OurCalling (www.OurCalling.org) is a Dallas-based organization that has created an interactive smartphone app that provides information and emergency alerts to some of the most vulnerable members of a community: the homeless.

OurCalling's app has a database of service providers for the poor, a list of resources such a clinics, food banks and rehab facilities, a calendar for volunteer opportunities, a way for individuals to report a situation where volunteers can go assist someone in need, and more. While it started in Dallas, they are currently working to expand nationally to provide information on services to homeless people all over the US.

Listen to this fascinating episode of The Intelligent Community to learn more about how OurCalling developed the app, the lessons they learned on building relationships, and their plans for what's to come with their mission. 

Between 1860 and 1900, inventors created the telephone, phonograph, moving pictures and air transportation.  Thomas Edison tested the first practical lightbulb, Karl Benz built a workable internal combustion engine and David Edward Hughes transmitted the first wireless signal – and they did it during just one three-month period in 1879. The result was a golden age of economic growth from about 1900 through the 1960s, with a broad-based rise in incomes across the industrialized world.  

You have never seen the work of Ms. Hadam Sung and her sexy dance cover group from Korea, Bambino. She is a “nugu” to you (I’ll explain that one later). On the Internet, however, she is a record-breaking superstar whose talents are cherished throughout Asia. Thanks to broadband, they are exported worldwide. Broadband and innovation, the golden combo, have made it happen for her. Not to mention her hard work and her talent.

PART 2: With smart infrastructure, smart people and smart money, an innovation ecosystem is never too far behind.

As we see the emergence of the Internet of Things in the short years ahead we will become even more used to changes in how we will expect things to work and how differently we will want to do things. Resistance to change has been the usual excuse for communities and people, in general, in the past to accept new ways of doing things, but as our urban areas increase their populations and it becomes more difficult to be mobile; to be able to do the things that we may have done previously and we will now have to share it with more people waiting to have access to it, there will be less resistance to change. Perhaps even pent-up demand will be experienced for things that people see in other communities and expect will or should be available to them in short order.

PART 1: Disruption - to transformation - to evolution: the circle of life continues.

As I move through my day, I am constantly disrupted in my normal ways of doing things to the point where I am no longer disrupted but maybe only annoyed that what I am now doing on a regular basis is the new normal. Then I become resigned to this fact and don’t expect to ever go back to what I had been doing years before. I begin to see the advantages of what I am doing today and would never wish to go back to what I had been doing. I even advocate the fact that this new thing is so much better and encourage others to do the same. As society accepts these acts by me and others, they become normalized and the disruption is no longer ever thought of as a disruption. Besides a new disruption has already taken its place.

This infographic was created for ICF by StudioLocale (www.studiolocale.com) using data from the Intelligent Community in Numbers report. For more information, click here.

The broadband economy is an innovation-driven economy. Economist Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize in 1987 for proving that 80% of all economic growth comes from the development and use of technology. The spread of global and local connectivity has had a fundamental impact on the necessity for innovation, its speed and its economic value. Why?

• The first requirement for innovation is knowledge: of what customers want, of what other innovators are doing, and of what level of opportunity the market offers. Broadband has become the knowledge pipeline of the planet, making it possible for innovators to learn more faster than ever before.
• Another critical requirement for innovation is access to talent. Broadband has allowed both multinational companies and small business to efficiently tap the world's best and brightest.
• Innovation also requires access to markets. Broadband has made it far cheaper and easier to run a network of remote facilities or sales offices, to enforce standards of operation, branding and all the other factors in a successful marketing effort. And for innovators whose product can be marketed or delivered digitally, broadband opens the door to a global market.

Innovation is essential to the interconnected economy of the 21st Century. Intelligent Communities pursue innovation through a relationship between business, government and such institutions as universities and hospitals. The Innovation Triangle or “Triple Helix” helps keep the economic benefits of innovation local, and creates an innovation ecosystem that engages the entire community in positive change. Investments in innovative technology by government contribute to that culture and improve service to citizens while reducing operating costs.

Building Innovation Capacity

Creating, attracting and retaining knowledge workers are the most important steps a community can take to raise its innovation rate. Unlike traditional business as most of us conceive it, an innovative business is all about people.

In addition to building a knowledge workforce, Intelligent Communities focus on building the local capacity to innovate rather than achieving a few "big wins" in the business attraction game. Sustainable economic growth is no longer built on attracting the manufacturing facilities, R&D labs or distribution hubs of the world's biggest companies. Why? Because the world's biggest companies are not net creators of jobs. They have been shrinking in terms of total employment for decade.

