The Greater Victoria region includes 13 cities and towns at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, as well as many of the surrounding smaller islands. The region boasts a wide variety of cultural fairs and festivals celebrating regionally popular and electronic music and sailing life and history, among other topics. Greater Victoria also boasts the Victoria Symphony, which performs over 100 concerts per year, including an annual free concert called the Symphony Splash in the Inner Harbour. With its mild coastal climate, large number of colleges, universities and scientific research facilities and convenient port locations, the region has historically attracted visitors with ease. Now the Greater Victoria government, citizens and local businesses aim to make it a place where visitors and residents will want to stay and grow.

Public WiFi for All

In 2012 the City of Victoria signed an agreement with Shaw Communications to create a public wireless network for the region. The deal included setting up 52 public wireless hotspots in city parks, public buildings such as city hall and community and recreation centers to provide more consistent internet access for citizens and visitors. The success of the project encouraged Telus to expand its network in the region as well with an additional 160 hotspots spread throughout Greater Victoria. With easy access to WiFi, tourists are now able to share their experiences of Victoria in real time online, increasing interest in the region among their followers and friends. And citizens can now count on wireless access, and the wealth of information and services it has to offer, no matter where they go in daily life.

Helping People Find Employment

GT Hiring Solutions Victoria is a local privately-owned company established in 2005. Since 2012, it has partnered with Greater Victoria government, industries and community service providers to help citizens find employment by providing job training and placement programs. These include the British Columbia Employment Program, Jobs Placement Program, Training for Jobs Program, Empowered to Work Project, Aboriginal Careers in Tourism, Tourism Careers for Youth and Older Worker Program. GT Hiring Solutions also provides self-serve resource rooms and community job fairs. As of 2018, GT Hiring Solutions has supported over 8,000 clients in finding employment in the region, including more than 2,000 who completed certification and skills training in first aid, computer basics and a variety of other areas.

The South Island Prosperity Project

In 2016 Greater Victoria formed the South Island Prosperity Project (SIPP) economic development organization. Its forty-five members include ten local governments, five First Nations, three post-secondary educational institutions, seven industry associations and non-profits and twenty major employers all working together to promote economic prosperity in the Greater Victoria region. The SIPP quickly developed the Smart South Island Vision 2040, a long-term vision for regional prosperity focusing on smart transportation, affordable housing, human and environmental health and economic resiliency. To engage the community in the plan and attract outside investors, the organization has held two public symposiums on Vision 2040 with more than 500 residents attending.

Since its founding, the SIPP has launched a number of successful programs and events and was one of the top ten contestants in the Canada-wide Smart Cities Challenge competition and its $10 million federal investment prize. SIPP events include the Open Innovation Challenge, a four-month public competition to find the best and brightest local innovators and IndigenousConnect, a monthly peer forum to promote entrepreneurship and leadership development. The organization also hosted the 2017 Prosperity Summit, an international investment attraction forum, in partnership with GLOBE Vancouver. In addition to launching a variety of events, SIPP has created the 2017 Prosperity Index, an economic indicators publication to provide key information for investors and entrepreneurs.

The Smart South Island Vision 2040 is a grand one but well within Greater Victoria’s power to realize as community engagement grows along with the region’s dreams.

Population: 348,000

Website: www.victoria.ca

Smart21 2019

Chicago, on the shores of Lake Michigan, is a global city of 2.7 million. It is the center of America’s third largest metro economy, which produces more than US$690 billion in gross regional product. Almost one-quarter of households had earnings exceeding US$100,000 in 2016, according to the US Census. Chicago companies employ over four million people, many of them at the more than 400 major corporations that have their headquarters there. In March 2018, its unemployment rate was an enviable 5.3 percent, nearly the lowest since the government started tracking it.

The distribution of those riches, however, is far from equal. A long and often bitter history has made Chicago the most racially segregated city in America. The unemployment rate for African-Americans was 16.2 percent in 2018, compared with 4.7 percent for whites, due partly to that segregation and partly to the disappearance of industrial jobs in factories and logistics companies. From 2000 to 2010, 181,000 black residents moved out of Chicago, mostly middle-class people who could afford to move, leaving behind their poorer neighbors. About 40 percent of black 20-to-24-year-olds were out of school and work in 2018, compared with 7 percent of whites of the same age.

Rising to the Challenge

All big cities have big challenges. What distinguishes the successful ones is how they rise to those challenges. To build a better tomorrow for all its citizens, Chicago is focused on enlisting technology, education, engagement and demand for a better quality of life to open the doors of opportunity.

Chicago’s economic might makes it a prime market for broadband providers. Nearly 20 companies, including America’s biggest names in telecommunications, operate there. A gigabit broadband price war broke out in 2016, when the incumbent AT&T began to face competition from Comcast and RCN to deliver gig services for only US$70 per month, and promises to spread higher levels of service at lower prices across the well-to-do neighborhoods of Chicago.

While the private sector competes for existing residential and business customers, however, the city has targeted the 28% of households with no Internet subscription, predominantly in poor neighborhoods, with two programs.

Connections in the Community and To Go

Connect Chicago is a donor-advised fund managed by the City Tech Collaborative in partnership with city government. Launched in 2012, it is a network of over 250 locations where residents can access the internet and receive digital training. Each year, it delivers more than 8.6 million hours of training per year at libraries, senior centers, community service centers and workforce and youth centers. In recent years, it has opened 49 new centers, upgraded broadband at existing ones and deployed 3,000 new computers. In 2018, City Tech Collaborative launched the Connect Chicago Innovation Program. Funded by companies including Microsoft, Comcast, Sprint, the Lenovo Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, the program solicits applications from nonprofits for new ways to provide technology access, skills and engagement, and offers grants of up to US$50,000 to support pilots of selected projects.

The Chicago Public Library is making its own contribution to expanded access with the Internet to Go program. It lets patrons check out portable Wi-Fi hotspots for three-week periods to use at home, at work or on the go. The library system makes available nearly 1,000 of the portable hotspots at branches in communities with the lowest rates of broadband usage in the city.

Talent and Innovation Laboratory

Higher education has become the gateway to personal prosperity in the digital age. But low-income students face many barriers to completing education beyond high school, from finances to lack of understanding and support from families and friends who have no experience with higher education. To help lower these barriers, city government formed partnerships with colleges and universities in which the institutions committed to dedicating some of their scholarship funding to a program called Star.

Beginning in 2015, the Star Scholarship Program began offering graduates of the Chicago Public Schools a chance to attend the city’s colleges and universities at low or no cost. Students qualify by graduating from high school with a grade point average of 3.0 or higher (the third highest of four grading levels) and going through an application process. The scholarships cover all tuition, books and class material costs for up to three years or until the student receives an associate degree. As of February 2018, there were nearly three thousand Star Scholars enrolled at city colleges. More than half of the first 2015 cohort had either graduated or were enrolled with enough credits to be on track to complete their degrees in three years. That compares with a 22 percent average for community colleges in the United States and suggests that the city-college partnership is meeting a challenging goal: to give students who are the first in their families to attend college the support they need to succeed.

