June 2013 – Looking Forward

June 26, 2013

US Mayors Pump It Up?

Along with Mayor Bill Finch of Bridgeport, Connecticut, I made a fun presentation at the annual meeting of the US Conference of Mayors. More about that, but some background first.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working with the Council on Metro Economies and The New American City of the US Conference of Mayors on a future-oriented, 21st century strategy for economic growth.

This project recognizes the increasing proportion of Americans who will earn their living by providing digital products and services, on the one hand, and the increasing availability of high quality, casual video communications and collaboration on the other hand.

Together these lead to some significant changes in the character of the economy and of cities. (See my presentation at the ICF Institute for more about these changes – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlNxLmIQ4O8.)

In the early stages, the strategy focused on ideas for mayors as they respond to these changes on behalf of the residents of their cities. More recently, with USCM staff, we’ve started to create pilot demonstrations of these ideas.

Recognizing that these changes in the economy enable many people to make a living almost anywhere, one part of the strategy is to provide a high quality of life, a “WOW” experience, that’s unique to a city so people come and stay there. The by-product of this experience is that it can also inspire residents to innovate – a key factor in economic growth.

With the Internet everywhere across a city, blending the physical and the virtual can create new WOW experiences. The presentation showed various examples that included displays and projections on walls and other physical structures, on a controlled mist from Long Island Sound, etc.

Bridgeport is a good example of a city that can benefit from this – an older industrial city of 150,000 that is cut by an interstate highway. It has locations and structures that wouldn’t normally be considered attractive, but offer great potential in a blended virtual/physical world.

Consider this smokestack that is the first sign of Bridgeport that drivers see on Interstate 95.

Why not make it a video screen?

This blending of the virtual and physical makes it possible to show what’s happening in real-time in another part of town or from another time in the same place.

Consider the multi-modal transit center that people see when they arrive by train, bus, ferry or even a car. It certainly could be more welcoming.

Each summer, there is a big music festival in Bridgeport – the Gathering of the Vibes. My last example showed how this wall could be transformed so it presents one of the star acts, Elvis Costello.

The song he’s singing, “Pump It Up”, is also the message to mayors and what they can now do with what used to be dreary places.

I left the mayors with this final thought: this is not primarily about something artistic or a way of getting advertising or even promoting big events. In a fundamental way, this is how cities need to think about urban design in this century.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/53929055163/us-mayors-pump-it-up]

June 19, 2013

How To Be The Most Intelligent Community In The World?

One of the questions I was asked about the awards given by the Intelligent Community Forum is what does it take to become an intelligent community. I’ll try to summarize what I’ve learned from participating in the ICF as a keynoter, juror and (before Cisco) a leader of a Top 7 community.

Among the few hundred communities that apply in this contest, it is clear the first step is make sure the community has sufficient broadband. Almost all of the things that intelligent communities can do for and with their residents depend upon that connectivity in one way or the other.

Second, high-speed connectivity is not enough to stand out in this global competition. The next question is what a community does with the technology. Is it transforming:

The way that residents interact with their government?
How residents – from pre-kindergarteners to seniors – are educated?
How well the physical aspects of the community are managed?
How residents are kept healthy and safe?
The local economy and the income opportunities for residents?

… Just to name some of the evidence that ICF is looking for.

Third, an intelligent community is reflected in the collaboration of all parts of the community. Is everyone getting the benefit of the technology? Are they working together to build a better future?

Fourth, there is an intangible, but important, element: the culture of the community. Is there a sense that the culture of the community encourages innovation and encourages the sophisticated use of the technology that they have invested in?

Fifth, ICF looks for progress. Many of the communities, who have been in the Top 7 and have won the top spot, did not win the first time they applied. But over the course of a couple or more years, they showed continued commitment to making themselves intelligent communities and they showed great progress.

None of these five factors should be all that surprising. Of course, as we’ve seen, succeeding at each of these takes a community effort and leadership that is both visionary and effective.

Here is the list of the Top 7:

Taichung City was selected as the winner.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/53358099312/how-to-be-the-most-intelligent-community-in-the-world]

June 12, 2013

Does Innovation Destroy Or Create Jobs?

The Intelligent Community Forum just completed its annual summit, which celebrates the Top 7 most intelligent communities in the world. These are the global leaders who have already made investments in broadband and in community building – and who are now looking to see how they can build on those advantages.

