April 2010 Archives

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You can actually feel the difference between an emerging economy and a mature one.  I recall it from trips to Malaysia and India.  When you visit a place where the economy is growing like mad, there is electricity in the air.  It's the energy of hope.  People might not have any more idea where they're going than I do, but they know they're going somewhere and that it's going to be big.  In large, mature economies, on the other hand, the highs and lows are muted.  There's a lot more to lose and less faith in what there is to be gained.  Like big ships at sea, they take a long time to get up to speed and a long time to turn in a new direction. 

I have not had the privilege of visiting Suwon, South Korea - that opportunity went to my colleague John Jung - but I bet I know what it feels like.  I have just finished writing their Top Seven Intelligent Community profile on our Web site, and I recognize the attitude.  It says "let's get it done."  The 1997 Asian economic crisis made Mayor Yong Seo Kim and his leadership team lose faith in a future that depended on South Korea's enormous chaebol companies.  So, they set about building an economy whose growth would be based on small-to-midsize enterprises (SMEs) specializing in IT, biotech and nanotechnology. 

And they got it done.  Fast forward a few years, and Suwon was home to three new industrial complexes and nine multi-tenant technology buildings.  The new Kwangkyo Techno Valley campus is now full of research institutes set up by business, universities and government working hand in hand.   

South Korea already has one of the finest broadband infrastructures in the world, but Mayor Kim and his team wanted ICT to be ubiquitous in Suwon.  They got it done.  A lot of investment later, the U-Happy Master Plan had created a 1 Gbps e-government network.  They integrated systems for taxation, real estate, public health and safety, transportation and city administration, and put them online.  An e-services gateway handled 600,000 transactions last year from 10 million unique visitors. 

In its nomination for the Top Seven, Suwon wrote that "Investment in education is one of the most sound and rational outlays of capital that a government can make."  Between 2002 and 2009, the city backed up that proposition by investing more than US$360m in upgrading school facilities, opening new schools and expanding staff. 

Globalization is much on their minds.  So they opened the Happy Suwon English Village in 2006 to offer intensive learning in the global language of business to 7,000 elementary school students per year.  A new Suwon Village of Foreign Languages, which opens this year, will offer the same environment for Chinese and Japanese.  In 2007, Suwon established the Gyeonggi Suwon Foreign School.  It aims to make the city a premier destination for expatriates with families working for Korean multinationals.  And with all of this focus on languages, they are not exactly ignoring technology.  The city holds an annual Suwon Invention Competition for students and sends contestants to the World Innovation Olympiad every year.  Since 2004, Suwon has organized an annual Information & Science Festival, which attracts 60,000 paid registrants to a National e-Sports Competition, National Intelligent Robot Competition, Professional Gamers Exhibition and much more. 

It's not as though the global recession missed South Korea.  Well, okay, technically speaking, growth never quite turned negative, because the government poured in fiscal stimulus.  But from November 2008 through March 2009, exports slumped every month by double-digit amounts.  When your economy has been growing 7-10% for years, that feels like a recession.   The difference is attitude.  While government and business in Europe and North America have been obsessed with how much and how fast to cut, Suwon has been thinking about how to win the next round of the economic game.  They may not know exactly where they are going, but they know they are going somewhere, and it's going to be big.

Until the US financial industry imploded in 2009, columnists like the New York Times' Tom Friedman wrote despairing editorials about America's best young minds, who were graduating from university and going to work for hedge funds and brokerages.  There, they were put to work developing those exotic financial instruments that, we now know, turned out to be so much toxic junk.  It's a challenge for industrialized nations to interest their young people in science, technology, engineering and math or STEM.  Not so in the racing economies of China, South Korea, India, Brazil and other emerging economic powers.  There, it is clear to everyone where the future lies: in making things and delivering services that require extreme technology skills. 

So, how does a community in an industrialized nation interest its youth in STEM and route them into careers in companies clamoring for their talents?  For a compelling example, see our profile of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, one of our Top Seven Intelligent Communities of 2010.  (A quick log-in is required.)  Ottawa is Canada's capital.  So naturally, you would expect the most highly valued skills there to be lawyering and navigating bureaucracy.  But Ottawa is determined to be recognized less for governing and more for innovating in the technologies of the 21st Century.   

