody else’s “business!” In those days, people seemed to like their privacy and relative anonymity. To say that someone “minded their own business” was considered a compliment – kind of. Privacy was observed, and yet the local culture had a way of knowing who might be a threat in their private cocoons and who was simply nurturing a rich inner life (or was an eccentric who drank too much hard apple cider at night). We watched one another. The reinforcing mechanism that evolved to run the alliances among the people, schools and businesses was - are you ready - gossip. People, who are verbal and tribal beings, have allowed gossip to become a cultural pastime as well as a monitoring tool. We all knew, or thought we knew, everyone else’s affairs. No IPTV network running hundreds of video cameras or Facebook pages were necessary.

Who knew that not only was this a cultural asset, but that in the not too distant future technology would enable it, enshrine it as a great economic virtue and yet, at the same time, threaten to make it one dimensional and increasingly suspect. I suspect we are now rethinking this.

As we head into the ICF’s 2013 Summit, where we will have a closer look at seven communities that are working nicely, thank you very much, the notion of collaboration and its potency has emerged as the “secret sauce.” For the past few years it has been expressed as the “triple helix.” It appears as a part of a persistent dialogue, whose concepts are increasingly harnessed like a raw material by a range of management and logistical processes which then produce economic success. It uses the tools of the Internet and the cloud in new ways and enhances their capabilities. It allows creativity, which French tightrope walker Philippe Petit jokingly calls, “the perfect crime,” to flourish. It is also done through a lot of talking, committee meetings and – yes – gossip on email.

In Taoyuan and Taichung, Taiwan, two of the year’s Top7 Intelligent Communities from Asia, the sense of community is everyone’s business. In Taichung’s case so are the resources of its 16 universities and technology corridor, precision machinery technology park and science and software parks. Each is now getting to know one another’s “business” through a new Taichung Software Park Industry-University Council. This is a collaboration the size of a dragon, or two. Understanding that there is a compelling need to innovate and to drive deeper toward a connected, global economy, what emerged in Taichung, after much discussion, is an extension of the powerful business alliances that have already made Taichung the world’s third largest exporter of high-tech precision machinery. The newly formed Council will include a massive databank for managing collective resource inventory, as well as a “talent breeding model” to produce Executive Masters degrees. It will be run by a dedicated office to pilot the city’s software industries toward global markets, which await. The alliance includes 26 incubation centers and the intellectual brainpower of 156 departments related to some aspect of the local and national economy. It is a classic, Confucian example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. (Remember the Beatles? Or the Allies in World War II? Then you know what I mean.) Or, as author E.O Wilson notes in his best-selling new book, The Social Conquest of the Earth, this is an example of why human beings, like wasp ants and but a few other species, tend to overrun the planet. It’s not the brain, it’s the culture. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt says in HIS new book, “the brain is the greatest invention ever, but we did not invent it.”

Culture, however, is a different matter. We did invent that, sort of, and as it expresses itself we are painfully aware that technology cannot in any sense replicate it. That is left to us and to social evolution. What we can do is to mind our business, tend to our community’s interests and note that inside each culture is a way to form councils and alliances that not only give us full economic lift, but also the privacy and emotional security we need to align ourselves to reach higher. As I learned in Lyons, if you do not feel secure in your place, you cannot tolerate or appreciate anyone knowing your business.

The Creative Class is Flunking Out. What?s Next?

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

“Sometimes, I think it’s a sin when I feel like I’m winning when I’m losing again.”

That memorable morning-after line was written by Canada’s great singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot, in a 1974 hit, Sundown. It came to mind last week when I was conducting Top7 site visits in Canada and reading an article by Joel Kotkin in The Daily Beast. The title was a real grabber: “Richard Florida Concedes the Limits of the Creative Class.”

According to Kotkin, Dr. Florida recently admitted in the pages of The Atlantic, “what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members – and do little to make anyone else any better off.”

The flaw in the Creative Class idea turns out to be simple: attracting a horde of high-skilled hipsters tends to push up the cost of living, so that any benefit to lower-skilled workers is lost. In an impressive show of academic honesty, Dr. Florida admitted, “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”

According to Kotkin, “For Rust Belt cities…following the ‘creative class’ meme has not only meant wasted money, but wasted effort and misdirection. Burning money trying to become ‘cooler’ ends up looking something like the metropolitan equivalent of a midlife crisis.”