If Chicago is a laboratory for the cultivation of talent among those usually left behind, it is also setting itself up as a test-bed for innovation in the Internet of Things. In May 2018, Chicago installed its 100th node in what it calls the Array of Things. This is an urban sensing project made up of a network of interactive, modular sensor boxes that collect real-time, location-based data on the city’s environment, infrastructure and activity.

Data generated by the Array of Things is open, with the first batch released in May 2018. The goal is to give researchers, policymakers, developers and residents high-value information to make the city operate better and improve quality of life for citizens. Chicago is publishing data on its sensor nodes and data collection tools on an open-source basis, so that other cities can replicate them. Seattle is expected to be the second Array of Things city, and cities in Mexico, the Netherlands, the UK and across Asia have expressed interest.

Sustainable and Responsive

The city introduced a Sustainable Chicago Action Agenda in 2012 to offer a vision for urban sustainability and a roadmap for residents and businesses to contribute to its achievement. Actions include rebuilding neighborhood playgrounds and parks, expanding access to recycling, improving non-automobile travel options from transit to biking, and encouraging sustainability-focused industries. The Greencorps Chicago Youth Program has provided summer jobs to over 2,000 high school students in such industries, and the first green manufacturing facility was approved for construction in 2018. Over 200 playgrounds have been rebuilt and nearly 20 community gardens have opened.

With each change at the neighborhood level, quality of life improves for residents. Another improvement comes with the city’s project to modernize its 311 non-emergency communication system. Before launching the project, Chicago convened community focus groups to learn what residents most wanted from a revamped 312 platform. From nearly 200 individuals, it learned that residents want transparency and accountability on service requests, timely response, clear and understandable language instead of “City-speak,” and choices of how they connect with 311. Implementation of the resulting design for Open311 began in 2018 with a goal of completion in early 2019.

Problems created over the generations take generations to resolve. Chicago has accepted the challenge, and is using technology, guided by a clear understanding of what its least-regarded citizens need most, to build a future of greater promise for all.

Population: 2,716,450

Website: www.cityofchicago.org

Smart21 2019

Top7 2019

In the heart of Vietnam’s southeastern Binh Duong Province is a brand new city in development. Binh Duong Smart City is being created by collaboration among the Smart City Office, Becamex, the state agency overseeing the project, the academic and entrepreneurial sector and the Standing and the Peoples’ Committees of the government, working together to develop a modern, environmentally friendly city that will someday be home to one million Vietnamese. The new city already includes Eastern International University, a world-class academic institution, as well as six industrial parks and the region’s first accelerator. Binh Duong Smart City has worked tirelessly, assisted by ideas such as the “triple helix” collaboration method from ICF alumnus Eindhoven, the 2011 Intelligent Community of the Year, to transform a traditionally agrarian, low-population area into a core of Vietnam’s Southern Key Economic Zone.

WiFi for All

The Binh Duong region has historically limited fixed-line infrastructure when it comes to broadband access, and investment costs for expanding it are high. The city has met this challenge by focusing instead on free, public WiFi networks. All government buildings in Binh Duong Smart City, as well as most public and private university buildings, colleges and high schools provide open wireless networks for their staff, students and visitors. Citizens living in more remote areas with limited access can make use of these public hubs as well.

In addition to providing WiFi networks in government and educational buildings, Binh Duong Smart City also has free public WiFi on all buses of the Becamex Tokyu system, which provides transport in and around the central province. The service is widely used already, with upwards of 50 passengers per bus connected to WiFi via their smartphones on a standard trip. Public spaces in the city have also begun providing free WiFi, including supermarkets, restaurants, coffee bars and parks.

While it continues to expand its public WiFi network, Binh Duong has also begun work on a glass fiber network to connect the city's many industrial parks. The city began installation of the glass fiber backbone in 2019 with the help of a collaboration between the regional telecom company VNTT, which provides services in Ho Chi Minh City, and Japanese provider NTT. This partnership allowed Binh Duong to design its glass fiber structure based on Japanese standards, improving broadband speed for the whole city once the project is completed.

Building an Innovation Ecosystem

As in many developing countries, Binh Duong Smart City faced difficulties attracting industry outside of cost-driven manufacturing, as well as backlogs in technical equipment within schools and new businesses. To combat these troubles, Binh Duong Province and Becamex Industrial Development Company (IDC) reached out to Brainport, Eindhoven for advice. Thus began the Binh Duong Smart region project, aimed at accelerating Binh Duong’s economic growth in a sustainable way by implementing the triple helix model of collaboration between industry, government and universities.

Binh Duong Smart City is home to a growing number of Techlabs and Fablabs located in schools, universities and vocational colleges around the region. These labs collaborate closely with industrial partners and Binh Duong’s Department of Science and Technology. Techlabs are locations for practical education in the latest technology, including up-to-date equipment provided by industry partners. They also provide a space for joint research projects between universities and schools and local industry employers. Binh Duong’s Techlabs include a lighting lab at Eastern International University, a mechanical electrical lab at Vietnam-Singapore Vocational College and an ICT lab at Thu Dau Mot University, with a robotics and intelligent systems lab, a power electronics system lab and a data analysis and artificial intelligence lab in the works.

Fablabs are small-scale workshops that offer access to digital fabrication technologies and equipment. They are open to everyone in the community, including students, adults, small businesses and organizations. These spaces provide an environment for clients to test new ideas and prototypes with access to all the needed equipment. Eastern International University in Binh Duong Smart City is currently home to the Becamex Fablab, a collaboration between the university and Becamex IDC, which boasts working spaces and equipment for 3D printing, 3D scanning, laser cutting, laser engraving, CNC and a variety of other hardware, mechanical equipment and tools. Other Fablabs are planned at schools and community centers throughout the region.

Binh Duong also hosts the region’s first mature business incubator at Eastern International University. The incubator began operations in early 2018, providing workspaces, training and support programs and networking facilities for entrepreneurs and new small business startups. The incubator works closely with the Becamex Fablab to grant access to facilities for testing products as well. Local businesses also work directly with Eastern International University on curriculum to ensure that students learn the necessary skills to find jobs in the local economy.

Binh Duong's Department of Science and Technology is now in the process of building the Binh Duong Innovation Hub. The hub will be centered in a historic building in the local community of Thu Dau Mot, which is now being renovated for this purpose. The Binh Duong Innovation Hub will to house a new startup incubator center, an official Fablab and a ‘Tech Playground,’ a permanent facility for STEM education.

Information Technology Training to Improve Rural Life

The Binh Duong province has historically been agrarian with many farmers scattered throughout remote areas. To reduce poverty and improve quality of life in these areas, Binh Duong began a project in 2011 to set up information access points in communes, wards and townships to supply scientific and technological training for local farmers and other citizens. The project team worked closely with the Farmers Association Tan Binh, Farmer Association of Lai Thieu Townlet, Farmers Association of Tan Hiep Commune, Farmer Association of Lai Hung Commune, Farmers Association of Minh Hoa and Farmers Association of Chanh My Commune to set up 87 access points throughout the province.

