Ideas for Ideas Magazine and a Reflection for the Year Ahead (Part One)

During the Ideas interview, John Jung and I discussed the criteria used by ICF to identify and name an intelligent community.  We noted, familiarly, how policies, businesses and social life are being shaped around an emerging broadband economy.  From an empirical perspective, the body of knowledge within ICF has grown substantially enough for us to claim that there are repetitive processes and steps that can be taken to launch a community into the 21st Century.

Most of this has become standard stuff for us, and we will continue to move it further along in 2010 as we gather more data, invite communities to host ICF institutes around the world and share profiles from our new Top Seven communities - and dozens of others through our Workshop and Accelerator programs - which each represent best practices.

However, near the end of the interview with the Ideas editors (which I am afraid is only available in Taiwanese) I was prompted by a good question from Fabius Chin, one of the interviewers along with editor-in-chief Lillian Kim.  I began talking about the creation of the community which has in it the hearty fabric of something invisible, yet will assure a community of longevity through the generations.  I referred to aspects of our criteria which have less to do, overtly, with the presence of a broadband infrastructure and more to do with a form of human capital that has been present for centuries and is only now being considered in a new light by people like Mel Horwitch of the Polytechnic Institute of NY University, Canada's Martin Institute, to some degree, and others.

Rather than focusing on the more technical aspects of broadband, I am increasingly using vocabulary that is associated with the artistic community, sociologists, urban planners and theologians.  I referred to a theme which has been ignored by interviewers in Asia, "creative culture," but which will be the essence, or the raw materials, for the "new economy."  Industrial policy is great, but intellectual policy is greater, I said.  I waited for their polite silence but I did not get it.  Either my interviewers were being extremely polite, or the concept resonates with increased vibrancy in a part of the world which most associate with stuff bought at Walmart rather than as a place where there are increasingly clusters of exciting, reborn, creative cultures.

I am increasingly aware of the cultural component of intelligent communities, which is ultimately a reflection of the creativity inherent in every person.  The question for communities is how to "mine" this material in a way that will enable economic success and an enrichment of a type that may not have existed for generations.   With "The Education 'Last Mile'," which explores the new but inherent relationship between the educations system and the workforce, as our sixth criteria this year, we have decided to give communities the opportunity to dig deeper and to explore for us ways in which learning and work are connected.  I suspect we will begin to see how creative cultures are making the transition from an industrial or even agrarian model of education toward one that is far less linear, and incorporative of deeper intellectual and intuitive processes.

This will allow us to further the dialogue with teachers and academicians, as well as the one we have been having with leaders of communities, CIOs, tech companies and other who gather around ICF's global dialogue.

Part two of my "Year Ahead" blog will be available next week.  In the meantime, I wish you and your community a healthy and prosperous year ahead.