The Rural Summit Of Europe

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The first of its kind European Rural Summit was held in Eindhoven, Netherlands on March 22 and 23.   This conference was hosted by the Netherlands’ Brabant Kempen region in collaboration with the Intelligent Community Forum.  

Attending were a couple hundred public officials, rural entrepreneurs (farmers and others) and experts in economic development, rural development, technology and telecommunications.  

Although proximity guaranteed a number of Dutch would be there, participants came from many European countries, including nearby ones like Denmark and Germany, as well as those much further away like Slovenia and Russia.  There were even a few Americans and a Canadian.  

I was asked to set the tone for the conference as its initial keynote speaker.    My themes, familiar to readers of this blog, were that:

• The increasing importance of the digital broadband-connected economy offers rural areas new opportunities that had been precluded by the industrial era’s requirements for mass, density and physical proximity— requirements far better satisfied in urban than rural areas.  This will be especially clear as full video interaction becomes more common, but it’s already starting.   As an example, since 2000 the rural population of France has increased after 150 previous years of decline.

• While broadband alone is not sufficient, if a rural area is connected, there are all sorts of applications to improve life — re-invigorating Main Street with augmented reality and new retail technology, tele-health, online education, precision farming and the like.  

• With a bit of creativity and flexibility in both technology and organizational structure, rural broadband is not an insurmountable challenge.  Indeed, under the umbrella of the KempenGlas cooperative effort, broadband is being installed not far from the site of the Summit in the more rural areas of the region

Although this message about the potential for a renaissance in the countryside has not been the one generally portrayed to city dwellers, it resonated quite well with the attendees who work with and in rural areas.  And these themes were picked up by other speakers.

Also at several points over these two days, people emphasized the interdependence — and, as I have noted, even the convergence — of rural and urban areas.    Drs. Elies Lemkes-Straver, General Director of ZLTO (Southern Agriculture and Horticulture Organization) took up this idea. Her organization of 15,000 farmers, operating under the motto “farmers connect and innovate”, has established relationships with green entrepreneurs, consumers and social organizations.

Although all the presentations were interesting, one particularly unusual talk was by Professor Nico Baken, professor at Delft University of Technology, focused on the changing nature of the economy and our current failure to properly measure what’s going on since we still use industrial era concepts.   He passionately advocated for not being limited by traditional measures of return on investment and instead considering the value of broadband in rural areas for the lives of people there and in cities.  This pleased many there for it makes it easier to get broadband deployment in the countryside.  

It may be surprising, as well, that one of the presentations at this rural conference was on AI and robotics, courtesy of Professor Maarten Steinbuch of the Eindhoven University of Technology.

Since I was in the Netherlands, I took the opportunity to do some exploration of the countryside in relative nearby areas of the Netherlands, France, Germany and Belgium.  The story in Europe, as elsewhere in rural areas of advanced economies, was one of increasing contrasts between the rural communities that are already showing strong evidence of growth and those that lag.  

While I had heard stories of abandoned farms from some participants, from what I could see along country roads, most of the arable land seemed to be under cultivation and the residents appeared to be relatively prosperous.  It helps that this area is a major wine producer, but that wasn’t all that farmers were growing or doing.  

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Aside from rural tourism in a land of chateaux/castles and the kind of manufacturing that is often placed on the far outskirts of cities, it was hard to tell whether the nascent digital economy seen in the rural US has a counterpart in Europe.

The Rural Summit wasn’t only for speeches, workshops and the various side trips attendees took.  There was also a strong desire to take action by establishing a network of rural leaders across Europe to help each other.  

Of course, I encouraged the leaders gathered in Eindhoven to go beyond that and help create a Virtual Metropolis that would connect their residents — and rural residents outside of Europe — for mutual economic, cultural and educational benefit.  This too received a positive reaction and do I’ll be moving forward to build the platform to make this possible.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

The Seeds Of Rural Economic Growth

I’ll be speaking at the Rural Summit for Europe to be held in Eindhoven, Netherlands tomorrow — I’ll be writing more about that later.  Coincidentally, last Friday, the Aspen Institute’s Community Strategies Group and Rural Development Innovation Group hosted a very good panel on rural entrepreneurship in the US.  

In addition to the Aspen folks, the panel consisted of:
• Lupe Ruiz, Co-Owner, Wing Champs
• Ines Polonius, CEO, Communities Unlimited
• Dennis West, CEO, Northern Initiatives
• Jeffrey Lusk, Executive Director, Hatfield McCoy Regional Recreation Authority

There are many potential entrepreneurs in the countryside.  If you think about it, the family farm is an example of entrepreneurship.

Even more so today, entrepreneurship is essential for the economic viability of rural areas in the face of the relatively shrinking rural population in the US because the traditional approaches aren’t working well.  

Two or three decades ago, some manufacturing plants moved to rural areas to save costs, but then manufacturing shifted further to low cost countries.  And now, with the increasing use of robotic devices, factories aren’t big employment generators.

Moreover, the use of incentives to get big companies to move to rural areas has been shown to be of limited and ever decreasing value in helping long term economic development.  Unlike multinational businesses that rural areas have tried to attract, local entrepreneurs are committed to their communities.  

Ms. Polonius noted that every dollar of sales that go to local entrepreneurs is spent several times over before it leaves the area, whereas sales at multi-national companies in rural areas leave much more quickly.  As a case in point, Mr. Ruiz noted that when it came time to build his restaurant, he felt an obligation to buy lumber from another local entrepreneur rather than make the drive to Home Depot or Lowe’s where he might have saved a few bucks.

The panel went on for than an hour, so I can only highlight what struck me as the most critical points.

First, without any prompting from me or anyone else, the panelists stressed the importance of broadband for both local business success and also being able to reach markets beyond the local area.  Mr. Ruiz was especially proud of the fact that his small town of Raymondville in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas had better broadband than the state capital of Austin did.  The service is provided by the Valley Telephone Cooperative – in yet another example of how cooperatives have moved broadband forward in rural areas as the big telecoms companies abandon those areas.

Second, creativity and counter-intuitive thinking are necessary to turn around rural areas.  Mr. Lusk pointed out how his area of southern Virginia had a concentration of some of the longest lasting poverty-stricken counties in the US.  Where once extraction industries, like coal mining of the mountains, provide some boost to the local economy, that had been on a downturn since the 1950s.  Local people wanted to have factories come there, but highway transportation wasn’t great and the land wasn’t flat – it was the Appalachian Mountains after all, very pretty, but not great industrial territory.

They finally turned things on their head and realized that the thing that was preventing industrial development – the mountains – was the basis for future growth of rural tourism.  Mr. Lust described the ingenious ways that the Hatfield McCoy Regional Recreation Authority went from ATV off-road trails to encourage other economic development.

Third is the need for risk capital.  Although local business folks often think first of going to the bank for funds, there are many fewer local banks around and banks of any kind aren’t generally in the business of helping startups.  So, other sources of funds are needed.  That’s where non-profits like Northern Initiatives come in.  The non-profit organization proclaims that it

“provides loans to small business owners and entrepreneurs in Northern Michigan that might not qualify for loans from traditional banks for a variety of reasons.”

Fourth, the development of rural entrepreneurship cannot end with the money, also needs training and coaching.  Communities Unlimited offers a cash flow tool to keep entrepreneurs on an even keel.  And, as with Wing Champs, they provide a variety of other services to help new business get over the inevitable rough spots.  

Similarly, Northern Initiatives puts it this way:

“Each one of our loans comes with access to business services which includes a suite of practical trainings, tools, and resources on topics that matter to every business owner.”  