The access points provide a website portal for accessing local scientific and technological information, technology markets and equipment via the Internet and both local and international information sources. This portal allows farmers to easily locate the information most relevant to their land and situation. The access point staff also provide training courses for local farmers with a focus on accessing and exploiting websites related to prices and commodities, consumption markets, models for raising livestock and plants and other useful resources. Forty-five of these training courses have been completed to date with 900 farmers participating throughout the region.

Keeping Citizens and Officials Informed

In April 2022, Binh Duong established a Smart Monitoring and Operation Center, also referred to as the Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) for the province. This center serves as an integrated system of hardware and software that connects the provincial databases, allowing them to connect, analyze and present real-time information to the public. In conjunction with this establishment, the city has upgraded its provincial data integration center and backup data integration center, making them connected and interoperable with the national data integration axis under Vietnam's national e-government architecture. Binh Duong has also upgraded its provincial web portal to meet the requirements and technical standards of the Ministry of Information and Communications. The portal has been ranked top among 63 provinces and cities for several years and allows citizens to get up-to-date information on government activities and important events, as well as keeping government entities coordinated and ready to serve.

Binh Duong Smart City Summit

While developing infrastructure and training programs, Binh Duong Smart City has also focused on its most important resource: its people. The city promotes information about its Smart City projects to the whole region via local and regional newspapers, websites and national television channels. Beginning in 2016, Binh Duong has organized and hosted the Binh Duong Smart City Summit, an international event aimed at raising awareness of the Smart City concept among authorities, businessmen, students and citizens of the region while demonstrating Binh Duong’s economic and social value to the region on the world stage. The 2016 and 2017 summits featured keynote speeches by thought leaders in Binh Duong and international industry and educational leaders, a live exhibition and a 24-hour hackathon with 50 student teams participating.

The 2018 Binh Duong Smart City Summit has expanded and will be co-organized by the Korean City of Daejon and the World Technopolis Association, as Korea is one of the major investors in Binh Duong’s industrial development and Korean companies are some of Binh Duong’s largest employers. The yearly hackathon will become a “Creative Ideas for Smart Cities” contest, inviting student teams to present ideas that promote innovation and social improvement. Ninety-six teams from 22 universities in Vietnam, as well as 26 teams from other Asian countries, participated in 2018. After the successful collaboration, Binh Duong has been invited to join the international WTA network and host the 20th annual WTA event.

Binh Duong in the Pandemic

Guided by experience with the SARS and MERS epidemics in Asia, Vietnam responded to the COVID-19 outbreak quickly and proactively.  By February 2020, most companies and institutions required staff to work from home and banned travel.  International flights were suspended in March except for repatriates, diplomats and other officials with mandatory quarantine periods.  Schools and universities were closed down for four months, as well as the bars and restaurants where so much virus transmission has taken place around the world.  As of April 2021, Vietnam has experienced fewer than 2,700 cases and 35 deaths from COVID.

Binh Duong’s provincial economy is mainly driven by industry and services, with tourism making only a minor contribution.  After a one-month mandatory closing, most factories returned to normal operation.  Nonetheless, restrictions on international travel have affected Binh Duong’s growth potential as foreign direct investment slowed.  To combat the unavoidable economic downturn, the industrial park developer, Becamex IDC, offered tenant companies a three-month rent holiday and Becamex staff accepted a temporary salary cut.  

In 2020, Binh Duong was one of the fastest growing provincial economies in Vietnam, which itself was a world leader in economic growth.  With the pandemic slowly loosening its grip on the world, the Binh Duong Smart City expects to return to growth, making their way toward a bright future for the region and beyond.

News

• Industrial hub sees nearly 14% export growth in first half (23 June 2025)

Population: 1,026,075

Website: www.binhduong.gov.vn

Intelligent Community of the Year 2023

Smart21 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

Top7 2021 | 2022 | 2023

Abbotsford is the largest city, outside Vancouver, in the province of British Columbia and is among the most diverse in Canada. More than a quarter of its population of 150,000 hails from south Asia, mostly from the Indian state of Punjab. The city borders the United States to the south and is part of the Vancouver metroplex, which has gifted it with both an independent economy and participation in the economic sphere of western Canada’s gateway city.

Eighty percent of city lands are protected for agricultural use, and its farmers make good use of that land, earning the highest income per acre of any place in Canada. Other important industries are transportation, manufacturing and retail. The city is home to the University of the Fraser Valley and an international airport. The Abbotsford Regional Hospital is its largest employer. Given these assets, the challenge that Abbotsford has set itself is to leverage them for growth in a global economy that is dominated by digital while preserving an enviable quality of life and a culture whose roots date back to 1858.

Plan 200K

Guiding the journey is Plan 200K, which envisions what the city will be like when its population grows to 200,000 residents. Plan 200K began with an intensely interactive work of advocacy, which drew on 8,000 interactions with residents over two years. From these conversations, Abbotsford established four cornerstones for the future: a vibrant economy, a complete community, fiscal discipline and alignment of all parts of local government in carrying out the vision.

Following community engagement, city government updated all of the master plans governing transportation, utilities, parks, the historic downtown and agricultural lands. Sustainability was an important issue because the projected growth in population will be concentrated in just 20% of the city’s land area. Sustainability goals are baked into Plan 200K, and projects have already achieved reduction in energy consumption by 320,000 kWh per year, diversion of nearly 16,000 tonnes of waste through recycling and composting, and expansion of water metering throughout the city.

Food is Not Just for Export

The planning exercise also uncovered a disconnect in the city’s economy and culture. Agriculture is a vital industry, yet the community exports nearly everything it grows and lacks a local food culture. Access to local food is limited and local businesses have little incentive to support local food producers.

To change the culture, the city partnered with a local brewer, the Chamber of Commerce, Regional District and a community market to create the Valley Field and Farm Collective. This nonprofit organization brings together a cross-section of people from the community to integrate food production into community life and boost local commerce in food. Not by coincidence, its founder also chairs Abbotsford’s Community Innovation Partnership, started by the Economic Development Department to foster an innovation ecosystem throughout the community.

Funded by private investors, government grants and community banking partners, the Collective launched a summer farmers market in 2018, where local growers sold directly to the public and local businesses. Later in the same year, the Collective began executing a more ambitious plan to create a central kitchen and food innovation hub, communal brewhouse, local food café, music venue and community rental space.

CityStudio

On its base of traditional industries, Abbotsford is also laying the foundations of an innovation ecosystem for the city. It decided to focus on youth. In 2010, Vancouver established a program called CityStudio and in 2018, Abbotsford imported the program in partnership with University of Fraser Valley (UFV) and a secondary school. CityStudio is an innovation hub where students, city staff and community volunteers co-create experimental projects – online services and prototype products – that aim to make the city more sustainable, livable and joyful.

