In this episode of the Intelligence Test, ICF Co-Founder Robert Bell has a conversation with John Jung, Co-Founder, Intelligent Community Forum and Wendy Dupley, Economic Development Advisor, Langley City, BC, Canada.

Humans are the masters of Earth when it comes to energy. We reap it from fossil fuels, the sun, wind and waters, even from the atom. You are using it now to read these words. Yet we waste most of it in the form of heat, whether it’s the blazing temperatures inside the engine of your car or the heat pouring out of the smokestack of a factory. By most, I mean up to 70 percent. That’s ridiculously bad for both our wallets and our environment.

What if there was a technology that could harvest the waste heat from factories, power plants and data centers and turn it into electricity? Well, there is – and it is being born at a startup housed at a university in an underappreciated corner of Ontario Province called Durham.

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

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

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