And they even provide a coach to each company they give money to.

Mr. West also noted that some coaching comes from modeling – seeing other local people making money by starting businesses provides both encouragement and education to potential entrepreneurs.

Although these efforts don’t have quite the focus on gazelle second-stage growth companies that the Economic Gardening movement does, they share in common the idea that long term economic growth comes from entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs need help.

Here’s the overall lesson of this panel:  

The seeds of entrepreneurship are in the countryside already.  For economic growth, those seeds need to be fertilized by the combination of broadband, creativity/counter-intuitive thinking, risk capital and training/coaching.

[You can see a recording of the event at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMIjJMEbzsI  ]

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

A Virtual Metropolis Of The Countryside

I first wrote about this proposal two years ago. But I’m reposting it, since the idea is even more relevant now, as there has been further development of virtual communications – Skype and Google translators, more varieties of videoconferencing both in the cloud and through services like FaceTime, and even video through augmented reality devices, like Microsoft HoloLens.

If you’re interested in joining and helping to build this virtual metropolis, please contact me.

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People who live in big metropolises, like New York, London or Hong Kong, often say that they can always find someone within a few miles who has a special skill they need to complete some project or build a business. I’ve pointed out that the close proximity of millions of people with so many different skills is part of what has made cities successful economic engines during the industrial era.

When the population of your town is just a few thousand, there is a much smaller likelihood you’ll find the special skill you need nearby – and thus you’ll be less likely to achieve what you have in mind.

In the US alone, the Census Bureau has noted in its report “Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change” that 10% of Americans live in one of the 576 small urban areas (where there is at least one urban cluster of less than 50,000, but at least 10,000 people).  That’s about 32 million people.

Another 6% lived in neither major metropolitan areas nor even these small urban areas. That’s just under 20 million people.

In this century, with broadband Internet, physical proximity is no longer necessary for people to collaborate and share their skills in a common project. Yet the small towns of these more than 50 million people are mostly not connected to each other.

So here’s my wild idea for the day: why not create a virtual metropolis of millions from the people in the small towns and communities of the countryside?

Imagine if even half of those 20 million (or 52 million) people who live outside the big metropolises could work together and be combined to act as if they were physically next door – while not actually living in such crowded conditions.

Such a network or virtual aggregation of small towns would offer their residents a much higher chance of succeeding with their business ideas and making a better living. If someone, for example, had the engineering talents to design a new product, that person might more likely find the necessary marketing talent somewhere in that network of millions of people.

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Clearly, anyone connected to the Internet can try to reach out to anyone else whether that person lives in a small town or a big city.

But a network of small towns alone might encourage greater collaboration because of the shared background of country life and the perceived greater friendliness (and less wariness) of non-urban residents. In most small towns, people are used to working with each other. This would just be a virtual extension of the same idea.

Initially, of course, people would feel most comfortable with those in the same region, such as within North America. Over time, as people interact more with each other on a global basis, that comfort level will expand.

Whether on a regional or global basis, this virtual metropolis could compete on a more even playing field and even establish a unique brand for the people and companies located there. It would make it possible for rural residents to keep their quality of life and also make a decent living.

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/152069321010/a-virtual-metropolis-of-the-countryside]

The Coding Craze

A computer coding craze has taken over the country. Everywhere you turn, public officials from President Obama on down in the US and around the world seem to be talking about the need to train folks in computer coding.

Governors
and Mayors are asking their school systems to teach students how to
code instead of learning other subjects. Many people who had little
previous interest in computers or software – except as blissfully
ignorant users – have signed up for, often expensive, courses on
programming.

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It’s not just in California or Seattle or Austin
(pictured), but back in traditionally less high-tech places on the East
Coast as well. Recently there were stories about coding classes in the
Borough of the Bronx in New York City and as far south as Miami.

There
may be good reasons to take these courses. A bit like the courses that
schools used to teach about how the car combustion engine worked,
learning to program may help people better understand how computers
sometimes operate.

As with any creative activity, at the start,
you can get a sense of accomplishment when witnessing your software
creation come to life — once most of the bugs are eliminated 🙂 You can
even reprise this feeling under special circumstances later on in your
career. But much of the work of coders can, in the long-run, become mind
numbing.

The opportunity to design and create a great new app is
like being invited to paint the Sistine Chapel. But the more frequent
opportunities are like being invited to paint someone’s apartment.

Don’t
get me wrong. As a long time software developer myself, I can say there
are many satisfactions for developers who have both the knack and
passion for software. But people who don’t have those attributes and
just do it like any other job will be frustrated too easily.

And, honestly, even the positive side of life as a developer is not what is primarily driving this coding craze.

Much
of the interest by public officials (like the governor of Arkansas in
the picture) as well as the people enrolled in coding classes is based
on their belief that these courses make possible employment
opportunities that will endure for decades in a world in which
traditional jobs have been automated or shipped overseas. Will it?

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Surely, some people are going into coding just for an immediate bump in short-term income. Studies
on the relatively new phenomenon of coding bootcamps seem to support
this notion – that is for the 65% of students who graduated and are
working in a programming job. Even in those cases, the best results were
for students who graduated from the more expensive and selective
programs.

Yet, on balance, count me as a skeptic. I think this
craze is, well, crazy. In the long run, I don’t think coding courses for
the millions will lead to the affluent future and lifelong careers that
many proponents envision.

First, as I’ve alluded to, these are
not jobs that everyone who is learning to code will find satisfying. We
may be too early into this craze to know how many people go into the
field and last for more than a short while, but I’d expect the dropout
rate to be high.

Second, there is the low level nature of what is being taught – how to write instructions in a currently fashionable language. While most of the coding courses focus on currently popular languages, like Ruby and Javascript, many of their students do not understand how popularity in languages can come and go quickly.

Some
languages last longer than others do, of course. Through sheer inertia
and unwillingness to invest, there are still some existing programs
written in old computer languages, like FORTRAN and COBOL. But there
aren’t that many job openings for people coding those old languages.

Wikipedia lists a variety of languages that have been created over the last three decades, approximately one a year:

1980 C++
1983 Ada
1984 Common Lisp
1984 MATLAB
1985 Eiffel
1986 Erlang
1987 Perl
1988 Tcl
1988 Mathematica
1990 Haskell
1991 Python
1991 Visual Basic
1993 Ruby
1993 Lua
1994 CLOS (part of Common Lisp)
1995 Ada 95
1995 Java
1995 Delphi (Object Pascal)
1995 JavaScript
1995 PHP
1996 WebDNA
1997 Rebol
1999 D
2000 ActionScript
2001 C#
2001 Visual Basic .NET
2003 Groovy
2003 Scala
2005 F#
2009 Go
2011 Dart
2014 Swift
2015 Rust
2016 ???

So if all they learn today is the syntax of one language and lack a
deeper education, they may find that one skill to fall out of favor.

Indeed,
many of those students aren’t even being taught about the different
kinds of programming languages – even classes of languages vary in
popularity over time.

Instead, they are usually learning imperative languages, especially with a focus on low level procedures.

It
is also not clear that the popular languages are the best ones to even
teach basic coding, never mind understand software more generally.

Even
the idea that any language is good enough to educate students about how
computers work is misleading. Different classes of languages lead to
different ways of thinking how we can represent the world and instruct
computers.

And finally, the trend in software, in fits and starts,
has been to reduce the need for low-level programming. Originally, it
was a move away from “machine instructions” to higher level languages.
Then there were various tools for rapid application development. Today,
there is the Low-Code or even No-Code movement, especially for Apps.