For secondary and university students, Abbotsford’s CityStudio provides practical learning about real-world challenges, career training, exposure to local business and the chance to gain valuable skills. For city government, the dialogue with students and experimental projects are shifting the culture of City Hall from perpetuating the past to innovating for the future. In its first year, CityStudio held 18 classes for students and city staff and launched 11 experimental projects, of which one on reducing littering in city parks won an award from UFV and was featured in a TedX event in Abbotsford.

Fiber to the Premise

Abbotsford represents an attractive market for communication carriers, because so much of its population is concentrated in a small share of its land. As a result, the incumbent phone company Telus has invested more than C$80 million to connect over 90% of homes and businesses to its fiber optic network at no cost to taxpayers. Completed in 2017, the fiber-to-the-premise network provides upload and download speeds of 300 Mbps with the potential to increase to 1 Gbps. Another fiber network has been deployed by Zayo to serve the high-capacity needs of data centers and technology companies. And as a result of a partnership with ICF Canada, Shaw approached the city with an offer to expand its public Wi-Fi capacity, so that by the middle of 2018, the company had 1,000 hotspots acrss the city including in all city-owned facilities.

With this kind of capacity, the city’s digital equality efforts have focused less on access and more on programs to help citizens use the connectivity to improve their lives. The library system offers an online learning collection featuring thousands of video courses, including language education. E-books and audiobooks are available online, as is a database of magazines, a car repair database and free music library. About half of Abbotsford residents are regular users of these services, each developing skills and experience with digital platforms that will pay dividends in the future.

Abbotsford’s Intelligent Community project is in the early stages of implementation, but it is grounded in careful plans developed in close collaboration with the community. The culture of that community draws on the best of farming tradition: hard and steady work toward the goal, staying steadfast in the face of setbacks, and caring for the land. In the plans and early results, it is possible to see the vision of an Abbotsford of 200,000 people ready to prosper in the decades ahead.

Population: 149,466

Website: www.abbotsford.ca

Smart21 2019

Top7 2019

York is a very unusual municipality. It is actually an amalgamation of nine cities, towns and townships that was founded in 1971, as well as a reserve where the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation reside. It covers more than 1,760 square kilometers (680 square miles) from the northern border of Canada’s biggest city, Toronto, to rural area on the shores of Lake Simcoe, in what the Canadians like to call “cottage country.” It is about as diverse – geographically, economically, socially and politically – as a community can rightly be.

Diversity has strengths. The municipality is Canada's third largest business hub, home to 600,000 jobs and 51,000 businesses. Most are concentrated in the affluent southern cities of Markham and Vaughan and the town of Richmond Hill, which also serve as bedroom communities for Toronto. Companies with headquarters and other major facilities in York Region include IBM, Lucent, Honeywell, Apple, Genesis Microchip, Compugen, Huawei, Compuware, Lexmark and Rogers Communications. The farther north you go, however, the more that technology gives way to historic downtowns, farmlands, wetlands and forest. A road network laid out in the 1790s connect north and south, east and west, and an effective transit system, including bus rapid transit, helps unite the municipality into a whole.

Broadband Strategy

Geographic size and diversity also bring challenges. The southern cities and towns are well-served by private-sector broadband carriers but as in any other urban-rural community, less-populated areas are not. To overcome the digital divide, York launched a Regional Broadband Strategy in 2014 to identify connectivity strengths, gaps and opportunities. A Broadband Strategy Advisory Task Force comprised of local Mayors and Regional Councillors was formed in 2015 to guide the execution of the Broadband Strategy. This included the formation of YorkNet -  a corporation  created to manage and oversee the expansion of York Region’s open access dark fiber network. 

Incorporated in 2017, YorkNet has since expanded its network to support the delivery of regional services. while collaborating with public-sector partners like municipalities, hospitals and schools to improve their access to high-speed internet and better enable connection, innovation, economic and education improvements. YorkNet also provides private-sector partners such as internet service providers with open access to its network to enhance access to high-speed internet for residents and businesses, especially those in rural and underserved communities in York Region.

Among its prouder achievements was the installation of an Ontario Research & Innovation Optical Network (ORION) point-of-presence at Southlake Regional Health Centre in the Town of Newmarket and the completion of a fiber connection to the York University Campus in the City of Toronto. ORION is a high-speed fiber network dedicated to research and education, which connects more than 2 million users including advanced computing centers across the Province of Ontario. The ORION Point-of-Presence at Southlake makes the network more accessible to York’s municipal governments, schools, local incubators and healthcare facilities; allowing the same connectivity and computing assets as the most advanced R&D institutions in Ontario.

Making It

Leveraging the existing strengths of the region, York has partnered with the Province of Ontario and the Town of Newmarket to develop NewMakeIt, a digital innovation hub and makerspace for members of the local community. It provides entrepreneurs and creative professionals with co-working space, high-speed broadband, tools and technologies to turn ideas into commercial products and services. In its first two years of operation, NewMakeIt fostered the creation of 12 new businesses and helped 17 existing ones expand their operations, with an estimated economic impact of C$3.9 million. But it is not just about business starts. NewMakeIt also offers a Repair Café, where the public can learn how to fix household items, robotics enthusiasts gather to build, and workshops train members in everything from woodworking to 3D printing.

Diversity can also mean inequality of opportunity. The Regional Municipality has launched digital equality programs in partnership with its many cities and towns. They include free Wi-Fi access at administrative facilities, libraries, transit terminals, recreational centers, hospitals and long-term care facilities. Libraries in rural communities offer the ability to check out high-speed wireless modems with a library card, and in-person and online skills training from basic computer skills to continuing adult education.

Balanced Growth

York is also investing in modernizing its transportation network to better serve residents in rural and urban areas. Mobile transit payment solutions are reducing waste and speeding processing. Expanded video monitoring along roadways and improved control of signal systems are easing congestion and delays. The C$20 million initiative uses Bluetooth device tracking and a data sharing partnership with Waze to develop a rich and real-time portrait in data of transportation patterns, so that the municipality can develop solutions that serve the entire region.

A Regional Municipality like York is an unusual thing. It enables its individual cities and towns to do much more than they could alone, and to pursue collective solutions to individual problems. It also challenges them to see past their traditional boundaries – to realize that the success of one community in winning inward investment or new jobs is not a loss for its neighbors but a multiplier that makes them all more successful. While leaving local governance to its cities and towns, the Regional Municipality is coordinating and attracting investment in the technology foundations of balanced, inclusive growth for the greater community.

Population: 1,186,900

Website: www.york.ca

Smart21 2018

Few communities can boast of having a globally recognized scenic wonder on their border. The city of Niagara Falls can. The Niagara River divides Canada and the US and, at the Falls, more than 168,000 cubic meters (6 million cubic feet) of it plunge 60 meters (190 ft) down into the Lower Niagara.