Far beyond the rust-belt in places like New York City, Kotkin finds inequity incongruous with the lifts-all-boats Creative Class meme: “In nouveau hipster and increasingly expensive Brooklyn, nearly a quarter of people live below the poverty line. While artisanal cheese shops and bars that double as flower shops serve the hipsters, one in four Brooklynites receives food stamps.”

A public battle of ideas is always interesting. But my purpose here is to suggest a more serious risk of wasted effort and misdirection. In recent years, Dr. Florida has evolved from his Creative Class focus to become a major proponent of urbanization. In The Atlantic, where he is an editor, he wrote:

Cities are our greatest invention … because they enable human beings to combine and recombine their talents and ideas in new ways. As highly skilled people concentrate in these places, the rate of innovation accelerates, new businesses are created, and productivity – and, ultimately, pay – grows…The critical mass for knowledge work is higher than for manufacturing: the knowledge economy thrives at a larger scale.

It’s a powerful argument for a more urbanized world. But here’s the thing: cities have been fulfilling this role for – and I’m not making this up – 3,000 years. Cities work, except when they become nightmares of dysfunction. To avoid that dire fate, a new movement called Smart Cities has sprung up to install sensors, networks and automation systems through urban areas to make them run faster, cheaper and better. In a very short time, it is becoming its own government-industrial complex, with everybody from the European Union to the biggest names in technology putting their shoulders to the wheel.

The trouble is, I think they are looking at the wrong problem. Cities work. Using information and communications technology (ICT), we can make them work better. But the place where ICT can make a revolutionarydifference is in rural areas.

Rural areas around the world have been losing their relative share of population for decades. In the less lucky places, economic viability is all but lost. And that is a problem for everyone. Everyone alive today depends on rural areas for such useful things as food, oxygen and clean water.

The revolutionary change we need is not a 10% increase in the efficiency of cities. It is a major boost in the economic vitality, social welfare and cultural richness of rural areas. Because of ICT, rural areas have for the first time an opportunity is to plug into the world at low cost regardless of location. They can affordably import the world’s learning and culture to enrich the lives of young and old, and to give local cultural traditions new life in a global community. They may even be able to make themselves as vital and exciting a place to grow a business or build a career as the busiest city center. All of this is possible in an economy and culture that are conducted increasingly online.

We do not yet know how to do it. But at ICF, we believe it can be done and must be done. We have launched a project called The Rural Imperative to begin figuring out how. Check it out at www.ruralimperative.com. For rural areas, for all of us, this is vital work. It is the only way we will avoid that morning after, waking up with a bad hangover and the sour knowledge that we thought we were winning while we were losing again.

When Good Enough is Just Right

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:30:00 -0400

Recently, as I watched the image of Life of Pi director Ang Lee walk up to the podium to accept his Oscar, I had no idea that this absolutely fascinating eye candy of a movie was produced in Taiwan. When he mentioned in his acceptance speech that he thanked his homeland of Taiwan and specifically the people of Taichung, I recalled that Mayor Jason Hu had told me about his association with the famous director when we met in Taichung last April, but I never connected the dots when I saw the movie. Why would I? Isn’t everything produced in Hollywood? Ok, maybe London, Toronto or maybe one of the other megacity locations such as Sydney or Mumbai. But Taichung?

According to a report in the Taiwan Review, the Director General of the Taichung City Government’s Information Bureau, Jean Shih, provided an insight into why Ang Lee chose to make the movie in Taichung, in central Taiwan, over other global locations. Taichung’s Mayor is an old friend of Ang Lee, personally inviting him to shoot the film in his city, making the decommissioned Shuinan Airport near the city’s center available for the film, a location that needed work but was good enough to become the center for the filming of the movie. Shih admits that some of the filming did take place in India, but the majority of the movie was eventually shot in Taichung, Taipei and Pingtung.

But it required much leadership, as Mayor Hu personally coordinated efforts to attract Lee’s American film crew to come for fact-finding tours to assess Taichung’s moviemaking environment. According to the Taiwan Review, these efforts resulted in Taichung city government joining forces with the central government to offer the director subsidies of more than $9.5 US million to film the movie in Taichung. This was good enough to result in 250 technicians and artists to work on an award-winning movie, but more importantly leaving a legacy for Taichung and Taiwan in the ever-growing race for content, creative industries, talent and financial deals that today could potentially be located anywhere.