You’ve
heard of the App Economy, another part of the promised job future?
Putting aside the debate as to whether the app phenomenon has already
peaked, with these low-code tools, fewer coders will be needed to churn
out the same number of apps as in the past.

And then over the horizon, computer scientists have been busy “Pushing the Limits of Self-Programming Artificial Intelligence” as one article states in its title.

Finally,
with this background, pure coding itself, even in past years, was only a
small part of what made software successful. And a successful long term
career in software requires an understanding of what goes beyond
coding.

But this is enough in one post to get many people irked, so I’ll save that for a future post.

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/141088761737/the-coding-craze]

Talk To Anyone In Any Language?

It’s been clear for some time that the Internet can connect everyone
around the globe – in theory. This opens up tremendous potential for
collaboration, mutual economic growth, education and a variety of other
benefits. We’ve seen many of those benefits, but we still haven’t
touched the surface.

Among other reasons the true potential of a
globally connected world hasn’t yet been realized is that many people
still can’t communicate when they communicate – they don’t speak the
same language.

So it has been interesting to me to see the recent
improvements in real time translation on the Internet. I’m not talking
about the translation of text that has been around for a couple of years
through, for example, Google Translate of websites or even the very
useful app, WordLens, which I have used in my travels when I had to read
foreign signs.

No, the new improvements are in speech – taking
speech from one language and ultimately, quickly converting it correctly
into another language. Although text translation is not easy, speech
introduces much greater challenges.

These new real-time voice
translation services and devices aren’t perfect, but they’ve improved
enough that they are usable. And that usability will begin to make all
the difference.

Last year, Google took its Translate app into speech. You can see a quick video example here. Google claims it can handle 90 of the world’s languages.

Then,
more recently, Skype made its Translator generally available, although
it’s clearly still in a sort of test mode. For English, Spanish, French,
German, Italian and Mandarin, Skype describes its capabilities quite simply:

“You
can call almost anyone who has Skype. It will translate your
conversation into another language in near real-time. What someone else
says is translated back in your language. An on-screen transcript of
your call is displayed.”

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They have a charming video of school children in the US and Mexico talking to each other somewhat awkwardly.

There’s another video, titled “Speak Chinese Like A Local” with an American photojournalist in China arranging a tour for himself.

This translation work hasn’t only be done in the US. The Japanese have also been busy at this task, in their own way.

While not using the Internet, a Panasonic translator – in the form of a smart megaphone – will be tested at Narita Airport to translate between Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English.

Then there’s the “ili”,
a portable device (also not connected to the Internet) which translates
between Japanese, Chinese and English. The company describes it as “the
world’s first wearable translator for travelers”. They’ve posted a
video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6ngM0LHxuU. The video is a strange combination of cute and creepy, but it gets the point across.

These developments have led some stories
to proclaim the arrival of the universal translator of Star Trek. But
as Trekkie experts say, unlike the one in Star Trek, this doesn’t read brains, which may have been a necessity to communicate with non-human species.  

On
the other hand, if you only want to talk with other people, the new
language translators are pretty good substitutes 😉 With more use, they
can only get better, faster, all the while helping to improve
understanding between people around the world.

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© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/137156470627/talk-to-anyone-in-any-language]

The Virtual City-State Of All Ohio?

Last week, I attended the conference that launched the new Global Institute for the Study of the Intelligent Community, based in Dublin, Ohio.

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In the annual evaluation by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF),
Dublin has been among the most intelligent communities in the world for
the last few years. Nearby Columbus, Ohio was designated the most
intelligent community this past June.

The institute will share
innovations and best practices to help make communities more prosperous,
livable, resilient and intelligent. Although using broadband and
technology is a part of the story, the institute is part of the ICF
movement which has distinguished itself by its emphasis as well on all
the other factors that make a community intelligent. As such, the effort
to become an intelligent community involves all elements of a
community, not just technologists. Much of the discussion encouraged
leaders from Dublin, Columbus and other places in Ohio to think about
what a successful intelligent community means and how to measure it.

Dana
McDaniel, who had been in charge of Dublin’s economic development
strategy and is now its city manager, organized and led the conference.
In the moments when people had a chance to outline their longer term
vision, he had an intriguing thought. He wants to unify and treat Ohio
as the first intelligent community that encompasses a whole state.

This
reminded me of my work on technology-based economic development in
Massachusetts a few years ago. Massachusetts’ problem was that the
Boston/Cambridge area of the state was its primary economic engine, but
that the rest of the state, especially the central region, had suffered
economically.

Several states have a similar situation with only
one truly prosperous region. New York, Illinois, Colorado and Washington
are reasonably good examples of the problem.

So we came up with a
plan that would use broadband connectivity to link the rest of
Massachusetts to the Boston area. We knew this might be fraught with
political objections from other parts of the state not wanting to lose
their identity by being considered virtual suburbs of Boston.

Instead,
we were trying to find a way to link together the whole state. This
would not only provide resources and potential financing from Boston for
those elsewhere, but just as important it could provide people in
Boston with new entrepreneurial ideas that could only flourish in areas
with a different business atmosphere.

While it certainly has
pockets of relative affluence and poverty, Ohio is actually not one of
those states with a single economic engine. Despite that – or maybe
because of that – the idea of weaving together all the communities in a
state is germinating there.

By contrast, some states that do have
the problem of a concentration of prosperity seem to be going in the
opposite direction – splitting themselves into non-cooperating regions,
thus diminishing the state’s overall impact and putting every region in a
weaker competitive position.

I’ve noted before that
communications technology today makes possible a virtual metropolis
created through the linked combination of rural areas.

Ohio’s
variation on the theme is also an interesting development to watch. It
may well position Ohio as the forerunner for economic growth for the
rest of the USA – a 21st century virtual version of the economically
dominant city-states of the European Renaissance.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved
[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/132017256455/the-virtual-city-state-of-all-ohio]

Where’s The City? Where’s The Country?

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I’ve written in the May 2014 issue of Urban China magazine and here before about the various ways that life in urban and rural areas is converging.

But when it comes to the economy, especially growing global trade, we often hear of great distinctions between city and countryside.  Indeed, it is often assumed that most of any country’s economy can be attributed to its cities and public policy follows that assumption.  

David Brunnen is Managing Editor of Groupe Intellex and Partner of NextGen in the UK. He has had a long and distinguished career as a leader in technology and public policy.

He has been doing some interesting research and concluded that this urban-rural divide is not as great as myth would have it.  This culminated in a report in May 2015 with the intriguing title, “Global Trade Development outwith the Metros: not beyond belief”.  He also provided something of an executive summary on his blog.

He observed that:

“Conventional wisdom says that the pursuit of global growth is surely what has led to the success of major cities…

“The notion of growth in international trade from enterprises rooted in our countryside and less-regarded towns may, at first glance, seem unlikely.   Scratch the stats however and beneath the glossy megacity headlines you can sniff the fragrance of a less-urban, more rural, renaissance.”

Brunnen points out that part of the myth about the role of cities is a very generous definition of what is a city.  As an example, Brunnen cites the work, ending last year, of the RSA City Growth Commission of the UK, whose aim was to “enable England’s major cities to drive growth”.  

“Some of these encompass far more places than are recognized by any governmental and administrative boundaries. The South Hampshire Metro area includes two cities (Southampton and Portsmouth) and the entire semi-rural conurbations on both sides of the linking M27 motorway. Their London Metro area extends west well into Hampshire, south to include Gatwick airport, east to include places on both sides of the Thames estuary and north to include Luton airport beyond Bedford.  In the debate about building airport capacity for London, it’s a wonder that Birmingham in the West Midlands is not a candidate.”