This year’s theme was innovation and employment, so I was asked to give the keynote presentation on the question of whether innovation destroys jobs and how sub-national governments should respond.

This is a summary. The video of the presentation will be available in a couple of weeks. [Note: there was a foreshadowing of this presentation in my earlier blog post “Are Jobs Disappearing?”]

The current argument that technological innovation is killing jobs has a long tradition, going back to the Luddites. But today we even have that herald of the Internet age, WIRED Magazine, portraying a near term future in which robots do all the work. I pointed out that there is still a lot of work to be done whether or not robots are “on the job”, for example curing diseases.

More relevant to the question is whether the new kinds of work that innovation makes possible can be handled if people do not have the skills needed for that work. The need for training is obvious, but my focus was on the need for life-long learning for the adults, rather than the usual investment in K-16 educational institutions. In building a platform for lifelong learning, local governments can draw upon the numerous online resources for learning. Indeed, the local public libraries should be given the task of organizing and making sense of all of these online learning opportunities.

Another, little discussed part of the employment picture is the relative inefficiency of the labor market itself. I suggested that, at least for their own metro areas, these local leaders use or enhance some of the new software that better matches the talents and temperament of their residents to the needs of the economy.

Any discussion of innovation and jobs also needs to provide the big picture, the context of what is happening. So I briefly summarized my work on the future-oriented economy, with its twin trends of (1) a more service-oriented and digital (intangible) work and (2) ever increasing high quality visual communication over the Internet that enhances collaboration among people across the globe.

Among the several implications of these trends is that the nature of work itself is changing. People will still have lots to do, but they will not necessarily be making a living in a traditional 9-5 job at a fixed work location.

Innovation is one word with two forms. One, that Clayton Christensen called “sustaining innovation” is the kind of innovation that does increase productivity so that fewer people are needed to do the work – in other words, jobs decrease. The other is what he calls “disruptive innovation”, which can lead to the growth of new industries and companies providing greater income for everyone associated with that growth. Clearly, it is this second kind of innovation that public officials need to encourage.

In an excerpt from Steven Johnson’s TED talk on “Where Good Ideas Come From”, the audience was reminded that “chance favors the connected mind” and innovation is really a network phenomenon. This is reflected, as well, in the open innovation movement among many corporations and even the US Government.

To accelerate disruptive innovation and the economic opportunities it can generate, local governments need to connect their residents to the global economy, global flow of new ideas and new services.

Successful innovation also requires a supportive culture, including accepting the failures that are part of innovation and experiment. Failure is something that many public officials feel comes with a high price, although the historic success of public sector innovators tells a different story. And, of course, the best path for disruptive innovation is not huge projects that require huge investments, but many smaller experiments. As the saying in Silicon Valley goes: “fail early and fast” to maximize learning from the experience.

For their part, public officials can help build a local culture of innovation by using government itself as a model of innovation. They can even use the experience of being in their city as a continual reminder and inspiration for innovation. I gave some examples of simple, not very costly ways of taking even the less beautiful parts of a city and turning them into exciting, artistic lessons on innovation.

Finally, using the 19th century example of the reaction of different cities to the railroads, I noted that they should not just wait to see what happens with technological innovation. Their decision to lead innovation or not to decide will have long-term consequences.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/52788966705/does-innovation-destroy-or-create-jobs]

June 5, 2013

Perceptive Radio?

I’ve written before about how technology and the Internet makes possible individualized, personalized experiences that weren’t possible in the past.

Now comes along an experiment in one of the iconic mass media of the 20th century – radio.

The folks in the R&D lab of the BBC have been working with what they describe as “perceptive radio." It is something that looks like an old radio, but has a computer built into it. That computer, in turn, is aware of its environment and will adjust the audio delivered by the radio.

See and hear this at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p018pj2c and http://futurebroadcasts.com

This is personalization in not quite the way that Google and Facebook do it, which is by analyzing the text you enter into your computer. Instead the BBC’s Perceptive Radio senses the environment you’re in.

Of course, it won’t be too long before the "radio” can also sense your body’s vital signs and adjust to the physical signs of your mood.

I’m not sure where this experiment is going, but they are onto something. In this form and/or in other forms, we will be seeing more of this kind of personalization.

Here’s the picture from the BBC website …

Are you ready for it?

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/52219705757/perceptive-radio]