For the second consecutive year, ICF partnered with the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, the largest annual Smart City conference in the world.

This year, ICF coordinated a VIP Delegation with a curated agenda for the week, bringing together participants from around the world to explore, learn, and contribute to the conversations defining how cities adapt, innovate, and thrive.

Bursa Metropolitan Municipality is the first TOP7 Intelligent Community in Türkiye. Izmir and Konya Metropolitan Municipalities have met ICF’s Smart21 level, but Bursa has successfully leapt forward, and in its first year of applying, has impressed the adjudicators to make it to the 2025 TOP7. I was interested in finding out how this happened and undertook the site visit as this year’s TOP7 auditor to Bursa. I am glad I did. I was thoroughly impressed. Bursa’s leaders are proud that their community was the first capital of the Ottoman Empire and the terminus of the Silk Road. It is a double UNESCO World Heritage community, has had an amazing growth trajectory as an industrial leader, and is seeking to become a world leader in innovation and sustainability through its transition into a digital ecosystem. But they do not dwell on the past nor ignore it. 

What if there was an intelligence test for your community? How would it score? 

An intelligence test is a set of carefully designed questions that measure how well we reason, remember, understand visual information and solve problems. They are used to predict how we will do in school, work and military service and – believe it or not – our odds of living a long and healthy life. But IQ scores offer probabilities, not facts. Of equal or greater importance are all
the beautiful, complex and messy human factors, from personality and creativity to social skills, social class and family history.

The same is true of a community. Smarts matter – but so do the community’s stories about itself. So do its geography, the skills and creativity of its people and conditions far beyond its control. A community IQ test would have to measure all that. But how?

My audit of New Taipei City for its Intelligent Community Certification wrapped up with insight into how cities can get the most out of the digital transformation. We visited the Sanchong Education and Activity Center, one of four locations where people of all ages (but mostly seniors) come to learn how to use digital tech. My takeaway: if you are doing digital inclusion, cover the basics– but change things based on what’s popular. The popularity list at Sanchong starts with podcasting and live streaming, followed (of course) by AI. The Center updates its courses and workshops every year to stay current. That’s how they have trained hundreds of thousands of New Taipei citizens.

I just finished my first day of auditing New Taipei City in Taiwan for renewal of its Intelligent Community Certification. Along the way, we had lunch, as the picture shows. But in between the glasses of iced tea, I picked up noteworthy, new ways that local governments can help their existing and new companies succeed: 

#1 Improving the Odds of Startup Success with Crowdfunding

New Taipei selects startups each year – including indigenous and new residents – to benefit from crowdfunding campaigns. In six years, the city has helped nearly 80 startups each crowdsource an average of US$120,000. The money isn’t really the point. It is to help startups identify their value and road-test their messaging early in their development, based on feedback from the crowd. The city team provides a professional-grade crowdfunding campaign and supplements it with product and target market analysis, media exposure, industry and government connections and access to grants. It’s an imaginative way to support the early development of new companies.

Ask people to name the most innovative states in America, and you are not likely to hear the word “Ohio.” Isn’t that the Midwest farm state where all the factories went broke?

If you are still living in the 1980s, yes. But I had a front-row seat for a different story at Ohio’s Future of Mobility Conference, hosted by the Beta District and the Intelligent Community Institute of Dublin Ohio It took place at the Automotive and Mobility Innovation Center in the Beta District, a technology corridor between Dublin and neighboring Marysville, where private and public-sector partners have created a unique test bed for connected vehicles. They have installed fiber networks and wireless transceivers along 35 miles of State Route 33, a busy road for cars and trucks where technology is being stress-tested in all weathers and road conditions.

Every city or region of any size in the world would like to attract technology companies to locate there. The boom times for digitally-driven technologies seem to know no end, and diversifying into tech looks like a sound long-term strategy. But executing the strategy? Not so easy.

One of the world’s better examples comes from the city of Tallinn, capital of Estonia, a country whose journey from post-Soviet devastation to tech leadership and EU membership still astounds. A program called Test in Tallinn, led by innovation expert Mark-Emile Talivere, does what so many communities try to do, and does it very well.

Part of the 2025 ICF Delegation meeting with New Taipei City’s Mayor Hou
 

For the past three years, the Intelligent Community Forum has taken a delegation to attend the annual Smart City Summit & Expo and Net Zero City Expo (SCSE) in Taipei. From a small, largely Canadian delegation in the first year, the past two years have attracted significant numbers of international attendees to be part of ICF’s Delegation to the SCSE and associated site visits. This year, thirty-one delegates from Canada, USA, Brazil, Spain, and the Netherlands joined ICF Canada and ICF Taiwan’s organizers to attend the SCSE and undertake visits to meet the mayors of Taoyuan, New Taipei City, and Yunlin County. In each of these gatherings, in addition to the formalities, the mayors explained why their communities have become among the best smart cities and Intelligent Communities in Taiwan. They noted that they are leading in applying digital communications technologies in health, emergency response, education, traffic control, urban planning, and overall quality of life for their citizens. As the delegation learned over the course of their visit to Taiwan – these communities excel in not only digital connectivity and AIoT applications, they also train knowledge workers and the talent to innovate and become global entrepreneurs. And with innovation, they share their prosperity with all of their citizens who have developed a culture of engagement and respect for sustainability, all key factors of smart cities to evolve into true Intelligent Communities.
 

I frequently lead online webinars and workshops. Like most things in life, they’re both good and bad. They lack the human touch that, in-person, can lead to real relationships – but they also let us share a much broader range of knowledge and opinion than we are likely to find in a face-to-face meeting in one place.

Not everyone who registers for these events shows up. That's their privilege. But recently, I came across something new. A couple of people showed up – kind of – by having an AI note-taker application log in, listen and summarize what it heard for later reading.

There is a word you see often in news coverage of politics today. The word is “performative.”

It describes elected officials of the extreme right or left and the strange way they do politics. Instead of running for office to accomplish something, they seem to see public service as a call to express things – specifically, things that make the news. They introduce divisive laws that have no chance of passing. They ignore real crises in favor of creating imaginary ones. They label their opponents as criminals because they are too liberal or conservative, and members of their own party as traitors because they are not liberal or conservative enough. Sometimes, if these antics alarm enough other elected officials, they succeed in getting divisive laws passed. But their real goal is triggering the praise and outrage that follows.