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This is one newspaper’s view of the London Metro area five years ago.

Brunnen goes on to note:

“Not surprisingly, with these broad definitions of their City Regions, the RSA City Growth Commission suggest that Metros contribute 61% of UK economic growth.  Ask ordinary people whether or not they live in a major city and the map would be very different – in fact it would be perfectly possible to conclude that economic growth is far more evenly spread with only around 50% of growth generated within those megacity places that demand such intensive management.”

But this is not just a story about England.  There are similar situations in many other countries, including the US.

A few years ago, Wendell Cox of Demographia, an international public policy firm, wrote “America is More Small Town than We Think”.  He starts with the statement we’ve often heard:

“America has become an overwhelmingly metropolitan nation. According to the 2000 census, more than 80 percent of the nation’s population resided in one of the 350 combined metropolitan statistical areas.”

According to the census, the figure was 79.0% in 2000 and is now 80.7%.  Moreover, the official definition of urban is not limited to obvious big cities like New York City.  Some of that urban population lives in what the Census Bureau calls urban clusters, whose population is between 2,500 and 50,000.

Focusing more on governance, Cox’s argument nevertheless parallels what Brunnen has written more recently about international trade.

“America is more “small town” than we often think, particularly in how we govern ourselves. In 2000, slightly more than one-half of the nation’s population lived in jurisdictions — cities, towns, boroughs, villages and townships — with fewer than 25,000 people or in rural areas. Planners and geographers might see regions as mega-units, but in fact, they are usually composed of many small towns and a far smaller number of larger cities. Indeed, among the metropolitan areas with more than one million residents in 2000, the average sized city, town, borough, village or township had a population of little more than 20,000.”

The 2012 survey by the Census found more or less the same results.  If anything there were more governments.  Many metropolitan areas are more networks of small towns than one master urban jurisdiction.

Brunnen goes on to explain why those outside the big cities are able to participate so vigorously in global trade.

“Digital transformation is enabling business to thrive in places where employees like to live – in places where they can afford to live – in places where they can appreciate the value of community – in places where they feel more at home.

“Dig deeper still into life beyond Metros and you’ll find a diverse and complex fabric of connections and capabilities – with very different channels and enablers for international trade.

“These less-regarded places are familiar with making do without much, if any, external intervention (or interference) from their national or regional governments. ‘Just Do It’ … This inbred capacity for action plus our newfound ability to network ideas and contacts without the hassle of travel points towards a greater levelling up of opportunity.”

That story has often been drowned out by reports of resurgent cities and ever declining rural areas.  The big city governments of the world have drawn most of the attention from big corporations and governments — perhaps it is easier to sell to or deal with very big municipal organizations?

I’d suggest reading the rest of his report, for the policies — which are both innovative and pragmatic —that he proposes to encourage economic growth.  

The bottom line of all this: the sharp dividing lines between rural and urban are not really all that sharp.  That calls for a better balance across geographic areas.  A nation’s strategy for its economic future, its infrastructure investments, broadband and technology needs to reflect the real distribution of the population and the potential of all areas to contribute to growth.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/124154805794/wheres-the-city-wheres-the-country]

Collaboration vs. Competition For Economic Growth

Lots of talk about the economy focuses on how individual businesses compete.  Generalizing from the situation of individual businesses, public officials who are responsible for the overall growth of their local economy also often talk about competition.  Making their cities “competitive in the world economy” or enabling their “residents to compete" are frequent phrases you hear.  

And they worry about where they stand in the competition with other cities.

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Even in today’s global economy, the biggest cities still envision themselves as standing alone, in competition with all other jurisdictions.

And, of course, with cash, tax and other incentives, local economic development officials will try to steal – i.e., compete – with distant or even nearby jurisdictions.

Granted that sometimes the word “competitive” is used merely to mean prosperous or good or something else positive.  But the use of the metaphor of competition can be misleading, even in those cases.

The fact that individual businesses often find themselves competing with
each other doesn’t mean that regions as a whole thrive by focusing on
competition with other regions.

Getting back to basics, an economy grows as people develop and exchange
specialized services/products and, in various ways, create new ideas and
services/products.  The better connected and more collaborative the residents of a region are with everyone else, the more likely they are to be creating more wealth and income for themselves.  This means that
overall economic growth of a region is much more about collaboration than
competition. 

The value of collaboration has begun to be heard
in some parts of the economic development profession. For example, John Jung, Chairman of the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), wrote “Collaborative Innovation – the New Competitive Edge for Economic Development”.  From a conference on Global Competition and Collaboration in 2011, there was “New Building Blocks for Jobs and Economic Growth”.  The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania affirmed this idea: “We Need More Collaboration And Less Competition For Economic Growth”.

Unfortunately, most of the huge global cities have not yet seriously adopted this approach.  In contrast, an increasing number of smaller cities, towns and rural areas have come to the realization that they have a better future if they cooperate, collaborate and network.  

An interesting example is Mitchell, South Dakota, which has 15,000 people, but was among ICF’s Top 7 Most Intelligent Communities this year — among cities like Rio, New Taipei and Columbus Ohio.  They were in trouble a decade ago.  They had lost 30% of their population, especially young people, like many other small communities in the countryside.  

Mitchell turned that situation around.  They have three Internet service providers that deliver gigabit bandwidth.  They’ve seen the growth of tech companies and precision agriculture.  Their unemployment rate is 3%, with hundreds of open jobs.  Unusual for a small city, it has its own workforce development director.  

At the recent ICF Summit in Toronto, Bryan Hisel, Executive Director, Mitchell Area Development Corporation, put it simply: “entrepreneurship is our way of thinking here.”  So the leaders of Mitchell view their small size as an advantage, not a disadvantage.  That entrepreneurial culture of its people came before they had broadband.  

With that entrepreneurial spirit, you’d think that Mitchel is all about the competition.  But Hisel pointed out that all the things people elsewhere have started to talk about — especially collaboration — comes naturally to small communities.  So Mitchell has extended its service to nearby communities and even provides advice to small cities that others might see as competitors.

Perhaps the tradition of collaboration in parts of the countryside is also why there was increased interest at the summit in my proposal for a global virtual metropolis that connects small cities like Mitchell – a connection for economic success that arises from collaboration rather than competition with one another.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/122336332341/collaboration-vs-competition-for-economic-growth]

“You Belong Here” Says It All

Some of us live in places that are lucky enough to have some highly unusual feature that stands out – whether it’s the mountains in Colorado towns or the surf of Key West, Florida or even the sheer scale of New York City.  But unlike those examples, there are many fine places to live which have a high quality of life, but don’t otherwise have an obvious promotable distinction.  

The big question for these places is how to maintain and build on that quality of life in a century that raises new challenges to every place, as more people are able to earn a living no matter where they are – if there’s high-speed Internet connectivity available.

Consider the small city of Clinton, Mississippi.  It has a population of about 25,000 people and is near Jackson, the State Capitol.  Although it is a relatively old city in the state, having been created in the early 1820s, it was known as Jackson’s first suburb.   More recently, other more affluent suburbs have grown up around Jackson with high-end national stores in upscale shopping malls.  

While many small cities dream of having a Fortune 500 company, Clinton had already “done that, been there”.  WorldCom (later MCI Worldcom), for several years the second largest long-distance phone company in the US, made Clinton its headquarters location.  In the early 2000s, a major fraud and financial scandal was discovered at the company.  It went bankrupt in 2002 and after a while its nice headquarters was empty and the company’s assets were eventually acquired by a company far away, Verizon.  So Clinton was no longer a big company town.