Yes, megacities attract talent, financial opportunities and grow clusters, but megacities are also big, difficult to maneuver, penetrate and take advantage of; some would even call them impersonal and anonymous, so that it’s often much easier to build relationships and take advantage of connections and opportunities in smaller regions or in regions where initiatives become individually more important in order to be able to get things done. Places like Taichung may not have the dazzle of filming megacities like LA and London, but are good alternatives since they are highly agile, high-velocity locations. Add the elements of Intelligent Community into the mix and it gets very interesting indeed.

Recently I hosted Mr. Suneet Singh Tuli, who is nearly single-handedly impacting mass education in India by having developed a tablet that will provide 250 Million students in India with the tools to learn from teachers from around the world, connect by phone and email as well as use applications to be creative and share these with other students throughout their region and around the world. He is not running with the big “800 pound gorillas” as he calls them. He is a small firm, originally from Brampton Ontario, that punches above their weight. His tablet can be made for $35 and he sells it for $40 to the Indian government. It is affordable and is a pretty good smart application, similar to the original iPad and iPhones, which originally sold for hundreds of dollars. These iPads and iPods at their astronomical prices would not have been able to be sold to the masses in India when they first came out.

But Tuli’s Aashtak Tablet sells for a very affordable $40 and is being gobbled up by the politicians in India and in many other countries around the world. Mr Tuli’s goal is to bring a suitable, “frugal” tool that can be accepted and easily made available to the next 3 Billion end users. It may not be the excellence displayed in the latest Apple iPhone 5, nor the next Samsung Android, but for the masses, as he says, “it is simply good enough”. In fact, it is more than “good enough”, but not when you compare it with the flash and brilliance of the newest Blackberry Z10. But that is not his goal. Instead his goal is to get these tools into the hands of millions who can use the Aashtak Tablet: this will be their salvation; their gateway to education and to a promise of a better life.

Mr Tuli’s lesson here for me was to understand that not everyone needs, wants or must have the latest, dazzling and super-dooper smartphone in order to meet their goals and to be able to do something hugely impactful. This has and will in the fullness of time demonstrate that “good enough” is absolutely just right and has been able to execute the necessary tipping point to achieve good works; in fact, it even may be able to create excellence.

Similarly, Mr. Ang Lee was able to excel in his work, the Life of Pi by going to a non-Hollywood location and in an environment that would be considered by all measures, “good enough”. He was able to not only create a brilliant masterpiece from this exercise, but made a huge impact and created a legacy for the lives of his homeland and the citizens of Taichung.

From this point onwards, a location and facility considered initially good enough, has an excellent chance now to transform into a center of excellence.

Landscaping the Front Yard of Heaven

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

If you have ever been greeted by a large toilet seat as you arrived into town, you most likely were driving into the Nevada community of Battle Mountain. Few other rural communities in the USA or elsewhere have the credibility to welcome you that way. Or the guts. Forget the cliché that “first impressions” are the most important. It has always been gross impressions that count most. According to Maury Forman, author and director of rural entrepreneurship for Washington State’s Department Commerce, who I dub the Intelligent Community movement’s resident humorist, Battle Mountain was referred to by a Washington Post writer as America’s “armpit” in 2001. That stunk. It was also unfair, but revealed how some urban writers may have thought about small communities. The Washington Post, for the record, is based in Washington, DC, the city which uses toilets very effectively, mainly to flush down good ideas for connecting villages, as well as taxpayers’ money.

Rather than get depressed or, worse, defensive, the city took notice. It took notice with a sense of humor. Then it took action. It performed an exercise in economic development and creative public relations which resulted in the Festival of the Pit. Short for armpit of course. The Pit was a hit. The festival’s 2004 talent pageant, which ended in a tie between a woman who glued crickets to her underarms and a tiny girl who did breakdance, was one of many tongue-in-cheek events that led Old Spice deodorant, an international brand, to become a major corporate underwriter. Today, a blue grass festival has replaced the Pit. However through the process the community regained its pride and fired one of our movement’s first shots to signal the start of the rural renaissance.

In most parts of the world, urban and rural cultures have been out of balance and out of synch for at least two generations. The imbalance has exacerbated the stresses of the global economy and made cities desirable. A two-fold tragedy occurred as young people fled, while referring to their rural districts or the cultures they left behind as being in “the middle of nowhere.” (My least favorite phrase.) But the Middle of Nowhere is no more. Broadband communication changed that. So did common sense. The change has been most effective when linked to a coherent strategy, as I observed during my recent trip to both Washington State and Taiwan.

