Intelligent Communities: The Asian Way

It is usually a bad idea to generalize about big regions of the world, and never more so than in Asia.  A much-traveled business person once told me that there is no such thing.  The region is made up of many different countries with their own unique histories, and businesses typically fail when they try to attack it as one big market.  What works in India is meaningless in Australia, and what South Koreans want could not be more different from what Indonesians desire. 

But the temptation is just too strong.  As we prepare for the announcement of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year on January 20, I am going back over the first wave of nomination forms submitted by the Smart21 Communities in October.  From a review of the five Asian communities among the Smart21, I want to risk some generalizations about the Asian Way of being an Intelligent Community.  I offer them with all due humility.  The communities are more different than alike.  What they have in common is not uniquely Asian but can be found to some degree in communities everywhere.  In the Asian Smart21 Communities, however, we find distilled a set of particular strengths, from which we all can learn.

1.  Mighty visions and massive plans.  It is common among Asian Intelligent Communities to develop ambitious visions and to back them up with meticulous planning.  Taoyuan County, Taiwan is home to the nation's biggest airport, which serves the capital, Taipei.  The county's vision is to transform that asset into an Aerotropolis, an information-driven ecosystem for trade, industry, exhibitions, tourism and entertainment.  Driving the transformation is an ICT revolution in four stages: E-Taoyuan (for e-government), M-Taoyuan (for mobile broadband services), U-Taoyuan (for ubiquitous ICT in business and life) and I-Taoyuan (which ties to President Ma's vision of making Taiwan an Intelligent Island.)
     Taoyuan is a county of 2 million people that is Taiwan's industrial heartland.  But the same emphasis on vision and planning is visible in Gold Coast City, Australia, a county-size municipality that is home to a half million residents and attracts more than 10 million tourists yearly.    Fifteen years ago, the City put into place a formal economic development strategy overseen by a Regional Economic Advisory Committee.  The plan is updated annually to align it with other community development plans, such as the Gold Coast Planning Scheme, Local Growth Management Strategy, Activity Centre Strategy and Pacific Innovation Corridor program - not to mention the Bold Future blueprint for the next three decades.  That is a lot of plans and schemes and blueprints.  By the standards of other parts of the world, it may seem like overkill.  But consistency, discipline and focus are powerful virtues, and these communities seem to have them in abundance.

2.  Large-scale public and private investment.  Asian communities tend to make big bets on physical infrastructure, from building complexes to fiber networks.  Suwon City in South Korea has its own big vision (U-Happy) and multi-step meticulous plan.  But construction has a big role: the Gwanggyo Housing Development District, which houses 150 high-tech companies; the Suwon Industrial Complexes, with 1.2 million square meters of factory lands; the Suwon Venture Center for high-tech start-ups, the Gyeonggy Regional Research Center, Content Convergence Software Research Center and Auto Part & Material Research Center.  The government leads as planner and investor, and businesses and universities pick up the rest.  Nobody appears interested in a quick profit: they are laying the foundation for decades of growth.
     In Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, the focus is on the University of Ballarat Technology Park, which is key to a plan to make the city of 90,000 an internationally recognized ICT center.  Public, private and university money have gone into infrastructure, business attraction, incubation and training.  Meanwhile, the government of Australia is rolling out an A$43 billion National Broadband Network offering up to 100 Mbps nationwide.  Vendors have lined up to profit from the wave of investment, but it is the people of communities like Ballarat that will see the greatest return in coming decades.  Putting up buildings alone does not create sustainable growth - just ask the US construction industry right now.  But properly integrated into a long-term strategy, it can have a transformative impact. 

3.  Focus on education.  The Confucian cultures of Asia are famous for their devotion to learning, and education figures prominently in the economic development strategies of Asia's Intelligent Communities.  None is more focused than the Employment Services Card system of the Tianjin Binhai New Area, home to 2 million people in Tianjin, China.  Starting at university, the card records student participation in career guidance and internships.  It qualifies students for entrepreneurship training and mentoring, business subsidies, loans, social insurance subsidies and other schemes.  The government pays 70% of the minimum wage for between 3 and 12 months after hiring and has set up a technology transfer center to connect universities and businesses.  Inter-disciplinary teams of professors and students have solved many technical problems for businesses in the New Area, from grape cultivation and winemaking to wastewater treatment in papermaking. 

All of the Asian Smart21 put education, from primary through the "last mile" to employment, at the center of their efforts.  That's not unique to Asia, any more than planning and investment.  But the seriousness with which the Asian Smart21 pursue these things is worthy of being celebrated - and imitated - around the world.