Recent history makes that challenging.  When the 2001-02 telecom recession hit, it decimated Ottawa's communications sector, which includes Nortel, Newbridge Networks, Cognos and Mitel.  Today, Nortel is in bankruptcy, having been unable to withstand the competition from such Chinese innovators as Huawei and ZTE.  As telecom moved from regional darling to regional dog, enrollment in secondary school science and math programs plummeted.  That soon translated into lower science and engineering enrollment at the university level.  The tech sector recovered but interest in science and engineering education did not.

By 2008, Ottawa's economic development organization, OCRI, its universities and its entrepreneurs were doing something about it.  New programs included a Specialist High Skills Major for grades 11 and 12 that focused on ICT, and a High School Technology Program that sent students into companies to create software projects.  Universities joined in with courses in entrepreneurship and e-business, graduate programs in computer modeling and game animation, new schools of media & design and a bachelor of engineering in sustainable energy. 

The community has also focused on the "last mile" between the end of education and the start of employment. It's the golden moment when the most talented students face a choice of where to start their careers.  TalentBridge is a program that provides entrepreneurially-inclined university students with part-time jobs at local technology companies, paid by local government, where they work under experienced mentors.  The companies get the benefit of fresh thinking and new energy, while students gain business experience and often make the move into full-time positions with the companies.

Ottawa serial entrepreneur Terry Matthews has created the Wesley Clover Affiliate Program, which identifies the brightest and most motivated new graduates, puts them through a "boot camp" training program for 9-12 months, and then pairs them with industry leaders in specific sectors.  The aim is to introduce a new product into the market within 12 months.  That's a smart move for an investor like Matthews, and a great contribution to Ottawa's future. 

I'm glad that serious thinkers publicly worry about young people who would rather get an MBA than a computer science or engineering degree.  In our Facts & Figures Library, there is an interesting opinion piece by columnist Ralph Gomery called "The Innovation Delusion."  He believes that Americans - including Tom Friedman - are fooling themselves if they think they can have a vibrant tech sector in this country but let the manufacturing happen somewhere else.  Whether he's right or wrong, it's an important discussion to have.  But it is not the thinkers who impress me most.  It is the doers - the Intelligent Communities like Ottawa that don't just shake their heads about the future, but roll up their sleeves and get to work creating a better one.  

When you travel to cities to undertake a review one of the Top 7 Intelligent Communities of the Year, you just never know what you can expect. My fellow Co-Founders Robert Bell and Lou Zacharilla can probably tell you other stories, but in the process of reviewing these applications for ICF's Intelligent Community of the Year, we get to see a lot about a community: the highs of their political, economic and cultural excellence, as well as possibly the lows.

For instance in Eindhoven (Brainport), Holland recently, I discovered that the region was the home of Vincent van Gogh and his family. I had just seen an exciting exhibit of rare paintings and personal letters by Vincent to his brother Theo at the Royal Academy the week before in London and now I was going to actually see the shed where he painted his famous Potato Eaters painting. If that wasn't enough, I was given the opportunity to stay in The Netherland's famous Smart Home for three nights in Eindhoven. Although challenged with the language, I was able to master the various buttons and levers to work everything in the Smart Home. It was quite an intuitive experience and an extraordinary opportunity, but it was not the most surprising while in Eindhoven. I was a bit surprised to learn that I would be looking at the underbelly of their society. I thought that was what I had heard, but actually what I wound up looking at was a very pregnant belly of a woman going into labour and here I was, moments later, being encouraged to deliver a baby, no less.

Now how does a guy who sits most days in front of a computer or in a boardroom find himself in an operating room about to deliver a new born baby? Were my recent honorary degrees somehow interpreted as actually being a doctor? Was something lost in translation? I was in Eindhoven to undertake an examination of the vitals of the community, not the vitals of a woman about to deliver a baby. Well, I guess anything goes in the world of ICF.

So let me explain a bit more. I was about to observe the digital monitoring rooms of a health simulation centre where doctors and their team of nurses practice on simulation, observed by other doctors in remote locations. This was supposed to be all about high-speed broadband and its applications. But the program shifted gears and that day's scenario revolved around a woman driving her car at high-speed and has an accident. She is brought to the operating room that we are observing over dozens of monitors.