Clinton has, however, retained much of its original small town urban charm, with a number of brick-covered streets and an urban center that’s mostly missing from other suburbs.   It has a well-developed sense of community, which is, in part, reflected in the quality of its schools that are ranked number 1 in the state.

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Nevertheless, the people of Clinton know there are challenges ahead, so they have been an early adopter of gigabit connections to the home, through a program offered by the regional telecommunications company, C-Spire.  The company announced at the end of last month that Clinton had five neighborhoods where pre-registration for the service exceeded the minimum necessary and Clinton becomes the second city in the state to become a gig-city.  

(See my earlier blog post about Quitman, MS, for a report on the first city to do this last fall.)

Thanks to the work of the Intelligent Community Institute of Mississippi State University Extension Service, there I was last week to talk to a room full of Clinton’s community leaders.  They met to envision how this gigabit network investment can be used to provide new economic opportunity for its residents and to ensure that the city can flourish in the future.

Of course, I pointed out that broadband, while necessary, isn’t sufficient.  It’s only the start in building an attractive 21st century community that will retain and, better yet, attract people to live there.

I presented a picture of where the economy and technology have come from and where they seem to be going – and what Clinton can do to get ahead of the curve.  I offered numerous examples of things that can be accomplished by a small city, pointing out that small cities can make a bigger impact this way than big cities.  After my presentation, Clinton’s community leaders worked together to identify concrete actions they would get done in the next six months.

I was struck especially by the city’s new slogan and campaign.  It was not the all-too-frequent argument that “we’re cheaper than the next city down the road and we’ll give your company big incentives to come here.”  Even before I arrived with my message that, instead, these days the key question for economic development is how you go about keeping people and attracting newcomers to your city, they had already figured it out.

I wish I had come up with their slogan, since it is spot on – “You Belong Here”.  I’ll be following up to see how Clinton goes about making good on that slogan and its promise for the future.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/119442323609/you-belong-here-says-it-all]

A Post-Industrial City Built On Broadband

Situated in the center of Metro Vancouver, New Westminster, which was founded more than 150 years ago, is one of the oldest cities in Canada west of Ontario. Like many older cities, its industrial base was hit by hard times beginning in the 1970s.

Now, with the strong support of its newly elected Mayor and City Council, it has set its sights on a government-sponsored fiber network backbone for its future revitalization.   This is, in part, feasible because of its relatively small size, 7 square miles.  It also helps that the city has a publicly owned electric utility which will also run the broadband network.

With the network underway, the Mayor, most of the City Council, many members of the New Westminster’s Intelligent City Advisory Committee and other leaders met, for two days last week, to consider the city’s future in a broadband era and what they will be doing about it.  

The event started with my hour-long keynote, reviewing the trends in the economy, society and technology that any small city must consider as it plans for the future.  I told the participants that the Internet age is giving small cities, like theirs, a new chance to flourish and so I wanted them to think about these big questions:

  • How can a city of fewer than 70,000 stand out in a world of 7,000,000,000 people?
  • How can New Westminster build a high quality of life by intelligently responding to the trends that will affect all of us in the future?
  • How can the people there expand their thinking about their options?

My underlying theme was that broadband, while absolutely necessary, is insufficient by itself.   I showed many examples – even a few videos – from other intelligent communities around the world who have built on the foundation of a broadband network.

(A copy of the slides can be found at http://www.newwestcity.ca/database/files/library/New_Westminster_Keynote.pdf )

I especially emphasized lifelong learning in a knowledge economy, connecting residents to global economic opportunities and services and creating a culture of innovation.  I finished by pointing out how they could use their network to provide delightful new urban experiences for both residents and visitors, which in turn would also inspire people to be more creative.  

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The second day was devoted to further discussion about the contents of the keynote and a workshop in which the participants broke out into five groups, each on a different subject – education, health, economic development, government services and the network itself.  Each group debated the implications for that subject and came up with projects they will undertake to make use of the new network.

They developed a sophisticated and broad understanding of what they’re getting into with the broadband network.

They clearly understood that high speed Internet made it possible for their residents to overcome large geographic distances and connect to others anywhere on the globe.  But I suggested that, because New Westminster is a small city, they shouldn’t assume that it would be easy for everyone to participate by going downtown.  Even within the city, the Internet can make it easier for residents not to have to travel to participate in public discussions, to get government services, to collaborate on growing their businesses, etc.

I noticed that some people were trying to find an answer that would work for everyone, although the residents of the city had quite varied needs.  (This is somewhat related to another phenomenon you sometimes see in cities trying to figure out their broadband strategy – the search for the one “killer app.”)  So I pointed out to them that the Internet has, instead, renewed our awareness of the long tail – the need for and ability now to deliver many solutions and more personalized service to individual.  There is no longer a requirement for a mass production, one-size-fits-all approach.

At the end of the second day, Mayor Coté said that he realized being an intelligent community is so much more than just laying fiber.  Some of the more technologically savvy in the room offered their own examples and ideas, which is great because these efforts must be led from within the community and not depend on outside experts.

What is often encouraging to people like me is that many participants told me that they felt inspired – yes, that was the word they used – to take on the potential opportunities offered by their new broadband network.

I was also impressed by them.  New Westminster still has much work to do, but they clearly have their act together and have the leadership to get the job done. They will indeed re-create their city for a new century.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/115851214799/a-post-industrial-city-built-on-broadband]

Does A Cluster Strategy Work?

The conventional wisdom in economic development calls for growth strategies that are based on clusters of businesses in the same sector.  Here are just a few examples of the many cluster-based economic plans that I’ve come across from one end of the country to the other:

The problem with this conventional wisdom is that it is increasingly unwise.  

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Princeton University Economics Professor Paul Krugman won the 2008 Nobel Prize for his work 20-30 years earlier in identifying the “new economic geography” (the theoretical foundation of the cluster approach).  But in his acceptance speech, he noted changes:

“[Clustering] may describe forces that are waning rather than gathering strength.”

“The data accord with common perception: many of the traditional localizations of industry have declined (think of the Akron rubber industry), and those that have arisen, such as Silicon Valley, don’t seem comparable in scale.”

A European report from 2011 found:

“Business clusters could be less relevant as drivers of innovation than has been commonly assumed. The Stavanger Centre for Innovation Research analysed 1,600 companies with more than 10 employees located in the five largest Norwegian city-regions. Rather than national clusters, international cooperation or global pipelines were identified as the main drivers of innovation.”

For his University of North Carolina Ph.D. thesis research titled, “Cluster Requiem And The Rise Of Cumulative Growth Theory”, Dr. Gary Kunkle tracked the growth and survival of a cohort of more than 300,000 establishments operating in Pennsylvania from 1997-2007.  His findings:

“Industry cluster theory has … an inability to explain economic dispersion and the presence of high-growing firms that thrive in non-clustered industries and locations.”

“Firm characteristics are 10-times more powerful than industry and cluster characteristics, and 50-times more powerful than location characteristics, in explaining and predicting establishment-level growth and survival”

“A sub-set of businesses systematically accumulate a disproportionate share of employment growth. Roughly 1% of establishments created 169% of all net new jobs added in the state over a ten-year period.”

This latter point is one of the reasons that the Economic Gardening movement, led by Chris Gibbons, has arisen as an insurgent force within the economic development world.  It concentrates on the small proportion of enterprises that create the most new jobs.

There is nothing wrong with encouraging any existing local business to grow – again an economic gardening strategy.  But it is foolish to try to build a region’s economic development strategy around a cluster where none exists.  

