Robert Bell: November 2009 Archives

Something interesting is happening in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. 

Cleveland is home to world-class universities and the Cleveland Clinic, one of America's most innovative hospitals.  In 2006, we named Cleveland as one of our Top Seven Intelligent Communities, and we honored it again in 2008 among the four cities that make up Northeast Ohio.  

But Cleveland also has the second highest poverty rate among US cities, just behind the automotive capital of Detroit.  Half a century ago, it was one of the engines of America's industrial prosperity.  John D. Rockefeller made his first fortune there.  But when American manufacturing lost its competitive edge in the Seventies and Eighties, the economy went south.  The descendents of that generation of entrepreneurs took their inheritances and moved to the suburbs.  Despite the hard work of a lot of people since then, the city still suffers.   

One of those people is Lev Gonick, CIO of Case Western Reserve University.  When I was in Cleveland in March 2008, Lev told me about a project he was working on.  Like many urban universities, Case Western is in a tough neighborhood.  As many as three out of five of the university's neighbors are on food stamps, the American food security program. Eighty percent of newborn children in the surrounding neighborhoods are enrolled in Medicaid, the health program for the poor.   In the current recession, mortgage foreclosures in the area are as high as one out every three households.  It is a place where poverty, ignorance and failure are the inheritance that is handed down from parents to children.

Lev's project launched in mid-November, shortly before the US Thanksgiving holiday.  The university is connecting 100 neighboring households to its gigabit fiber network.  University researchers, technologists and institutions in the region are collaborating to see if high-bandwidth online services can actually reduce violence and crime, increase graduation rates in science and math, and do a better job of identifying and monitoring chronic health problems.  Case Western students will be working with the households to identify their needs, train people to join the digital world, and study how they actually do.  There's an eye-opening idea for you: as part of its core curriculum, a major university will study how broadband can be used to address the most intractable social problems of urban America.  The best minds in medicine, public health, education and public safety will put the 100 households under the microscope to learn what works and what does not.   Eventually, the University Circle Innovation Zone, as the project is called, hopes to connect more than 25,000 residents. 

You can read what Lev has to say about the project on our Web site.  It's a fantastic example of innovation in broadband that also contributes directly to the educational excellence needed to create a knowledge-based workforce.  And for me, it was one more thing to put on the list of blessings received when I sat down to a turkey dinner on America's national day of gratitude.  Thanks, Lev, and the best of luck to you and all of the people and institutions involved.  The work you are doing may well change the world for the better.

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Innovation is a global issue.  In a new poll released by Newsweek and Intel, 75% of Americans say that technology innovation is more important than ever but over half fear that the Great Recession has hurt the ability of US companies to innovate.  Europeans largely believe that technology innovation has improved their quality of life and the economy, yet only 14% predict that Europe will be an innovation leader.  Not so the Chinese: 63% believe that China will overtake the US in technology innovation within 30 years.

Innovation may be global, but it always takes place in a local context, be it a town or city, a county, state or province.  Here's an example.  This past week, in the US state of Nebraska, the University of Nebraska's Board of Regents took up an issue raised by opponents of stem cell research, which holds such promise for developing innovative new therapies but does it by making use of embryonic tissue.  For weeks, the board had been the target of a fierce campaign from opponents.  Their goal was to have the board restrict research to a small number of cell lines approved by President George W. Bush, rather than opening the door to research on hundreds created since 2001 from unused embryos at fertility clinics.  In the end, the board deadlocked in a tie vote, which left the current rules in place and was a defeat for the activists.

The morning I read that story, I stopped on my way to work to stare at a huge banner draped across the front of the New York Stock Exchange (see the video below).  The China Cord Blood Corporation was doing a public offering.  I heard later that they raised about $20m to fund expansion in China.  Its business is storing the blood left in umbilical cords after birth.  Why?  Because such blood may be a pathway to innovative new therapies in the future. 

And there you had it: two stories of healthcare innovation tying together opposite ends of the globe.  A Chinese company with a successful business coming to the US to raise money, and a US university caught in a struggle with citizens about whether one form of innovation was morally right.  Whatever your position on the issue in Nebraska, it's clear that local context matters.  Broad cultural issues and plain old people with strong feelings can have outsized impacts on a community's innovation potential.  In Saudi Arabia, religious opposition is rising to modern universities created by the kingdom to jumpstart innovation - because they are places where Westerners and Saudis can live a Western lifestyle.  In the US state of California, huge budget cuts are threatening that crown jewel of higher education, the University of California system.  The current cause is the recession but the underlying problem is a law drafted by anti-tax activists back in the Eighties that has made it almost impossible for the state to raise taxes for the past two decades. 

In this global broadband economy, communities have local choices to make.  Innovation is essential, yet it can be deeply disturbing to established ways of life, thought and belief.  It can be tempting to say "we just can't do that here" because a noisy minority opposes it.  But they can't stop innovation from taking place.  They can just ensure that your community misses out on the benefits.

At the start of the 20th century, only about 10% of humanity lived in cities.  Today, over 50% live in urban environments. By the middle of the 21st century, the number could be as high as 70%. For that reason, making cities smarter may well be the key to the survival of the human race. Our book, Future Cities, examines ways, in the words of Star Trek, to "make it so."

