I’m excited and honored to be in Vietnam this week for the Top7 Conference - Post-Pandemic Recovery: How Digital Innovation Drives Growth in Our Community, an event that is helping to create a positive, peaceful future for our cities and our world. I would like to thank Binh Duong and Becamex for inviting us here to Vietnam’s first Intelligent Community for the conference. It has been a pleasure to watch Binh Duong continuously making progress and to be here to congratulate the city on its 25th anniversary. It will be good to see my colleagues from the Netherlands and Eindhoven, too. Eindhoven remains, 11 years after its achievement as Intelligent Community of the Year, one of the best examples of what can be done with innovation, cooperation and the power of the Trip Helix.

Our theme today is “How Digital Innovation Drives Growth.” We will ask our guests: what does that mean? And what kind of growth? Economic, social and cultural, political maturity and excellence? Yes, all of these! We should be proud that in Smart Cities and Intelligent Communities, governments also innovate and learn to provide better, timelier and more reliable services to their eager cities and towns.

A discussion on education, healthcare, and the idea of what a “community” will be in 2031 - and how these changes have been accelerated during the time of COVID-19. With guests Joost Helms, Director, Eindhoven International Project Office and Dr. Rick Huijbregts, Vice-President, Strategy & Innovation, George Brown College.

Taoyuan, Taiwan & New York, USA – 10 January 2022 - Topics such as net-zero carbon emission and sustainability have become key issues to the global community. Undeterred by the coronavirus pandemic, Department of Information Technology of Taoyuan City Government partnered with the internationally acclaimed ICF as a front runner in 2022. As a prelude to the Smart City Summit & Expo 2022 held in Taiwan, Taoyuan City will co-host with ICF the series of “Taoyuan x ICF: City-Leaders Conversation” with fellow intelligent communities on how to best respond to the challenges at hand.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, Lou Zacharilla discusses Eindhoven and The Smartest Neighborhood in the World with Peter Portheine of the Eindhoven International Project Office (EIPO).

NDO/VNA – Ho Chi Minh City wishes to learn from the Dutch city of Eindhoven’s experience in smart city development and cooperation models between the state and businesses, schools, and research institutes, especially in smart city building and operation, an official from HCM City said on May 21, as part of his visit to the Netherlands.

Nguyen Thien Nhan, Secretary of the Ho Chi Minh City Party Committee, told Vice Mayor of Eindhoven, Stijn Steenbakkers, that this is the first visit to the Dutch city by a Ho Chi Minh City delegation.

In the middle of the night on an abandoned bus lane somewhere in Eindhoven three cars pass by, in the front BMW i3 someone is behind the wheel, the other two vehicles are unmanned. At an appropriate distance and fully automatically they follow the front driver.

Amber, a car-sharing platform, tested for the first time on the public road with their shared cars, at night on a blocked bus lane. To this end, the company worked together with the municipality of Eindhoven and SmartwayZ. Amber called this a successful test and the aim is to introduce platooning as of next year in order to be able to transport cars from hub to hub at night.

Different initiatives around the Eindhoven University of Technology bring students and SMEs closer together. They offer support to the Brainport region through time, money and knowledge to develop innovative ideas and develop them into startups. Innovation Origins looks at a number of these projects and shows what they can do for this region.

“The Vragenbank gives SMEs the opportunity to get in touch with the university. They can quickly and easily submit their question about an innovative idea in their company to a student.” Monique Greve leads this project from the TU/e and sees that it brings SMEs and students closer together.

	Rob van Gijzel

The best description I have ever heard about ICF as an ideas-driving think tank for enabling Digital Age policy for cities and towns was from Rob van Gijzel, the former mayor of Eindhoven, The Netherlands and the ICF Foundation’s first chairman. He called us, “The method of transformational decision making for cities.”

And we are. Or at least “a method” for this. We are also a group that inspired communities to believe that, yes, they can.

The world has cooperated with the ICF vision. Thanks to broadband and satellite telecommunications the world became flat. Like the sound of a rail train’s whistle, people heard something familiar and it allowed them to rethink the proposition of the small and the midsized city especially. It dawned on them that “the middle of nowhere” was no longer their domain. They had places with a history and assets that could be transformed.

These cities and towns have begun to determine the course of the global economy because of how they have moved from using smart technology to become Intelligent places. This year’s Smart21 is laden with them, from Vietnam to Ohio to India.

One of the pillars of the success of the Brainport region is cooperation. Cooperation in chains between networks of suppliers and OEMs and cooperation in the multi helix to create the optimal conditions for successful companies and groundbreaking innovations. And yet, at the start of the future study of Brainport Eindhoven, the participants indicated that even more cooperation was needed, both within the region and with parties outside of it. Cooperation is crucial for the development of future generations of applications and systems. Because even more than now, everything will be connected with everything by 2038.