While many regions try to be more sophisticated in their approach, too often, I’ve heard people say that they have a few web design firms and from that they’re going to invest in building a “high tech cluster”.  Every town has someone who claims to design websites.  Really, that’s not a cluster even in the old industrial era.  And it’s not an effective strategy for economic growth in this era.

The famous economist John Maynard Keynes once said “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”  While some of the economists who developed cluster approaches are not quite defunct yet, the message is the still relevant.

We are in an economy where everyone in the world is connected by information and communications technologies.  For residents of any city or state to flourish economically, they should not be limited to a cluster of business activity which is based on purely local, physical proximity.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/115120132463/does-a-cluster-strategy-work]

Managing A Global Virtual Workforce

In many of my presentations, I point out that an increasing number of people will no longer have traditional 9-5 jobs in office buildings.  Of course, I’m not the only one to observe that the labor market is potentially global and that entrepreneurs who live anywhere can connect with others who have the skills they need to make their businesses successful.

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When I say these things, people generally agree – in the abstract – but they seem not to know how they can actually do this.  They just don’t know how to start and sustain a global virtual business.

This is a particularly important problem for entrepreneurs who do not live in one of the half dozen biggest metropolitan areas in this country or their equivalent metropolitan areas elsewhere.

With that in mind, it’s worth noting that last year a book was published that can set virtual entrepreneurs on their way.  It’s “Virtual Freedom: How to Work with Virtual Staff to Buy More Time, Become More Productive, and Build Your Dream Business” by Chris Ducker, a serial entrepreneur based in the Philippines.  (He’s also responsible for the slide above.)

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Ducker starts by describing the feeling that entrepreneurs have that they must do everything themselves because they can’t find others to help them.  And, of course, those who are outside of big cities feel even lonelier.  But reminding readers of that feeling is really just the motivation for reading on.

“Virtual Freedom” is essentially a practical handbook for managing a virtual global workforce.  It goes into some detail about hiring people, compensating them, managing them, etc.  It provides case studies and references to tools that the entrepreneur can use.

It’s interesting that the advice in much of the book applies to management in general, not just management of virtual workforces. 

Perhaps managing a virtual workforce forces you to think about management more clearly than when you manage in traditional offices.  In those offices, people seem to think they know the rules and patterns of behavior – even when they don’t really know.

Some of the advice is common sense, except we all know that common sense is not so common.  

For example, he gives examples of entrepreneurs who were frustrated by the poor quality of those they depended on, until the entrepreneurs realized the problem was, in large part, on their side – a failure to communicate clearly and specifically what they were asking for and a failure to verify this was understood by workers who often came from other cultures.  But in the diverse workforce in many countries today, this is an issue even in traditional offices.

Along with communicating clearly, he emphasizes that the entrepreneur needs to think clearly about the tasks that need to be accomplished.  After all, when you can’t really look over the shoulders of the people who work for you, the only measure of effectiveness you have is what results they deliver.

Of course, such an approach in a traditional office environment is also a good idea – rather than trying to see if “people are working hard”.  It’s easy to look busy.  Not so easy to get tasks done and deliver results.

Bottom line: if you want to get a quick course in management of virtual staff, read this book.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/109394419164/managing-a-global-virtual-workforce]

Countryside Complaints Collapse?

You often hear how the countryside is collapsing in various ways.  And clearly the remaining sixty million Americans who live in small towns and rural areas have faced a variety of challenges. 

As I described in my presentation at the Walsh University Leadership Academy a few weeks back, I’ve heard eight major complaints to explain why rural areas are in trouble.  While each of these has been true over the last few decades, increasingly the changes in our world mean that these complaints themselves are no longer relevant – the complaints are collapsing, while the countryside has new opportunities for renewal.

Let me address each of these, briefly, one at a time.  (If you’re interested in a fuller explanation, I can send you a copy of the whole 80-slide presentation.)

1. “We’re not big enough to have sustainable business clusters.”

So many economic development officials have had the cluster strategy drummed into their minds that they don’t realize how out of date it is.   As economist, Paul Krugman, said when he was given the Nobel Prize for his early work on economic geography, “[Clustering] may describe forces that are waning rather than gathering strength.”  My favorite example is the growth of the BATS Exchange at the expense of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street.  BATS is headquartered in Lenexa, Kansas.

2. “We’ve lost most good-paying manufacturing jobs.”

So has everyone else.  Just as economic changes over the last hundred fifty years meant that we need very few people on the farm to produce the food the rest of us need, so too productivity in manufacturing means fewer people are needed in plants.  That is part of the growth of the economy.  But there has been a parallel increase in the service sector of the economy and the Internet has made possible a new range of intangible, digital products and services – from which people can make a living.  That, of course, doesn’t even account for the many unmet needs of our economy and society – for example, curing major diseases – that will generate employment.

3. “We don’t have skyscrapers filled with office workers.”

But work is no longer tied to these “places of work”.  Many people can work from home, without the need for a cubicle in a skyscraper.

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4. “We’re isolated in the middle of nowhere.”

You may be physically far from large metropolitan areas, but digital communications connects everyone everywhere, even face-to-face through video-conferencing.  (Of course, this assumes you have broadband connectivity sufficient for video – but that’s part of the point of this argument.  If you get the connectivity, there are all kinds of options open for you, even in the countryside.)

5. “We don’t have a major research university.”

There is an incredible amount of learning available on the Internet, including courses from traditional universities (like edX) and non-traditional sources.  And most of the research at the major universities is now available online, especially the kind of later stage research that is most easily commercialized.  So what you need is not the research university, but people with sufficient entrepreneurial imagination – and those folks can be found all over.

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6. “Whenever we get sick we need to go to a big city for care.”

With telemedicine (and even remote surgery, in the longer run), not all health care requires a visit to a big city.

7. “We can’t participate in developing new ideas and our innovators have no one to talk to (so they leave).”

Again, anyone with an innovative disposition can now reach out to others on the Internet.  Moreover, with the growth of the open innovation movement in corporations and governments, there are a variety of opportunities for people who live in the countryside to offer their new ideas – and be rewarded for them.

8. “There are not enough customers nearby and many of the business skills we need are also not nearby.”

Yet, economic opportunities and services are global.  All you need to be is connected to the global economy.  By the way, this isn’t limited to people who want to write computer software.  There are all kinds of interesting examples of people who live in the countryside making a living outside of the tech industry – for example, by teaching English to foreign students, or selling their works of art and craftsmanship, or providing help desk/customer support or even selling lobster bait bags.  Now the market is not limited to the small number of people who are nearby.

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So before people in the countryside give up on their futures, they should consider how these old obstacles of the past will collapse in the future.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/104844439162/countryside-complaints-collapse]

Is Industrialization Still A Useful Strategy For Developing Nations?

Last month, the Economist had an article titled “Arrested development: The model of development through industrialisation is on its way out” – well worth reading.

It started by describing how China successfully followed the previous model of industrialization by Japan and South Korea, among others.  In turn, many other emerging economies are now planning to follow the same road as China did – initiate a wealth-creating manufacturing sector that can export to the world.

However, the Economist offered a cautionary note about this strategy:

Governments across the emerging world dream of repeating China’s success, but the technological transformation now under way appears to be permanently changing the economics of development. China may be among the last economies to be able to ride industrialisation to middle-income status. Much of the emerging world is facing a problem that Dani Rodrik, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, calls “premature deindustrialisation”…

For most of recent economic history, “industrialised” meant rich. And indeed most countries that were highly industrialised were rich, and were rich because they were industrialised. Yet this relationship has broken down.