It is in cities that new technologies and major scientific discoveries and inventions arise. It is here that new strategies for sustainable development, renewable energy, and combating climate change ferment and blossom. In Future Cities, you can read about the major forces of urban change that will ultimately reshape our world.

The interrelationship between the city, the evolution of humanity and new technology is powerful.  Clearly the future of cities has many dimensions related to art, culture, education, health care, business opportunity, trade, political relationships, governmental and military systems and much, much more. Nevertheless communications and information technology (IT) are incredibly powerful drivers of change.  In the United States, cities such as Philadelphia are using smart recycling bins embedded with RFID tags to track and encourage residents for recycling. In recent months, the government of Kenya successfully designed and implemented an elaborate e-learning program, which trained over 22,000 nurses in the basic medical skills necessary to treat diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

In China, there is world's largest electronic education program known as the Chinese National TV University, which I helped to start in 1986 as an Intelsat-based satellite experiment under Project Share. This system now provides innovative programming to over 10 million students. In Korea, transportation managers have deployed a network of wireless sensors to ensure the safety of bridges throughout the country. 

In Stockholm, a city I had the privilege to visit when the International Space University met there over a decade ago, its city planners have been using information technology in a broad range of ways that led to its selection as the current Intelligent Community of the Year.  These are only a few examples of how technology is redefining our world.

As I said when I gave the Arthur C. Clarke Lecture in 2001 in Washington, D.C., the 21st century will be the most challenging century in the entire history of humankind. More people have had to find a way to live and survive on planet Earth since the start of World War I than in the entire history from the time that marked the start of the human race. With each decade, the challenges only seem to escalate.

Consider this thought experiment.  If we to take the millions of years since the origins of the first "apeman" and compress that time into a single "SuperMonth" we would find that for 29 days and 22 and half hours we were hunter/gatherer nomads. In the last hour and a half of our SuperMonth, we took up farming, agriculture and building permanent settlements. Only the last 90 minutes represents the age of human towns and cities. Four minutes to midnight represents in SuperMonth time the Renaissance. The last two minutes were the industrial revolution and the last 25 seconds or so is the time represented by computers, television, space missions, lasers, atomic energy - and spandex.

We live in a time of future compression driven by technology. Some of the great challenges of the 21st century--a brief flash of cosmic time--could well see us Homo Sapiens coping with a global population of 12 billion people; adjusting to large-scale technological unemployment triggered by what I call "super automation;" and the real biggie, climate change. All of these problems are, of course, intensively interrelated. It is within the Future City that we can hope to find solutions to these challenges.

Dr. Joseph Pelton is the award-winning author of over 25 books related to the future, applied space systems and communications networks.  His books explore not only how technical systems work, but how they impact society. He is the Former Dean of the International Space University and former head of Strategic Policy at Intelsat.

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It was way back in 590 AD that Pope Gregory the First made the list of human frailties we know today as the Seven Deadly Sins.  These are not the big sins covered by the Talmud's Ten Commandments: thou shalt not this and thou shalt not that.   They are psychological excesses: extravagance, greed, wrath, pride and so on.  My own personal favorite is envy.  It's so universal - where would a consumer culture be without it? - so socially acceptable and so corrosive. If a day goes by when I haven't envied somebody for something, well, I'm just not living. 

We now have evidence that the Seven Deadly Sins are going to follow us into the digital future.  A recent study by Brandchoices.co.uk found that 6 out of 10 Brits admit they would be jealous if they found out that their neighbors had a faster broadband connection than they did. I get it.  At home, I'm suffering with a cable modem delivering maybe 4 Mbps downstream on a good day. If you have a 20 Meg fiber connection, I'm going to curse the ground you walk on. 

But really, envy isn't as much fun as it looks.  It feels bad, for one thing.  It also blinds us to the very real gifts that life has put into our hands.  And it keeps us from taking action to make things better.  It's so much more comfortable to just sit and stew in envy than to do something new and different.   This has been driven home to me by recent work with the Intelligent Communities we have honored through our award program.  I have written a series of what we call Report Cards.  Intelligent Communities ask for them to get feedback on how they scored in our award program's analysis, which gets increasingly rigorous as they advance from Smart21 to Top Seven to Intelligent Community of the Year.  Naturally, we don't reveal how other communities scored - but we do show them where their strengths and weaknesses are, so that they know where to focus in their nomination the following year.  And as I always remind people, it's not really about the nomination or the award.  It's about broadband and knowledge work, digital inclusion and innovation and advocacy in your community.  Knowing your real strengths and weaknesses is just the first step toward making the economic and social progress your citizens deserve. 

I am just wrapping up a Report Card for Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.  And here's the point: Moncton made the Top Seven last year and really wanted to be our 2009 Intelligent Community of the Year.  The honor went to Stockholm instead.  Moncton's first response was to ask for a Report Card to help them understand why.  When they were named to our Smart21 Communities of 2010, they asked for another Report Card to understand the new competitive environment.  Now, I was not given a magic crystal that lets me see into the hearts of men and women.  For all I know, they may be suffering from all of the Seven Deadly Sins up there in Atlantic Canada.  But they are taking action.  They are seizing their opportunities with both hands, looking their strengths and weaknesses straight in the eye, and deciding what to do about them.  That's smart.  That's the spirit we see in all of the communities we honor in our awards.  And it may just be the single most important competitive advantage they have.