Our facility shifts into panic mode when it is discovered that she is pregnant and needs an emergency C section or else lose the baby. I was prepared to monitor this in my comfortable chair sipping a latte.  Instead I was given a white doctor's uniform and quickly shepherded into the bright and busy operating room. Others around me were busy with their tasks and one nurse was calming the woman down. The patient was going into shock and there was a new sense of panic as the monitors around me buzz, bleep and whiz. All foreign sounds to me. What am I doing here?

Slipping on rubber gloves, I am handed a scalpel and instructed with a sense of urgency to slice the belly where marked. I do this as instructed. I am then given scissors to complete the job. The gynecologist instructs me to now finish the job by pulling the baby out of the woman's womb through the incision I had just made. I do as I'm told and there is great excitement around us. All this excitement in the span of about 60 seconds. The woman's vital signs improve and the nurse announces that the baby's vital signs are good as well. Apparently there was a photographer imbedded in the delivery room, hence the photograph in the newspaper the next day.

I wonder how many people looking at the picture realize that the woman was a very sophisticated wifi-enabled simulator and while she moves her head and eyes and mouth as if she were real, she wasn't. The belly looked quite realistic; but believe me, I sliced into a rubber doll and nothing else.

After that excitement I continued on to witness a driverless bus by a local firm called Phelia in Brainport's Automotive Campus that uses sensors and magnets to remember its driving track, speed and docking capabilities. Eindhoven purchased a fleet of these buses and developed a 10km route with magnets imbedded into the road between Eindhoven's train station and the airport that could be used by the driverless bus. I wonder if that is where the woman had her accident? Wait a minute, it's all simulation.

Of the many communities that I have visited over the years, the smallest U.S. county built on the "Arlington Way" is among the most unusual and most successful. Described as a collaboration of citizens, businesses and government, it seems to be in a constant process of collaboration aimed at "slowing down the planning and development process" to allow for thoughtful and insightful input by the dozens of neighborhood committees, commissions and task forces. Once a plan is established, I am told, it is important in "Arlington Way" fashion to ensure consistency at seeing the long term plan through to its ultimate conclusion. And it shows. Where a sea of parking lots surrounded a failing Home Depot, the hub is now home to upscale Whole Foods and Harry's Tap Grill, accessible by well designed streets and treed sidewalks.

The make-up of the community also hosts immigrants and a broad mix of new comers coming to Arlington for residential opportunities adjacent to the Nation's capital. But today many of the people actually find work in Arlington. The sense of community is deep. Young, single and tech savvy, many residents and workers give their time freely to participate in commissions and committees. With a high level of education and sense of community commitment, many are on multiple commissions and committees. "It's hard for the leadership to argue with the opinion of judges, Nobel Laureates, international negotiators and experts in fields ranging from medicine to international development." It is after all, I am reminded, the world in one place. "We have over 100 languages spoken in this community and as a community, it is very inclusive and welcoming to all people from around the world interested in contributing. But it is well known that collaboration becomes more difficult as a community grows. It will be Arlington's challenge to maintain that sense of collaboration as the community continues to attract more people to the county.

Photo: Arlington County Board Chair Jay Fisette with Ballston in the background.

Arlington is adjacent to Georgetown in Washington DC, but feels like a major city with 30 storey high rises and densities that are attractive to young couples and families between the ages of 24-35. At a corner in the Ballston neighborhood I see about a dozen individual joggers, dressed in designer running gear, coming and leaving in all directions, and criss-crossing in a pattern that almost feels choreographed. Arlington is attractive to people who work in the defense industry, close to the Pentagon and to Washington's key offices across the river. The Rosslyn-Ballston corridor is a nexus of science and technology related firms, many of whom benefit from the synergy of the close proximity to each other. The other consolidation of firms supporting the business of government and defense is in the Crystal City area, a major spine of high density development adjacent to Ronald Reagan National Airport.  All of these firms and the people that live and work in them, and their neighboring lower density residential areas benefit from the major transit capabilities in the region. 11 of the 33 stops are in Arlington. The Greater Washington Region has a population of 5.5 million and benefits from the remaining 22 stops. This inordinate benefit that Arlington has is a consequence of geography and history, but it is also a result of determined leadership and the collaboration of many individuals who make up this community. 45 neighborhood committees and a significant number of commissions keep the population in touch and actively engaged. They work together for the betterment of the community; for their families and for their children.          

What is the wow factor in Arlington I asked? I am told without any hesitancy: "It's the committees, commissions and neighborhood groups that make up the county."