The article went on to point out that:

Another mechanism through which new technology is changing the process of development is the dematerialisation of economic activity. Consumption the world over is shifting from “stuff to fluff”

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The Economist article, however, was not complete.  While it noted the impact of robots who can work cheaper than humans anywhere, it didn’t address the role 3D printing will have on manufacturing.

In my presentations to mayors of North American cities, I’ve emphasized that they cannot base their future on an old industrial era model of the economy.  The same is true for countries which haven’t industrialized yet.  In a global economy, even with vastly unequal positions of different nations, the same rules of the game apply. 

I won’t repeat here the themes of my other blog posts, but, to get into that game, communications and information technologies (ICT) are a requirement.

Of course, it is frequently argued that ICT has to take a back seat when a nation doesn’t have clean water, etc.  I understand this argument and sympathize to a degree, but I’d also note that in fact in many poor countries there are more people with mobile phones and access to the Internet than access to a bathroom.  Maybe they understand that you need, to use an old analogy, to spend some money to drain the swamp or you’ll forever be stuck fighting the alligators.

For them, ICT is a path out of poverty.  And, of course, from a public sector viewpoint, ICT can also help to manage and implement cleaner living conditions, sewer systems, etc.

The ultimately pessimistic view of the Economist article may not be justified, since these new rules and approaches to economic growth are beginning to be understood by a number of leaders in developing nations.  By ICT investments, experimentation and innovation, they are also beginning to create the new post-industrial template for growth.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/102450208611/is-industrialization-still-a-useful-strategy-for]

A Virtual Metropolis In The Countryside?

People who live in big metropolises, like New York, London or Hong Kong, often say that they can always find someone within a few miles who has a special skill they need to complete some project or build a business.  I’ve pointed out that the close proximity of millions of people with so many different skills is part of what has made cities successful economic engines during the industrial era.

When the population of your town is just a few thousand, there is a much smaller likelihood you’ll find the special skill you need nearby – and thus you’ll be less likely to achieve what you have in mind.

In the US alone, the Census Bureau has noted in its report “Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change” that 10% of Americans live in one of the 576 small urban areas (where there is at least one urban cluster of less than 50,000, but at least 10,000 people).   That’s about 32 million people.

Another 6% lived in neither major metropolitan areas nor even these small urban areas.  That’s just under 20 million people.

In this century, with broadband Internet, physical proximity is no longer necessary for people to collaborate and share their skills in a common project.  Yet the small towns of these more than 50 million people are mostly not connected to each other. 

So here’s my wild idea for the day: why not create a virtual metropolis of millions from the people in the small towns and communities of the countryside?

Imagine if even half of those 20 million (or 52 million) people who live outside the big metropolises could work together and be combined to act as if they were physically next door – while not actually living in such crowded conditions.

Such a network or virtual aggregation of small towns would offer their residents a much higher chance of succeeding with their business ideas and making a better living.  If someone, for example, had the engineering talents to design a new product, that person might more likely find the necessary marketing talent somewhere in that network of millions of people.

Clearly, anyone connected to the Internet can try to reach out to anyone else whether that person lives in a small town or a big city.  But a network of small towns alone might encourage greater collaboration because of the shared background of country life and the perceived greater friendliness (and less wariness) of non-urban residents.  In most small towns, people are used to working with each other.  This would just be a virtual extension of the same idea.

Initially, of course, people would feel most comfortable with those in the same region, such as within North America.  Over time, as people interact more with each other on a global basis, that comfort level will expand.

Whether on a regional or global basis, this virtual metropolis could compete on a more even playing field and even establish a unique brand for the people and companies located there.  It would make it possible for rural residents to keep their quality of life and also make a decent living.

What do you think?

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© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/100663996332/a-virtual-metropolis-in-the-countryside]

Small Town, Big Story?

Can a town of 2,300 people in the countryside of Mississippi create a future for itself with broadband?  The answer is yes if you speak to the visionary leader of Quitman – its Mayor, Eddie Fulton – and about two dozen community leaders from business, education, churches, health care and other fields. 

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Quitman is not what you might think of as the likely star of a broadband story.  It has suffered de-population, economic difficulties, community tensions and all the other problems people in many small towns across America have witnessed.

Then along comes the Mississippi-based telecommunications company, C-Spire, who announced it would deploy gigabit Internet connection through fiber to the home in a small number of communities.  The key requirement was that a fairly sizable percentage of the community’s residents had to sign up for the service in advance.

Quitman was the smallest town to take on this challenge.  It would not normally be considered because of its size, but they had such a strong commitment to building on broadband that the company decided to make the investment.  Now, Quitman is ahead of the others in deployment and plans for developing their community.

Anyone who has ever been involved in a big technology project knows that the biggest obstacles to success are not technical issues, but human issues.  That’s why the chances that Quitman will succeed are good.  They have the necessary leadership, motivation and willingness to innovate.

They’ve also been helped by one of the long forgotten secrets of America’s agricultural and economic success – the extension service.  In particular, Professor Roberto Gallardo  at Mississippi State University Center For Technology Outreach has helped to educate the community and been their adviser.

And so it was that last week I was in Quitman leading what the Intelligent Community Forum calls a Master Class, as part of its community accelerator program. 

I pointed out that, rather than being an anomaly, a small city like Quitman could be the quintessential broadband success story.  I told the community leaders that a number of recent studies have shown that broadband has a much greater impact on small towns and rural areas than in cities.  As I’ve written before, this is not surprising.  Big cities provide many traditional ways that many people can interact with each other.  It is only when residents of small communities get connected to everyone else through the Internet that they can start to level the playing field.

I reviewed the historical context that is opening up new opportunities for rural communities.  I provided various examples, from elsewhere in North America and beyond, of the ways broadband can make a difference to the countryside.  The point of the examples was to give the community leaders ideas and also to see small towns, like theirs, doing great things with broadband. 

Then to bring the strategy and examples home, I asked them what they would do with broadband when it was deployed.  The community leaders separated into three groups, one each focused on education, health and economic growth.  They had a good discussion and came up with good ideas that will enable them to move fast when the connectivity is available later this year.

The signature line of the old song “New York, New York”, written at the height of that city’s industrial prominence, proclaimed: “If I can make it in New York, I’ll make it anywhere”.  This century, in the post-industrial era, the line should be: if broadband helps make Quitman a success story, then it can happen anywhere.

I’ll keep you apprised of their progress.

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© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/97730847152/small-town-big-story]

Will The Best & Brightest Return To The Countryside?

There have been recent news stories about those coming and going and possibly returning to life in the countryside. 

A couple months ago, the New York Times had a major story about older folks returning to rural life after business careers elsewhere – “A Second Career, Happily in the Weeds”.  (Among others, it featured Debra Sloane, a former Cisco colleague.

Then this past weekend, in a kind of counterpoint, the Times’ Sunday Review section had an op-ed article about a woman who tried and gave up on living in the countryside – “Giving Up My Small-Town Fantasy”.   While she returned to the city, she also wrote that she moved to a small town because:

We were betting on the fact that we wouldn’t be alone in fleeing the big city for a small town. Urban living has become unthinkably expensive for many middle-class creative types. A 2010 study from the Journal of Economic Geography found a trifecta of reasons some rural areas have grown instead of shrunk: the creative class, entrepreneurial activity and outdoor amenities. In 2012, a University of Minnesota research fellow called the influx of 30-to-40-somethings into rural Minnesota towns a “brain gain” — flipping the conventional wisdom on the exodus from the boonies to the big city.