Such a massive source of hydroelectric power attracted electro-chemical and electro-metallurgical industries in the first half of the 20th Century. But the rise of global competition in the Seventies and Eighties eroded their competitiveness, and tourism became the city’s most important business. The Canadian side of the Falls offers superb views, but promoting tourism was not left to nature. The province of Ontario has a legal drinking age of 19 compared to 21 in the US, which tends to draw young consumers across the border. The province also legalized gambling in the mid-1990s, and by 2004, Niagara Falls boasted two major casinos and numerous luxury hotels.

Building the Foundation

Even with a spectacular waterfall thundering nearby, tourism can be a slender threat on which to hang a community’s economy. The leadership of Niagara Falls has committed itself to laying the foundation of an economy that can prosper in the digital age, create high-quality employment, and equip its people with the skills to make the most of it.

When it became clear that communications carriers would not invest significantly in the region, the city helped found the Niagara Regional Broadband Network (NRBN) in 2004. Its original goal was to meet the high-speed connectivity needs of municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals in the region. Once the network was operational, it expanded service to business customers. Today, it consists of 700 km of optical fiber with eight points of presence serving 680 sites in the region. NRBN also leases telecom carrier hotel facilities in Toronto and Buffalo to provide high-quality global connections. It has proved instrumental in retaining employers by allowing them to optimize operations.

If technology is one foundation, people are another. Niagara Falls currently has the educational demographics typical of a tourist destination. Fourteen percent of the population has an undergraduate degree or higher, while 42% have a community college certificate or “some college” in their background. The city is investing at the ground floor in the long process of changing those demographics.

Multiple programs focus on teaching elementary and high school teachers how to use technology and incorporate it into their work. The Blended Learning Institute trains math and science teachers to effectively combine digital and online content with traditional teacher-led instruction. A computer science track teaches them programming and web design, as well as how to make these topics accessible to all learners. This is complemented by a provincial program called IT4Learning, where online content connects with in-class teaching and gives students more control over the pace at which they learn. Participating students can access coursework anytime, anywhere, and teachers can interact with students and fellow teachers in a secure online environment. The highest expression of this educational innovation is Teach One, a program that provides mastery-based learning. Students are assigned groups based on skill level and learning style rather than age. They participate in skill-building activities alone, in groups and with teachers. They are assessed daily to determine their mastery, and this assessment guides the next day’s lessons. Teach One equips teachers with unprecedented real-time data on how their students are doing, and ensures that students master one foundational principle or skill before moving to the next.

Behind much of this innovation is a government-university project called ihub Niagara. It is an incubator with portfolio companies that focus on educational technology for kindergarten through university. Like any incubator, it provides technical assistance and professional services to help start-ups develop products and services and bring their first customers on board. It is distinct in its partnership with the city’s schools and nearby community college and university. It hosts quarterly Dragon’s Den-style events that bring together educators and edtech startups to review emerging tech solutions against real challenges in school communities. It provides a safe space for educators to critically evaluate new products and offer early-stage feedback that helps develop better products to serve their needs.

Enriching the Ecosystem

The ihub Niagara incubator is only one part of an emerging innovation ecosystem in a 12-muncipality region. It includes a business development district in Niagara Falls, the Spark Niagara Accelerator, the nonprofit Innovate Niagara, the Walker Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center at Niagara College and the Biolinc incubator at Brook University focusing in biotechnology. This set of partnerships is overseen by the Niagara CIO Consortium, which unites the technology leadership of the city, a regional chamber of commerce, the school board and participating colleges and universities.

The drive to prosper in the digital economy focuses not only on the future. To address lack of digital skills in today’s population, the library system offers computer access and technology training programs, and is building a makerspace. This is part of a broader Digital Inclusion Framework that has served more than 12,000 participants ages 12 to 65 and offered 7,500 hours of training to end-users and another 3,800 to the volunteers who provide the training. Volunteerism is central to the program: 99% of the people who staff it are volunteers working with such charities as the Kiwanis Club, Rotary Club and United Way. The digital training they provide has immediate relevance to its recipients, because it focuses on health and wellness, education, employment and engagement in the community.

Beyond the Falls

In 2012, the city launched the Connect Conference as showcase for its educational technology cluster and a driver of continued innovation. Every year, it attracts 2,000 education leaders, CIOs, directors of education, IT experts, business managers and government officials, and its program covers the complete educational cycle from kindergarten to higher education, libraries and workplace learning.

The roaring Falls will never stop being a vital contributor to the economy and culture of the city on its Canadian side. Niagara Falls aspires, however, to be much more than a place to gamble, party and admire the view. It is on the path to becoming a place where digital technology drives innovation, creates new jobs and new industries, and providing a rewarding quality of life for coming generations.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons, Kai Lehmann Niagara Falls, commercial use allowed

Population: 88,071

Website: niagarafalls.ca

Smart21 2018

Kinmen County is an archipelago of islands separated from mainland China by a mile or so of water. But it is part of Taiwan, whose main island lies 100 miles (161 km) to the east. That geographical oddity has done much to determine the county’s past – and also hold the keys to its future.

Kinmen became part of Taiwan in 1912 and was occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War. Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on the mainland, the PRC laid claim to Kinmen, which triggered its transformation into a military base that was home to more than 100,000 soldiers. The base withstood heavy artillery fire during two Taiwan Strait crises in the 1950s. It would be nearly 40 years until the military control of Kinmen County was lifted. That milestone in cross-Strait relations, however caused annual economic growth in the county to plummet from 10.5% to under 1% in the following ten years.

By 2014, only 3,000 soldiers were still stationed in the county. But in that same year, Kinmen received 1.2 million tourists and other visitors from mainland China, the rest of Taiwan and the Chinese populations of Singapore, Malaysia and other nations. An economy built on conflict had found a new focus and the leaders of Kinmen County were determined to continue its growth and create a diverse economy capable of retaining young talent and connecting its citizens to the world.

Promoting Tourism

The epicenter of the tourist economy is the Kinmen National Park, which preserves the vast military infrastructure of what is known locally as the Battlefield. One out of every three visitors tours the military camps and enjoys digital, interactive and real-life simulation games that recreate the tensions of the 1950s. These include interactive touchscreens and a 3D tour map accessible both onsite and through a mobile app, while a Facebook page and YouTube channel provide external marketing. In 2009, the county launched the world’s only Tunnel Music Festival, which takes place in one of the vast tunnels constructed to protect military supplies. It now attracts thousands of tourists from around the world each year.

The county has also poured investment into restoring hundreds of historic buildings that showcase traditional architecture. An interest-free loan program encourages young adults to launch tourism-related businesses such as guesthouses there. Two major real estate developments are also driving tourism as well as creating local employment. The Wind Lion Plaza provides duty-free international boutiques focusing on regional culture and green technologies. The Golden Lake Hotel attracts both tourists and business people from China and Taiwan. They take advantage of Kinmen’s new role as a weekend tourist destination for Taiwanese and Chinese mainlanders, and the relocation of businesspeople to the island for easier access to the vast markets of the mainland.