In Taiwan, there is a new way to view the digital divide. In the words of Chunghwa Foundation CEO Mike Lin, a former Microsoft executive, “we turn the digital divide into a dividend.” The cloud, broadband and the Intelligent Community Forum’s concept of ecosystem evolution are altering the imbalance and, in the case of agriculture, education and entrepreneurship the results are as striking as the orchids grown and exported by Taichung-based Green Culture Biotechnology.

Green Culture Biotechnology is located in one of this year’s Top7 communities. It is part of a community cluster whose success is tied nicely to an approach that many nations preach about, but which Taiwan is perfecting patiently and effectively. Note that I do not say easily. It never is.

Green Culture, housed in a factory with clean rooms and an R&D equivalent to any of Taiwan’s silicon wafer foundries, geneticallyengineers tissue culture to raise orchids that are exported around the world. It owns patents for virus control and detection, as well as patents for the nano machines that detect viruses. It even developed a new generation of plastic containers for shipping the young orchids to Europe and Brazil. A walk through the rows of its prime orchids is to imagine what the landscaping may be like in Heaven.

If it were all alone in the community, or situated on the outskirts of the “middle of nowhere,” Green Culture would still be an impressive business. But in Taichung, it is symbolic of a city which, due to the alignment of central government funding and the governance of cities, is part of a municipality which includes a vast agricultural district. The city of Taichung has responsibility for its rural areas, which includes native Taiwanese tribes and many schools and universities in its mountainous areas. This gives it sensitivity to the environment. But the city’s push to become “green” is obsessive. Taichung is more ecologically sensitive than Hawaii, in my experience. It's natural, given its heritage and its shrewd understanding that quality of life is capital. It is helped by the political and cultural alignment of city and countryside. Rather than neglect the rural, it emphasizes agriculture, education and entrepreneurship. Its rural schools are connected and its students have wonderfully talented teachers and principals with an ability to teleconference with other teachers in the city and access any book anywhere through a mobile system. (Oh yes, the average elementary school student reads an average of 200 books per year and collaborates online with its classmate to produce other books!) Its farmers are aided by a “triple helix” of local government, academia and connectivity by the two carriers, Chunghwa and VeeTime, to produce value-added fruits and produce for markets such as Singapore.

Is it a perfect place? Far from it. I am told that in Taoyuan, the other Top7 Intelligent Community, there is still a desire by developers to cover over many of its 1,000 ponds. But I suspect that attempt will not go all the way – or will be balanced. Taiwan has its own champions, as Battle Mountain had. Taiwan’s is the famous “Rice Bomber,” Jang Yu-Men, whose Seed Project evolved from a series of “bombings” ten years ago. Not the terrorist type. Yang planted rice-filled explosive devices in Taiwan in 2003 and 2004 in protest against what he called the government's neglect of farmers. He has since adopted a more peaceful approach in his efforts to revitalize agriculture and promote a vision of development. Today, the government has unveiled programs that reach out to anyone wishing to become a farmer and return to the land. The life on the land is never easy, but the economic and social rewards – the landscaping of Heaven which is now possible – are not romantic notions, but a part of local GDP. The Green Cultures of the world are booting up in Taiwan.

The Radical Openness of Columbus, Ohio, USA

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:00:00 -0400

I have been making site visits to Top7 Intelligent Communities for a lot of years and, I have to tell you, the delights are many. Meeting the world’s most dynamic, innovative and committed government leaders. Seeing people passionately committed to transforming the place they live, whether through technology, business, education, healthcare or other social services. Being in meetings, demonstrations and presentations from 7:30 in the morning to 9:00 at night.

Well, maybe not that last one. But the cost in lost sleep and sore feet is well worth it.

My most recent visit was to Columbus in the US state of Ohio. I took away pages of notes, which I will turn into a report for the international jury that helps select the Intelligent Community of the Year. I also took away one of those delights I mentioned – the pleasure of coming across something new.

I was welcomed to Columbus with a luncheon that placed me next to Mayor Michael Coleman. Now in his fourth term, Mayor Coleman has the soft-spoken authority of one who has been winning elections for fourteen years. Much of that time has been spent doing creative deals with developers, who have transformed the skyline of the city and brought much-needed, high-quality housing to formerly run-down neighborhoods. In his first run at office, he promised to construct 10,000 housing units, and more than a decade later, his administration is well on its way.

