Robert Bell: April 2010 Archives

Listen to the podcast     Follow ICF on Twitter

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.