Seeding a Knowledge Economy

Kinmen County leaders are not content, however, with attracting visitors and their spending. County government has invested millions of New Taiwan Dollars (NTD) in education. The Taiwan Academic Network provides gigabit connectivity to primary and secondary schools as well as universities and cultural and research centers, with a submarine cable link to the network center in Taoyuan (a Top7 Intelligent Community, most recently in 2017). Schools run robotics summer camps and Digital Opportunity Centers provide training courses and enrichment activities for students ranging from age three to seventy-eight, regardless of income level. The county operates five senior learning centers for its elderly population offering courses in life safety, healthcare, advocacy and, of course, digital skills, which have reached tens of thousands of residents.

Kinmen County is also home to multiple institutions of higher learning, including National Quemoy, Ming Chuan, Nanhua and National Tsing Hua Universities. In addition to general courses, many offer education on R&D, technology, business, innovation and food processing.

These support parts of the economy having little to do with tourism. The Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor distillery, established by the county in 1953, has substantially upgraded its operations, distribution and marketing. Its Kaoliang fortified wine has a 75% market share across Taiwan. Because the long military occupation of Kinmen left so much of the land undeveloped, the county also has a large livestock industry, which generates half of the value of the county’s agricultural economy. Beginning in 2006, with the encouragement of county government, the distillery worked with the Livestock Research Institute on re-purposing as cattle feed the large volume of rice, malt and grain residue left from brewing. The livestock industry, with support from a national government ministry, is also moving up the value chain. A NTD 100 million investment has created the county’s first meat processing plant, and innovative companies are developing businesses that turn by-products, such as excess fat, into skin care products and bath supplies instead of burying them in landfills.

Between 10 and 15% of university graduates choose to remain in Kinmen County and seek employment each year. The universities, along with the Industrial Development and Investment Committee of Kinmen, hosts career fairs and has re-purposed an abandoned military base as the home for start-up companies. County government has spurred innovation in its small-to-midsize business sector with millions of NTD for research, which has produced nearly double that level of private-sector investment and additional revenues of nearly 130 million NTD as of the end of 2017.

Connecting People

Conservation and sustainability are important values in Kinmen County. Investments in solar power systems, wind turbines and microgrid energy storage are meeting one-fifth of total demand for electricity. The Low Carbon Island program, launched in 2013, led government to install 5,000 kW of solar systems on public buildings, schools and universities, leading to a reduction of 1.24 million kilograms of carbon dioxide through May 2017.

The foundation for these positive changes lies in the network. In keeping with the national i-Taiwan program, Kinmen County has installed hundreds of Wi-Fi hotspots across its offices, libraries, tourist attractions and public transport and facilities. In the five years ending in 2017, the wireless network supported more than 43,000 sessions with traffic of 3,900 Gbits. So successful has unwired broadband been that the usage rate of fixed broadband actually decreased slightly from 2012 to 2017, when mobile broadband adoption reached 93%.

Yet the past is never far away in Kinmen County. One of its unique products is the Kinmen Knife. It was developed by local artisans from the remains of the artillery shells fired by China into the county in the Fifties, and the high-quality knives are sought after by chefs and connoisseurs. In sharp contrast to those times, Kinmen County imports more goods from the mainland than from Taiwan due to the lower costs. The county’s future will continue to depend on combining the best of both worlds for the benefit of its people.

Photo by Seasurfer, Wikimedia Commons. Used under the Free GNU Documentation License.

For additional images of Kinmen County, see “Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands, Only a Few Miles From Mainland China”, The Atlantic, October 18, 2015.

Population: 136,004

Website: www.kinmen.gov.tw

Smart21 2018

Founded in the late 1800s in rural Alberta, Olds has been a small farming community for most of its history. Over the past twenty years, however, it has developed into an educational and technology center capable of luring tech entrepreneurs from the nearby city of Calgary. Olds has focused its efforts on its traditionally rural needs, bringing fiber-optic broadband access to even its most remote citizens as well as an expansive learning campus that includes both local high schools and Olds College.

A Connected Community Network

Olds was the first town in its region to offer gigabit Internet speeds through its community-owned and operated Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, O-Net. In 2010, the non-profit Olds Institute for Community & Regional Development borrowed funds from the Town of Olds and combined it with grant money from the Province of Alberta to develop O-Net. Once the network was complete, the Olds Institute sought a local provider to offer triple play services to the public, but none chose to do so. Taking the lead again, the Olds Institute created its own local telecommunications company to offer such services. As of today, 100% of sites in Olds have broadband capability with over 90% of the population making use of services.

Creating a Community Learning Center

As of 2006, the Olds High School was in serious need of a new building, as rapid development in the area had left it separated from its sportsfields and secondary facilities by a highway. Rather than simply replace the school, however, the town decided to develop a Community Learning Campus, inspired by the Alberta government’s Rural Development Initiative. Local businesses partnered with Olds College, Chinook’s Edge School Division and the Town of Olds to fundraise for the project. The result was a 77-million-dollar educational, employment and cultural “commons” in a traditionally rural region with little access to modern educational tools or the arts.

The Olds Community Learning Campus was completed in 2010 with the opening of the Ralph Klein Centre, which houses a community fitness center, the new Olds High School, the Central Alberta Child and Family Services office, the Olds Alberta Works Centre and the Olds Campus Community Health Centre. Olds College gained four new educational facilities as part of the Community Learning Campus, and its Broncos now host most of their games there as well. Since completion of the Community Learning Campus, Olds has seen greater high school completion rates, better diploma exam results and expanded course offerings. Olds High School was also chosen as one of two high schools world-wide to be included in an Innovative Learning Environments study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Developing a Culture of Use

With Internet access now available throughout the town, Olds has focused its efforts on training residents and businesses to make the most of this new resource. Beginning in 2011, the Olds Connected Community Committee developed a series of training programs, including more than 20 educational videos of people using and explaining technology in the community. The committee has also created a cyber seniors program to bring in local youth to teach seniors how to use new technologies.

Members of the cyber seniors program have gone on to help the committee develop the Digital Network Area Centre at the Olds Municipal Library. The DNA Centre is a technology demonstration center available to the whole community, where residents can go to use new devices such as a 3D printer as well as various programs and applications for work and recreation. Positive response to the DNA Centre has led the library and local schools to add more STEM programming, including tweet ups, video gaming events and social media and new media competitions.

Soaring Public Engagement

The success of local programs has fostered a strong culture of public engagement in Olds. The Olds Institute for Community & Regional Development has brought together members from the government of Olds, Olds College, Olds Regional Exhibition, the Mountain View County government, the Olds and District Chambers of Commerce and local schools to discuss new community initiatives and needs, to pool their resources for fundraising and project management and to encourage residents to volunteer their time and take up leadership positions in projects that matter most to them. This collaboration has yielded impressive results, including the creation of O-Net and the relationships needed to build the Community Learning Campus. With so much accomplished in the past twenty years and community engagement reaching new heights, Olds races toward a bright tomorrow and an even brighter future.

