In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Jim Shea, Founder and CEO of Deepsig.

Development in the African innovation ecosystem is still at the take-off stage. The level of growth witnessed in the space is still a country mile away from those achieved in America’s Silicon Valley and across technological hubs in the Far East.

With the increasing popularity of AI, observers affirm that innovative progress in Africa could well match up with the rest of the world sooner rather than later. But with varied peculiarities scattered around the continent, there is a greater need to interrogate what the future holds.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Krista Nightengale, Executive Director at the Better Block Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to showing communities how to build a more walkable, bikeable, liveable neighborhood to improve quality of life and attract talent.

The Taiwanese government spares no effort to promote new tech trends in sports to help people live a longer and healthier life.

The advancements in artificial intelligence of the past few years have been mind-blowing. They have given rise to much research and analysis about the future of work. They have also given rise to a lot of nonsense. The trick is to figure out which is which.

On one side of the argument are respected academics and global consulting organizations. In their tremendous book, Race Against the Machine, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson offered dire predictions of the increasing power of AI and the erosion of jobs it will bring. Their advice? Don’t fight it – instead, figure out how to work with technology change to get the greatest benefit as individuals and as a society. There have been dire predictions about how big job losses will be, but the best-informed numbers come from the McKinsey Global Institute. They predict that automation will eliminate only 5% of today’s jobs. But it will also have an impact on 60% of total jobs. On average, workers in those fields spend one-third of their time doing routine work, and routine labor is the easiest to automate. So, no matter what you do for a living, it would be wise to buckle your seat belt.

With the goal of leading the upgrading and transformation of industries and the development of digital technology, the Taiwan government is implementing the "Smart City Taiwan Project" through the Industrial Development Bureau of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The central government, local governments and industries are working together to develop innovative applications in 22 counties and cities across Taiwan in six major areas, including "health," "governance/security," "transportation," "agriculture," "education" and "tourism/retail," through the Public-Private-People Partnership mechanism. Since its inception, the project has yielded fruitful results, with about 300 enterprises participating and developing 223 smart services that benefit 8.54 million people. In addition to solving local problems, the project has also opened up international development opportunities for industry players.

Innovation.  It’s a popular, misunderstood and kind of squishy term that nonetheless plays a big role in today’s world.  A Google search on it will earn you 1.65 billion hits. 

There’s a reason for that.  Economist Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize more than 30 years ago for proving, for the first time, that 80% of all growth in the economy comes from the introduction or use of new technology. So, if you are engaged in creating or putting to use a new way of doing things, you have a shot at your share of 80% of growth.  If you are devoted to doing the same old things, you can hope for a share of the 20%.  Which would you rather have?

(April 9, 2018 – New York City, NY, USA) – The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) has released a comprehensive ranking of Intelligent Communities grouped by Innovation, one of the Factors defining Intelligent Communities in the ICF Method. The list is the latest publication in ICF’s By The Numbers series. It provides a useful guide to the relative strengths of communities in ICF’s network, and an inspiration for greater progress in coming years. Future By the Numbers rankings of Intelligent Communities will be released by ICF in the coming months.

The list ranks Intelligent Communities in our global data set using data on communities submitted from 2014 through 2018. This data is carefully weighted to balance the self-reported and third-party data of the Smart21 evaluation and the data from later stages of evaluation that is subject to onsite validation.

You go to a conference and a speaker talks about the vital importance of innovation.  Your city, county or town needs to be more innovative.  It needs to become smarter.  It needs to be agile.  It needs to juggle flaming torches while keeping a hula hoop in motion. 

Actually, none of that is why innovation is important.  The guy who first uncovered the truth was Stanford University professor Moses Abramovitz.