There’s nothing new about city governments pursuing property development. While making a visible mark on his city, however, Mayor Coleman also set out to change its soul.

He believed that immigration was the key to the city’s future. At a time when immigration is a hot-button political issue that can start arguments in most industrialized nations, he thought his city needed more of it, not less. So he persuaded a small group of business leaders to accompany him on a study tour to Toronto, Canada’s business capital, which prides itself on attracting immigration from around the world. (By coincidence – or not – Toronto is also a 2013 Top7 Intelligent Community.) Returning to Columbus, he launched programs to ease the entry of immigrants, from English as a Second Language classes to lessons in how to live, work and raise a family in Columbus.

It worked. Columbus, which is Ohio’s state capital, has one of America’s largest Somali populations as well as a fast-growing minority of Mexican immigrants. Americans tend to think of Ohio as home to a homogenous white population. Not in Columbus.

Did the Mayor’s effort contribute to economic growth? I don’t know. That was one data point I didn’t get. But when it comes to changing a community’s soul, data points don’t always serve us well. What Mayor Coleman’s effort seems to have brought about was a culture of radical openness to the world. And we know from our study of Intelligent Communities that such openness has extraordinary value. Broadband infrastructure has the potential to tie any community, urban or rural, into the global economy. But potential is not practice. A culture whose first impulse is to welcome the stranger is one that can squeeze the greatest value from that infrastructure.

The tall buildings that fill the center of Columbus are one sign of economic progress. But I suspect that the intangible attitudes I met there are far more crucial to long-term success.

It Will Only Encourage Him

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

My fifth grade teacher often tried to take the entertainer’s instinct out of me, but was evidently unsuccessful or mutated it badly. Whenever I would stand up to speak, I invariably could make the entire class laugh, enabling the room to quickly became as “non-linear” as a Marx Brothers movie. I suppose this threatened her authority, for she would say, “Please, don’t laugh when he does that. You’ll only encourage him!”

Doing things others were scared to do, or simply couldn’t think to do, was a quality I always admired in others as well. What little of that quality I have has served me well, but I know that I am not in a league where my actions can transform entire cultures and economies. However, the people I associate with are able to do just that.

My friends, I encourage YOU to welcome Mike Lazaridis, who makes his home in Waterloo, Canada and the subatomic universe. In recognition of his work as the co-founder of BlackBerry, the developer of smartphone technology and as the mastermind of a new vision for his community called Quantum Valley, ICF has named him as its 2013 Visionary of the Year. You can read the press and media coverage of this announcement and get a sense of who this man is, and what he has accomplished.

I’d like to write about him in another way: as a man committed to his place, his community and who lives in a world of great imagination.

Said the Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Orki, “The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination.” There are several ways to look at this, even when relating to Mike’s vision. A son of Turkish immigrants, he did not arrive in his place in life with much more than imagination, I am told. Further, not every kid in a dorm at even the best engineering school in Canada automatically goes out and creates the wireless version of crack-cocaine. USA president Obama, never to be confused with an addict of any type, was brought to tears when told that his would be taken away while he managed the affairs of the free world. Mike’s work gave millions back their imaginations. We could now imagine working anywhere we wished and the big ideas and the deals would be less likely to slip away. However even this is to trivialize the importance of his work. Like the man he quoted when we named him our Visionary of the Year, Einstein, he perceives the world and its phenomenon not as one brick atop the other, or the sum total of what can be put in the next generation of wafers, or a place in cruel ruthless pursuit of conquests but rather as a miraculous experience.

This leads naturally to his vision of exploring that quantum universe, from which generations of industries and wealth and further social conquest of the planet will evolve. It sounds downright Einsteinian to me!

Finally this: we run a think tank and a movement committed to the idea that there is no place like home. (If there is a more complex way to say that, go to the Perimeter Institute, which Mike funded in Waterloo. They are way brighter about the left-brained elements of our experience!) Mike, like Stephen Conroy, Suvi Linden, Amarzai Sangin, Scott Rourke and Andre Santini, is doing what he does with his life because he is committed to his place. Waterloo, Ontario is much the better for it, as its mayor, the irrepressible Brenda Halloran will quickly tell you.