Population: 9,184

Website: www.olds.ca

Smart21 2018

Kelowna is the largest city in the tourist-oriented Okanagan Valley and one of the fastest-growing cities in North America. Its 127,000 people are largely employed in tourism, which spans all four seasons and brings more than C$1 billion per year into the region. It is also home to two post-secondary institutions with a combined student body of over 13,000 full-time students. With a dry, mild climate and scenic lake vistas, it is surrounded by provincial parks, pine forest, vineyards, orchards and mountains. It is, in short, a beautiful spot that is a long way from any place even close to its population size.

This relative rural isolation and the low-skilled, low-paid nature of most tourism work presents Kelowna with challenges. Rapid development has triggered sharp debate in the community while driving up property prices to a level that places Kelowna among the top 10 most unaffordable markets in Canada. It has high rates as well of property crime, illegal drug use and opiod overdoses. Changing those dynamics while preserving what makes Kelowna so attractive is the vital task that Kelowna's elected leaders have set for themselves.

Breaking Down Barriers

Kelowna already operates a dark fiber network that connects city facilities and saves money, and offers 1 Gbps service on a leased basis to nonprofits, schools and private businesses. The benefits in terms of access to markets, knowledge and services are significant and growing. Its next target is underserved rural businesses and households. The city began network expansion in February 2017 using funding from the provincial Connecting British Columbia program.

Most of Kelowna's new residents come from other parts of Canada, and retirees over 65 make up more than 20% of the population. The Silver Surfers program connects seniors with Okanagan College students, who mentor them in using an iPad to surf the web, take pictures, send email, use Facebook and connect with family and friends over applications like Facetime. Originally piloted in 2016, the program has matched 96 seniors with 40 student mentors. Before the program, participants reported connect with family members twice per month; they now are connecting an average of twice per week.

Creating a Knowledge Workforce

Kelowna projects that the local economy will demand 56,000 new workers in the next five years, but like most rural cities, it watches too much of its student population depart after graduation. To reverse this trend, the city and community groups created in 2012 the Okanagan Young Professionals Collective (OPY), an umbrella organization that fosters and supports young professional groups engaged in volunteer, social, professional, sports, arts and cultural activities. One is Motionball, which builds awareness and raises funds for the Special Olympics Canada Foundation. Motionball aims to introduce the next generation of volunteers and donors to the Special Olympics through social and sporting events that put fun into giving. It was one of the founders of OYP.

Through 2017, OYP has raised over $360,000 in funds and services and persuaded local companies to contribute more than 3,500 volunteer hours of accounting, web development and business planning services to local nonprofits. Employers in the region have begun using OYP as a tool in their efforts to recruit young professionals from outside the region – and the results are showing. Kelowna's census district has experienced growth above the provincial average in 30-34 year olds since 2011, and the increase in the number of children has been more than double the average for the province.

Foundations of an Innovation Economy

Today's young professionals tend to be entrepreneurial, and the community has begun building the infrastructure to support a startup economy. A group of local entrepreneurs, community and civic leaders set a goal in 2014 of creating 10,000 technology jobs within 10 years. Their ambitions gave rise to the Okanagan Center for Innovation, a partnership among the city, the province, the Federal government and a local tech entrepreneur. The Center offers commercial space at market rates to companies, and publicly-supported spaces and services to startup and early-stage companies, community members and social enterprises. Since the opening of the 105,000 square-foot (9,700 m2) building in May 2017, all 48 desks in the publicly-supported section have been rented and 34 companies have joined an acceleration mentorship program. Atrium Ventures, an entrepreneur-led venture capital firm funded in part by government, has an office in the building and provides access to a direct investment pool.

Investing in Climate

As a low-density community, Kelowna residents depend heavily on private automobiles, and road transportation accounts for more than 65% of greenhouse gas emissions in the city. The city's Climate Action Plan seeks to compensate with an aggressive tree-planting program in Kelowna's natural parks as well as upgrades to city-owned heating, lighting and waste-water treatment facilities. A landfill gas purification plan is reducing 3,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year while providing a renewable resource for provincial gas customers.

This is one aspect of a broader "Imagine Kelowna" project, which engages the public in helping to plan the community's future for the next 25 years. Kicking off in May 2016, the project has attracted hundreds of inputs online, through the mail and in community events and workshops. It envisions a future with fewer cars and more public transportation options, and the creation of vital urban centers with housing for all income levels, to take the place of urban sprawl. A diverse and inclusive economy, built on a culture of entrepreneurship, will address the community's economic and social challenges.

Kelowna approaches the future with important assets: a successful tourism industry, a growing population and the outlines of a broadband-powered, innovation-driven economy. Its success will be determined by how it fills in those outlines and how it ensures that the benefits of tech-based growth reach far and wide across the community.

Population: 127,380

Website: www.kelowna.ca

Smart21 2018

The population of Hudson, Ohio is approximately 22,262. It is an affluent suburban community ideally located between Cleveland and Akron. Hudson is consistently thought of as the “jewel” of Northeast Ohio. Hudson has an excellent education system, historic neighborhoods, vibrant downtown shopping and dining, and a great quality of life. The City is also home to more than nine-hundred businesses, ranging from entrepreneurial endeavors to international corporations. The last 4 years have seen unprecedented commercial/industrial development from “future-facing” businesses in technology, medical/wellness, polymers, and homeland and cyber security. Hudson offers advantages to companies that want to locate in a family-friendly environment, making it the place to do business in Northeast Ohio.

At the same time there are challenges. The Hudson community had long eschewed growing its business tax base. Despite a heavy residential tax imbalance, high home prices and an aging and flat population, the focus was on affordable living. These challenges have been compounded by an upper middle-class population whose perception is ‘all is well’.  The median age of Hudson is a rapidly advancing 45.2 years with approximately 72% of residents over the age of 25 holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. Median household income is approximately $129,000. But like intelligent communities everywhere, it is a place in transition from one economy to the next. Hudson seeks to secure its future at a time when smaller communities without a distinct competitive advantage are seeing their human, economic, and cultural assets drained away by bigger places.

Velocity Broadband

In late 2015, Hudson began construction of the Velocity Broadband Network. That milestone was the end of one journey and the beginning of another. As internet access became essential to businesses, the city began hearing more and more complaints about lack of reliable, affordable connectivity. The largest companies in town could afford dedicated high-capacity service but small-to-midsize companies – the backbone of employment everywhere – could not. A survey of residents and businesses in 2015 made clear that coverage, speed, performance and reliability were a big issue. Some business people reported regularly leaving town for a café with internet access because their own service was so undependable.

The city first tried to interest ISPs in upgrading their infrastructure but the proposals from providers were inadequate and expensive. It pitched potential private-sector partners on buying capacity on an open-access network to be capitalized by the city. The response was tepid. Finally, City Council agreed to become a retail service provider. It made a US$3.3 million internal loan so that its IT department could expand the fiber network already used by government to serve the business community.