Where do you look instead for local income growth? To new companies. In the 20 years between 1980 and 2000, all of the net growth in American employment came from firms younger than five years old. The US offers one of the world's friendliest economies for start-ups, but the same trend is visible throughout the industrialized world, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Most small companies are not fast-growing. But a percentage of small businesses are what MIT researcher David Birch termed "gazelles" – nimble, aggressive start-ups with big ambitions hungry for the resources needed to achieve them. Successful "gazelles" throughout the industrialized nations create the income growth on which the rest of the local economy feeds. To empower them, communities should work to:

• Reduce the bureaucratic load. If your nation, state or province makes it difficult to start a business – as so many of them do – find out what your community can do to make it easier. Provide potential entrepreneurs with advice, help them with paperwork, even represent them before the various licensing and regulatory agencies. Convince local universities and technical schools to help entrepreneurs license technology on straightforward terms and develop progressive intellectual property policies. A community that makes it easier and faster to start and grow a business than its neighbors will enjoy a serious competitive advantage.
• Create a pipeline for talent. Improving the educational assets of a community is a big job, which can take years or even decades to bear fruit. But it takes far less time and effort to create a more effective "pipeline" through which local business can find the talent it needs. The work starts with talking to the significant employers in your community to learn what skills they need. From that point, communities conduct multi-faceted efforts to attract and channel talent to their employers.
• Expand access to funding. While slow-growing "income replacement" companies can fund themselves from cash flow, fast-growing "gazelles" need investment capital to realize their ambitious dreams.

The Role of E-Government

Governments may not directly create the business innovation that powers economic growth. But local government can play a powerful supportive role. In addition to the steps described above, Intelligent Communities also invest in e-government programs that simultaneously reduce their costs while delivering services on the anywhere-anytime basis that digitally savvy citizens expect.

E-government has an impact at the local level that is both subtle and complex. Leading by example, e-government raises the public's "digital awareness" and helps to create a more innovative culture that attracts leading-edge individuals and businesses. Money spent locally on IT products, services and support increases local demand for them. Effective e-government also signals to businesses and citizens that the community is a good destination for the "digiterati." In short, properly executed, e-government can do more than save money and improve service delivery. It can also become a robust economic development tool.

Congratulations to the Intelligent Community of Vancouver! The GLOBE Leadership Summit in Vancouver from March 2-4 was an exceptional experience. Nearly two thousand business and government leaders from over 50 countries came together to network and advance global business and sustainability agendas in Vancouver. 200 thought leaders from around the world focused on issues regarding sustainability, urban resiliency and all things related to the future of the planet.

The best acts of defiance are made in pursuit of a greater good. History is complete with tales of passive resistance, armed rebellions and legends of a person or group of dedicated souls who refuse to sell-out, cave-in or toss-down the towel, no matter how overwhelming the forces stacked against them or the depth of corruption from a perverse civil order. You and I honor the private inspirations in our lives who get us out of bed and roll us forward, somehow putting in us a deeper psychic mark and recalibrated moral settings. Those whose actions are given the stamp of the “heroic” or “visionary” after their time of persistence are seen to have been clearly on the right side of the cause, while most could only see through the glass darkly. They are, in the words of my father, not deliberate and intentional provocateurs, but people who simply “stuck by their guns.” At ICF we have 145 of them.

Get ready for the next industrial revolution. Change is inevitable. Get over it! And in today’s world, it will happen quickly. The drivers for it are not only structural, political, scientific and economic, but also cultural and social. They are manifested through such things as products and services, platforms and processes, as well as how people, governments and organizations are willing to accept and work with them. On the horizon is a phenomenon that is already changing the way we live. Billions of machine–to-machine (M2M) connections are actively connecting devices and applications that people use everyday such as Amazon’s Echo, Google’s Nest, or Apple’s HomeKit. On the Smart City scene are digital programs ranging from water and air quality sensors to sensor-enabled trash collection, using data to improve efficiency, reduce costs and make better use of our limited resources. The Internet of Things (IoT), which includes M2M connections and sensor-enabled environmental data generators, will probably be one of the most revolutionary impacts on our communities and on our lives since the broad-scale adoption of the Internet. While over 15 billion devices are already connected with one another today including computers with mobile devices, medical and environmental sensors, and industrial and commercial machines, 85% of these devices and other things are still unconnected. It is expected that 50 billion devices and applications will be connected by 2020. The growing adoption of IoT is driving businesses of all makes and sizes to bring about changes in the way they do business, service customers, attract and retain talented workforce and deal with supply chains.

The countryside is in trouble. You know it. I know it. The United Nations says so. The share of the world’s population living in the countryside is shrinking as megacities grow. Opportunities for education and employment are shrinking with it, forcing bright kids to leave town to pursue their ambitions. The tax base erode, schools consolidate, services falter and stores close.