I am not reaching for a poetic high when I tell you that people like this hear a higher pitch of existence. It is in their register, for whatever reason. While I can tell you why five criteria constitute an Intelligent Community, I cannot tell you why they, or we, see what we see or do what we do. I honestly cannot. It is simply a calling, and I will be forever amazed to know that people like Mike and these others – and many more whom we meet in our work – just keep coming. They come faster if you give them a place - a real home - for their imagination to run wild.

Please encourage them if they are in your community. They may disrupt the class or the town or the company. They may also teach you and the next generations about a higher pitch of existence.

It takes a Smart City to become an Intelligent Community

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

As I travel to meet cities and companies such as Siemens in Germany; Cisco and IBM in the USA and Canada; WIPRO, Tata and Tech Mahindra in India; Chunghwa in Taiwan and countless others in China, Australia and Brazil, I am absolutely amazed at how quickly “smart cities” has jumped onto everyone’s radar screens and part of the popular lexicon around the world. Back in the late 1980’s and early to mid-1990’s I was on a similar track with my “smart people, smart buildings and smart cities” initiatives which came together around SMART95 in Toronto and again in conferences in Silicon Valley and Calgary, among other places. We even started a Canadian Smart Cities Initiative in the mid-1990’s. But when we looked at the word SMART following the depth of discussion held at the SMART95 conference, we were challenged to go beyond just smart infrastructure. Over the years in the late 1990`s my fellow co-founders of ICF and I looked at the entire city and community development spectrum – from infrastructure and data to more holistic levels to engage discussion around the importance of higher education and skills development, involvement of research-based universities and the creation and expansion of knowledge-based industries; we focused on application of innovation and creativity in creating more vibrant and productive communities; and encouraged the importance of social and digital inclusion in creating a bridge to bring all the citizens of a community, state and country into the digital century and broadband economy. We embraced discussion around public advocacy and governance, collaboration, leadership, marketing and sustainability. We also discussed the concepts of liveability and the importance to look at scale when we consider the rural imperative. Over the years we at ICF and hundreds of communities and many more of its citizens around the world have come to refer to this higher order convergence as “Intelligent Communities”.

Yet, in this day of the ubiquitous “smart city” promotion by companies like IBM and others, we are constantly asked what the difference is between smart cities and Intelligent Communities.

Back last summer, I referred in my August 28 2012 blog that there was a big difference between Smart Cities and Intelligent Communities. My colleague Robert Bell did an even better job in his exceptional three-part series on the difference between Smart Cities and Intelligent Communities (refer to ICF Blogs dated December 27, 2012; January 6 and January 15, 2013). From these you will quickly discern that the essential difference between Smart Cities and Intelligent Communities is the former`s focus on urban performance as it relates to urban competitiveness versus the latter`s role in creating a more holistic approach at city and community-building and collaboration. By building and managing urban infrastructure with advanced monitoring and other intelligent systems, a new urban competitiveness is able to be developed based on urban performance and productivity. Urban, environmental and social capital emerge when they are properly valued and taken advantage of. For instance, a city watermain is kept in excellent condition to be able to provide 100% distribution since no leaks are detected along its system and repaired immediately when identified; traffic patterns ease congestion and reduce carbon emissions through effective traffic management systems; smart meters in municipal buildings limit electrical waste; and so on. These raise the bar for everyone in the community; cities are flocking to their nearest technology partners to become "smarter-connected and/or sustainable cities” as promoted by IBM, CISCO and Siemens, among others. A formula for creating smart cities based on urban performance may be seen as:

UP(urc[h+spi]) + ec + sc = UC²

In other words, Urban Performance (urban capital [hard and soft physical infrastructure] + environmental capital + skills capital = Urban Competitiveness (aka “Smart Cities”).

But to take it to the next level in creating Intelligent Communities, I could offer the following formula:

UC²+IC(t/SC)+InCr+DI+Av/M+S= IC

In other words, Smart Cities (Urban Competiveness) + Intellectual Capital [technology/social capital] + Innovation/Creativity + Digital Inclusion + Public Policy Advocacy/ Marketing + Sustainability Inputs = Intelligent Communities. A little tongue in cheek and fun with math, maybe, but it serves to explain that it takes more than urban performance systems to become an intelligent community.