To further the idea that the traditional brain drain from rural areas is changing, the well-respected Daily Yonder had a feature article last month summarizing research on “The Rural Student Brain Gain”.  As they note:

The common wisdom is that rural America’s “best and brightest” want to leave home. New research shows these students are no more likely to want to leave than their counterparts. And when they do go, they have a stronger desire to return.

There is no doubt that many young people who can leave will do so – which more likely means the brightest who can get into major universities.  To some extent, all young people want to see the world beyond where they grew up. 

Almost a hundred years ago, Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis wrote what became a very popular song as many young men went off to Europe in World War I.

How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm
After they’ve seen Paree’
How ya gonna keep ‘em away from Broadway
Jazzin around and paintin’ the town

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By the way, this is not just a rural question.  A generation ago or so, parents in New York City were asking the same question – would the young return after seeing California?  Feeding this concern, for instance, was an article in the New York Times on October 1, 1980 about so many New Yorkers living in Los Angeles that two of the big high schools in Brooklyn held alumni reunions there.

So while we don’t want the young to feel they are being kept captive, the question is will they return to their countryside origins or something like it?

To answer that question, there are others that need to be answered first. 

In a post-industrial, global, Internet-connected economy, can young people still feel they are part of the larger world? Can they have as many opportunities for fulfillment and success back home as in the “big city”?

The answer is yes, the potential is there.  But the young are still leaving because too few rural communities have done the things they need to do in order to open up those opportunities for their brightest young people.  These lagging leaders haven’t built up the broadband necessary to connect both young and old to the world, nor have they helped people understand what they can do with that broadband connection, nor have they focused on the larger issues of developing a community anyone would want to live in if they had a choice in the matter.

And those who have given up hope for their rural communities because they know people there can never earn the megabucks found on Wall Street?  They should be informed by other research, including a fascinating, classic study by Professor Gundars Rudzitis of the University of Idaho, in his article in Rural Development Perspectives, “Amenities Increasingly Draw People to the Rural West”:

More people are moving to rural areas for reasons that have nothing to do with employment.  … the rural West is one of the fastest growing regions in the United States. …  Surveys in the 1970’s began to show that, if given a choice, people prefer to live in small towns and even in rural areas.

Amenities such as environmental quality and pace of life were becoming important in explaining why people move. The apparent sudden preference of people for rural life shocked many academics and planners because rural areas were thought to be at a major disadvantage compared with urban areas. 

These findings also were a surprise because they conflicted with the major assumptions of migration theory, or why people move. Simply put, people were thought to move because they wanted to increase or maximize their incomes. … This approach, however, failed to explain why people moved out of cities into places like the rural West.

…  People who migrate to high-amenity counties are often assumed to be retirees, as the growth and development of States like Arizona and Florida bears out. In our survey, however, only 10 percent of the new migrants were over 65 years of age. Instead, migrants were more likely to be young, highly educated professionals.

These studies and stories about people moving from city to country and back make clear that these decisions are more complicated than the headlines indicate.  And broadband connectivity will upset these patterns even more. 

Indeed, this new picture of what is going on may tell us why the best and brightest of the countryside might want to return after they’ve seen Paris (or New York or San Francisco).

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/97138255998/will-the-best-brightest-return-to-the-countryside]

Presentation On Technology, People & Rural Prosperity

Previously, I mentioned that I gave the opening keynote presentation at the final annual conference on Rural Prosperity in Canada, held at Queen’s University of Kingston, Ontario. 

Jeffrey Dixon, Associate Director of the Monieson Centre which has run the project, was very kind in his feedback:

Norm Jacknis provided an inspiring presentation at our 6th annual rural economic development conference. He helped a group of community leaders, business people, policymakers and researchers consider new opportunities for rural prosperity and to think creatively about how they can use technology to transform their economies.

A video of the presentation, including questions and discussion, is now available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7PmYBxcqgA&index=3&list=PLc4qJ1UgXeFHWsWwtzQm5TvfeNuDvfRad and also as the Tumblr post just after this. I went into a fairly deep explanation of the trends occurring in the economy and technology – and why and how these trends open up new opportunities for small towns and rural areas.  It’s about an hour long video, although the actual presentation starts about two minutes into the video and ends about forty minutes later.  (Sit back and relax – I tried to make it as entertaining as possible.)

You can see the printed handout at http://business.queensu.ca/centres/monieson/events/Economic_Revitalization_2014/Presentations/2014%20conference%20presentations/Norm%20Jacknis.pdf   Of course, if you only read the handout, you’ll miss the videos and also what I say about each slide since I don’t really read them.

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Also, in conjunction with the conference, the university staff issued a series of research papers that you can read in the Journal of Rural and Community Development at http://www.jrcd.ca/viewissue.php?id=20

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/93308163833/presentation-on-technology-people-rural-prosperity]

Mapping The Future: Technology, People & Rural Prosperity

This Tuesday, Queen’s University of Kingston, Ontario held its last annual conference on Rural Prosperity in Canada.  As Senior Fellow leading the Rural Imperative for the Intelligent Community Forum, I was asked to give the opening, keynote speech. 

My overall theme was that the countryside has a new opportunity to flourish, considering developments in technology and broadband, as well as the major post-industrial trends in North America, Europe, Japan and elsewhere.  I also emphasized that broadband, while a necessary condition for community development, is not sufficient and must be integrated with other elements that build quality of life.

I won’t go into more detail here, since my presentation will be posted on their website.  Instead I’ll report on some of the items presented by others that caught my attention.

1. Research on the economic impact of broadband

The researchers at the Monieson Centre of the university’s Business School presented the results of their analysis of the impact of broadband on employment and wages.  They found that broadband deployment, from 1997-2011, had only a minor positive impact on employment in urban areas, but had a significantly more positive impact in rural areas.  However, broadband was associated with wage increases in both rural and urban regions.

Moreover, they found there was no impact on employment at firms producing physical goods, but a major positive impact on employment and wages for services (although not all services). 

Although we didn’t coordinate, it was nice to see results that tracked with the broad trends I’ve been highlighting for the last few years.  In a way, my presentation explained the research results.

2. Rural broadband network in eastern Ontario

The association of the key leaders of rural counties in eastern Ontario (called the Eastern Ontario Wardens Caucus), with others, have spearheaded a project called EORN that is wrapping up its initial deployment this year.  The Eastern Ontario Regional Network is building out rural areas with broadband that provides its 500,000 residents with 10 megabit connections – much more than is common even among most urban users of the Internet in North America.  EORN officials think it is the most ambitious project of its kind in the Americas or possibly the world.  They are certain it is the “most sustainable rural network” in the world.

Later in the day, Bo Beaulieu of Purdue University’s Center for Regional Development spoke about the necessity and value of regional cooperation among rural counties.  My observation was that, with broadband and regional cooperation, these areas can present themselves as the virtual equivalent of a city and be able to compete economically in many ways not otherwise possible.

3. Creative uses of the countryside

There were various presentations on how the new countryside is more than just farming.  One example was a “multi-functional” farm – yes, it grew food for sale, but also was an environmental education center, alternative energy demonstration site, publishing office, and a bed-and-breakfast set up by a “refugee” from Toronto. 

Since, especially in this area of Canada, much of that nation’s history is better preserved in the countryside than in cities, historical and cultural resources have been used as a basis for economic development.  See, for example, History Lives Here which has a variety of products, from videos and guided tours to History labelled wines from local wineries.

All in all, a very interesting day that provided strong evidence of the energy and innovation which is creating the future of rural areas in Canada and the rest of the world.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/82290687838/mapping-the-future-technology-people-rural]