Today, Velocity Broadband offers business customers a symmetrical 500x500 Mbps service with capability up to 10 Gbps. More than 250 business customers subscribe to internet service and over 100 to voice-over-internet-protocol telephone, producing revenues that exceed operating costs since 2017. In addition to satisfying existing users, Hudson has seen direct impact on business attraction. For the previous ten years, one of the city's primary business parks had only one tenant. Since Velocity Broadband started service, the park has added seven new buildings and is close to being fully occupied.

With the success of Velocity Broadband in the business sector, Hudson was eager to expand coverage to residential areas as well. The city sought input from citizens on broadband needs and challenges through a community survey and a committee of residents. In 2019, based on survey and committee findings, Hudson changed its policy to stop differentiating between residential and business structures for coverage, expanding Velocity’s potential subscriber footprint from 600 to 1,500 potential new customers. The city will seek further opportunities for network expansion in the coming years as well.

Fire Prevention via Broadband

Hudson’s historic downtown is comprised of buildings that are more than 100 years old, many of which are physically attached or at least directly adjacent to one another. Even one building catching fire in the area could spell disaster for all of downtown, wiping out businesses, lives and history all at once. The primary way to prevent such spreading fires is quick detection, but most options, such as running wires through old brick walls and ceilings, were prohibitively expensive for local businesses. The city took advantage of its Velocity Broadband to design a brand-new solution instead.

During the first quarter of 2018, the city coordinated building inspections with the Hudson Fire Department and the Velocity Broadband vendor to check signal strength and determine appropriate locations for wireless fire detection units. These units will form a mesh network that communicates back to a central fire panel, allowing Hudson’s Fire Department to learn immediately of any fires beginning. In addition, the devices include wireless horn-strobes that will alert everyone in the general vicinity if a fire breaks out. The city has made historic Main Street a pilot site for this fire detection network with plans to expand if testing goes well.

Center for Innovation and Creativity

An educated population tends to demand much from its educational institutions. In 2010, Hudson was named as one of the 100 Best Communities for Young People by an organization called America's Promise. The award was based on work that began in the 1990s to combat drug use and drive down the dropout rate by providing additional educational and cultural opportunities.

Today, the Hudson City Schools are part of the Six District Compact, a partnership of neighboring school districts, which lets students enroll in two-year higher education programs that earn college credit or provide a pathway directly from high school into employment. Vocational courses range from automotive to cosmetology, and STEM offerings as diverse as coding and robotics lead to the awarding of Microsoft and Cisco certifications. A 1-to-1 Chromebook program has equipped all students in grades 3-12 with a free laptop, and also paid for a professional Technology Coordinator to manage the project. Based on the Chromebook program’s success, the city will be providing students in grades 6-8 with 6th-generation iPads to replace their Chromebooks, giving them access to a wider variety of productivity and learning apps and tools. The same funding includes support and incentives for teachers to become certified as Google Educators. This mix of technology, training and train-the-trainer programs is a fundamental building block of the knowledge workforce. In 2016, a private secondary school, Western Reserve Academy, opened the Center of Technology, Innovation and Creativity with funding from a local foundation. In the 6,000-square-foot (557 m2) collaborative makerspace, students pursue their own projects and partner with local businesses to design, engineer and create products, beginning with banners and T-shirts and advancing to custom-branded gift items. The Center expected to offset 100% of its operating costs through such projects by the end of 2017.

Innovation does not, however, stop with the Academy's students. The Center has invited public schools to explore the facility and hosted a Digital Fabrication Camp for younger students. A 2017 gift to the school made it possible for students from rural, disadvantaged Ohio towns to spend three weeks of learning and exploration at the Center and to board at the Academy.

Engaging the Community

Hudson's economic development leadership discovered in 2017 that a highly valuable asset was hiding in plain sight. The city is home to nearly 80 Chairs, CEOs and founders of major corporations, universities and nonprofits in the region. To put that talent to work, the city and Hudson Community Foundation established the Business Leader Advisory Board, which meets biannually to prioritize opportunities arising from Velocity Broadband and other developments, and to act throughout the year as advocates for the city beyond its borders. Still in the early stage at the time of this report, the Board provides to Hudson the kind of expertise, insight and leadership access normally available only in a major city.

Another program, Leadership Hudson, introduces its citizen participants to local leaders in government, business and the community, and offers training in leadership. In addition to valuable networking and leadership development, the program offers each class the chance to develop a unique project to benefit the community. In 2014, the Leadership Hudson class partnered with the city-owned electric utility to install a Solar Education Center, complete with solar panels, at the Barlow Community Center. The class raised money for the project from local foundations, businesses and social organizations, as well as a crowdfunding effort that contributed 10% of the total raised. The money went to build a system with 55 roof-mounted and 10 ground-level solar panels, which now provide half the building's electricity and will save the city $100,000 in the next 25 years while reducing carbon emissions by 40 tons per year. Next on the agenda of the Solar Education Center is engagement with local schools to use data generated by the solar installation in STEM programs and in the Green Cup Energy Challenge, a national competition that engages more than 300 schools each year.

For those residents still left out of the loop, the city created the Hudson Commons project in 2019. The project aims to provide information and updates to citizens regardless of their media consumption habits, a formidable task in the digital age. The Hudson Commons project includes a wide variety of communication avenues, from monthly 3-4 page newsletters delivered by mail to bi-weekly “Hudson Headlines” short videos streamed online and posts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. The city is also considering creating a new version of Hudson Community Television available through new services such as online streaming, rather than traditional television.

Getting Out of the Way of Progress

City government is making its own contribution to progress by identifying processes that stand in the way of economic growth. The city manager introduced a Continuous Improvement initiative in 2016, and one of its first projects involved the permitting process for residential, commercial and industry construction. It was locally famous for its length and cumbersome procedures: a typical residential application took 11.5 days to process and involved 45 separate steps.

The Continuous Improvement team conducted a week of exhaustive interviews with employees and analyzed the steps in the workflow. At the end of the review, the team proposed to junk the existing software system in favor of a user-friendly online interface that could accept credit card transactions and would drastically reduce the number of steps. As just one example, residents wanting to add a window or fence to their property typically waited one week for approval, a process that involved a formal review board. The new system let residents apply for and receive approval in hours without ever leaving home. That residential application requiring 11.5 days and 45 steps was reduced to 2.5 days and 13 steps, and similar gains were made on commercial and industrial applications.

The leaders of Hudson understand the privileges that come with its position as a home for well-educated, well-paid residents working at companies throughout the region. Hudson's citizens already tend to be on the winning side of the transition to a digitally-powered economy – but the city is not one to take its current success for granted. Ambitious programs in broadband, education, economic and community development provide a pathway to a stronger economy and more engaged society for all Hudsonians.

Population: 22,389

Website: www.hudson.oh.us

Smart21 2018 | 2019 | 2020

Top7 2019 | 2020

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