However, to keep it simple - when I look at the image developed by our friends in Stratford Canada that reads: “It takes a Smart City to become an Intelligent Community”, I cannot explain it better to people than this when they ask me the difference between the two.

For Once, Automation May Be Good News for the Less-Skilled

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I came across a great phrase last week: “practicing at the top of your license.” The words come from healthcare – they refer to practicing medicine as a licensed professional. But they also open up a new way of thinking about the future of innovation and employment.

Healthcare is one of the strangest corners of the working world, because it is just about the only one in which technology innovation has done nothing to make things cheaper. Quite the reverse: each new innovation in diagnosis and treatment seems to trigger an arms race in which providers compete to plunk down more millions on shiny toys, with insurers, governments and ultimately patients picking up the tab.

In an intriguing article (“The Robot Will See You Now” in The Atlantic), Jonathan Cohn writes about a new wave of technology innovation in medicine that aims to supplement the judgment of physicians with artificial intelligence. IBM is leading the pack with its Watson computer, which made headlines in 2011 by winning the American game show Jeopardy. The Cleveland Clinic is helping to develop Watson as a training tool for young physicians and ultimately as a tool for diagnosis at the bedside.

Much is expected of Dr. Watson. Human physicians tend to diagnose based on a small set of things they observe, guided by judgment honed with experience. Watson may not have a physician’s judgment or experience, but it has access to vastly more knowledge. So Watson can suggest a range of possible diagnoses that might not even occur to television’s Dr. Gregory House.

“In Brazil and India,” writes Cohn, “machines are already starting to do primary care, because there’s no labor to do it. They may be better than doctors. Mathematically, they will follow evidence – and they’re much more likely to be right.”

So how is this good news for lower-skilled jobs? Unlike medical technology innovation of the past few decades, these changes may well empower lesser-skilled healthcare workers to provide services that only physicians now perform.

One doctor told Cohn, “I think we are transitioning into what I see as super-quality-control officers, overseeing physicians’ assistants and nurse-practitioners, who are really going to be the ones who see the patients.” (For the record, he doesn’t like the future he is forecasting.) Smart information and communications technology will let lower-paid employees deliver a more consistent and evidence-based quality of care. “If technological aids allow us to push more care down to people with less training and fewer skills,” predicted one expert, “more middle-class jobs will be created along the way.” That is, middle-class jobs where people are practicing at the top of their licenses.

Human beings are terrible forecasters of the impact of technology. We always see the dark side first, because it is so easy to recognize. Much harder to imagine are the positive ways we will put new technologies to work to build a future we want. When we talk about the impacts of innovation on employment, we see the machines taking away jobs. But the jobs of tomorrow are taking shape all around us. Community leaders need to keep their minds open to possibility, and steer their constituents toward it.

The Call Back Home

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 14:00:00 -0500

When I next see her, I am going to tell my high school language teacher that I learned 11 Aboriginal Australian languages in 90 minutes last Friday night in New York. I did not use Rosetta Stone or one of the commercial courses designed to “immerse” a person in a language, so that they can travel to a country and manage to at least mangle greetings.

Instead I felt my way into the culture, through the music, sounds and images of an ensemble of 16 artists who are part of a “creative meeting place” for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal performers to develop and perform contemporary Australian Aboriginal music and, as I was told, to “interrogate Australian culture.” The group is called Black Arm Band. These beautiful souls offered me in 90 minutes more emotional range than a joint conference of psychotherapists and opera divas. While the inspiration of the group is to “awaken sleeping languages” and the spirit of a community that has been fragmented, it has given the culture –Australia’s – the “courage to face many dilemmas.”

The music and images were an attempt to unite, or at least to call forward, language as a cultural center and source of personal power. Given the fact that I was a guest at the performance and performance after-party of my friend Phil Scanlan, the nation’s Consul General to New York, the connection among culture, community and broadband ran like a current through the entire evening. It is not lost on Australia, as we heard from last year’s Visionary of the Year, Stephen Conroy, that there is a seeping away of vitality from the communities of that hearty culture.

This is not unique. There is something swelling in the ground and in our public air that is seeking a new way; certainly a new economy but also a new cultural experience that can feed the new economy. It first needs to reunite and then to reignite. It needs the courage to face dilemmas. That is where ICF and its communities come in.

I am not dreaming this, however dreamy the performers at NYU’s Skirball Center made me. This is real world stuff, and you can hear it rumbling through the conferences, cafes and countryside just as well as I could hear it in the unique sound of the world’s oldest wind instrument, the didgeridoo.

What is it? It is both anger over the pace of change and a rush toward the hope and possibility bound up in a newly-discovered, old truth: community is the source of culture, and culture is a canvas that can be repainted and reconstituted for the good. But you need to have wealth. You need to be able to sell the painting and to own it in every generation. This is called economic viability.

You can see this rush of possibility on our stages in New York each June, when the world’s Top7 Communities arrive to tell their stories. We learn from it and it guides others. You feel it when you speak with people from our Institute at Walsh University which is attempting to explore education’s role in the new community, while bringing Ohio’s Stark County into the new century. It too is a call back home.

You will also hear it in a new, exciting way when Chief Uzo Udemba, CEO of the Udemba Group of companies addresses the ICF’s Intelligent Communities of the world alumni on June 5th. Udemba is attempting a cultural coup of epic proportion. One worth studying. His vision is as clean and as simple as the voice of a great singer. His countrymen have scattered. Nigeria, which has one of the world’s largest film and media industries (after the USA and India), is attempting to put these creative arts back into its economy and to build an economic and social engine from them. To do this Mr. Udema has a vision for a new city, an Intelligent Community which will arrest the Diaspora of Lagos. As with most communities under siege, there is flight out. Nigeria’s talent is scattered across the globe. The work, over the long-term, is to allow them to hear the right music, the song that lures them back home. It is an attempt at a global gathering, which is not unlike what we hear from rural populations trapped inside cities. “We want to go home.”

If I heard anything on Friday night in New York, during one of the most significant two hours of my life, it is the sound of a call to gather the tribe and to make it work and work and work until the gold returns to the kingdom of community.

Offshoring? That's So 20th Century! Or Is It?

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Last summer, according to The Economist, MIT surveyed 108 American manufacturers with multinational operations. It found that 14% of them had firm plans to bring some manufacturing back to America. Another 33% were actively considering it. Almost half of really big US firms, with sales above US$10 billion, plan to “reshore” some of their operations, according to a different study by Boston Consulting Group.

So, is the era of offshoring jobs over? Can American workers – and the communities where they live – relax? Can their counterparts in other high-cost countries from Canada to Europe look forward to a reshoring surge?

And if you live in China, India, Malaysia, Mexico or another offshoring destination – do you need to start watching your back?

I don’t pretend to have the answer. But I can tell you about something I saw with my own eyes. Last year, I had the privilege of visiting Oulu, Finland, one of our Top7 Intelligent Communities of 2012 which is also among the Top7 of 2013. I was taken to visit a Nokia manufacturing plant. Now, Nokia has been through some rough years, as its failure to keep up with mobile innovation cost it dearly. Oulu, home to one of the company’s major R&D facilities, has suffered right along with it. I was eager to see what the company was doing with the people and facilities they had chosen to keep in Oulu.

What I saw was a manufacturing plant, but of a very specialized kind. This facility exists to take prototypes of new equipment and turn them into production models. Its production capacity is deliberately limited to the thousands of units. Once they have worked out all the bugs and found the most efficient way to produce the product, manufacturing moves to Asia, where contract manufacturers make millions of them at per-unit costs that the Nokia plant could never equal. But the Oulu plant is not out of the loop. It also functions as the repair facility for the equipment it helps create. (They are making mostly wireless base stations and other heavy gear, not handsets.) Everything that fails in the field comes back to Oulu, where it is tested, torn down and diagnosed. The lessons learned go into product upgrades, which are put through the plant’s processes until they are ready to go to Asia and be implemented in mass manufacturing.

Most of the personnel in the plant are highly skilled, from engineers to technicians to design specialists. When they need to do a production run, the plant hires engineering and technology students from the University of Oulu to work part time. The young people appreciate the money and the chance to see high-tech manufacturing first-hand. Nokia gets products into the hands of customers faster and can make sure those products work properly committing to high-volume production. And the benefits run like a river through the economy of Oulu.

This looks to me like the future of communities in a century where business serves a global market. Modern economies prosper from being specialized. Some of the food that farmers grow feeds insurance brokers who sell them crop insurance. By specializing in different things, both do better than if they tried to do everything themselves. The way to be a successful community today – whether in industrialized or developing nations – is to figure out what you are good at and then commit to having the people, infrastructure and innovation capacity to deliver it.