Can Cities Be Catalysts for Local Innovation?
Justin Bean
Sustainability New Venture Strategy and Biz Dev, EIR @Hitachi | Author & Speaker | New Business Incubation | Climate Tech & ESG | Startups | Angel & Venture Capital Investing | Social Impact | IoT + AI | Smart Cities
What if cities could enable companies, governments, and organizations to unleash their data for the entrepreneurs and developers that are dreaming up the next Ubers and new solutions to local challenges?
The Lord Mayor of Copenhagen unveiled City Data Exchange this week together with Hitachi Insight Group, the company's newly announced Internet of Things (IoT) unit. Smart cities have for a long time hosted open data portals and hackathons to create solutions to local challenges. This has been a successful endeavor for increasing transparency, making data accessible, and bringing together their communities to rally around solving local challenges locally. The data that sits in the hands of governments is massive, but it is a fraction of the amount of data the private sector is gathering from IoT sensors, phones, and operations. The city hopes that by unleashing these larger and more diverse sets of data, it can empower the local community to help achieve its 2025 sustainability goals.
The Vital Importance of Data Access
This is a substantial development in our approach to building smart cities for at least three key reasons:
- Data is the new oil: as the lifeblood of our digital economy, data plays a significant role in enabling new solutions that are smarter, more predictable, and better designed to fulfill their objectives. Improving access to more of it will facilitate more entrepreneurship and therefore economic growth.
- Democratizing innovation and local relevance: by enabling local communities to develop solutions, they will naturally seek to tackle local challenges. This approach does away with the cookie-cutter model of smart cities, and instead allows for distributed innovations to occur within the community that address the needs of those communities. This democratization of innovation not only speeds up the creation of solutions, it increases their relevance to the city, making cities more likely to be resilient, sustainable, and vibrant.
- Aligning financial interests: City Data Exchange allows businesses to monetize the data that they posses, providing a new revenue stream for companies and a financial incentive to share their data. All data must be anonymized and can be aggregated to eliminate privacy concerns, while still providing valuable data to the surrounding business, government, and organizational ecosystem. Imagine what a real estate company could do with data from retailers, or what transportation planners could do with anonymized movement data from telecoms.
This is a radically new approach to smart cities that leverages the 21st century trends of technological democratization, distributed capitalism and production, and ever-increasing sources of data from IoT and business operations. By enabling the local community to innovate faster and on a larger scale the community itself becomes more resilient in the face of the technological disruptions that are impacting our society today, and will impact us even more drastically in the future.
The City as Platform
How can cities leverage these technological advances to help their communities tackle the challenges of their time? Cities have long been essentially platforms for human life - they are the infrastructure platforms for resource distribution (water pipes and electric wires), transportation (roads and transit), and housing. By becoming a platform upon which businesses, communities, and organizations can develop, innovate, and provide value, cities are enabling the needs of the 21st century to be met.
Cities should also work closely with companies and organizations to spur innovation and encourage the creation of relevant solutions for their communities. Public private partnerships with not only companies and organizations, but ones with startup communities are essential. By facilitating data exchange in the digital world, and entrepreneurship in the real world, cities and organizations like City Digital in Chicago, Grand Central Tech in New York, TUMML in San Francisco, and Dallas Innovation Alliance in, you guessed it - Dallas, can provide entrepreneurs and innovators with the resources they need to be successful and thereby make their cities successful.
By enabling communities to share data, and by supporting new businesses and solutions, cities as a collection of stakeholders can achieve creative, relevant, and agile solutions that make cities as places and communities more vibrant, more sustainable, and more resilient. In the face of accelerating changes, this enables us as people to seize the opportunities that come with change and make the world a better place for us all.
Click here to learn more about City Data Exchange or Smart Cities.
What is your city or community doing to drive innovation for local sustainability, opportunity, and resilience?
Sustainable Intelligence Architect |Talent Market Ecosystems | Digital Growth | Socio-economic Digitlization | FinTech&Data Economy | Innovation Psychology | Heart Surgeon.
6 年"City is a complex organism " very well said which connect and coordinate every others within the city and surrounding city. This will not be only smart but dream city.
Director - State & Local Government - Avanade & AMBG, a JV of Microsoft and Accenture | I help state & local governments leverage the Microsoft ecosystem to do what matters for the people they support | Southeast US
8 年Well said, Justin & David. One thing I have noticed, however, is that even though cities sit on a treasure trove of data, making that data consumable and secure is still a challenge given the various technology silos and aging information technology infrastructures that most cities operate with. The innovative municipalities I work with are finally looking at IT as a strategic part of their infrastructure, and not just a cost center. I'd like to see more public sector business leaders start thinking that way.
Private account - #gerneperDuOderSie
8 年Thanks David, just to add besides financial long term funding I'd be a bit concerned about capabilities - technical in-house and with the partners/ suppliers. What do I mean? In the old days (let's say around 1980 - 2000) a Telecom equipment like the Siemens EWSD fixed line and / or mobile voice switch would have come with a long term hardware guarantee of at least contractual 10 years (but in reality much longer ...). But this was based on the assumption that Siemens as a company will be around for a long term to come, and that "we" cannot afford to upset our long term customers. But now it seems we are talking about products and companies which are often only around for a couple of years since start, are not yet out of the 2 to 5 year of childhood ... with a 30% chance of survival and a risk to be considered. A chance maybe that many more of the "big, old, slow" players will stick around and not been thrown out of the evolution completely or change? (sorry, but I cannot get the picture / analogy with the dinosaur to mammal out of my head looking at the current disruptions ... ). Karim
Private account - #gerneperDuOderSie
8 年Hi David, I'm of course in agreement that each city is unique (otherwise it would be pretty boring to visit or relocate there ... :) ), still are not (let's say as a ballpark figure) 70% of all "smart technologies, IoT etc" applications and requirements the same? Like any other utility? I'm only wondering, one out of two main concerns I have one the new solutions is long term maintenance and operational support: will it be possible and/ financially feasible to keep it running if the solutions are ? The second one is data security. Best RegardsKarim
Leading the Next Wave of Mobility Tech
8 年I would assert based on my nearly 30 years' experience worldwide that cities themselves MUST be THE catalysts for development. State / provincial, regional, national and global level capabilities can and should be brought to bear from a technology, investment and best practices standpoint, but each city in the world is unique in terms of its resources, challenges, demographics and politics and each must fund its own solution "on the ground" so to speak. By that I do not mean to suggest that the city governments should do it all. This approach that has been tried and failed in too many places both by the cities themselves and vendors waiting for procurements by those cities to step in and create a solution for them. Rather, the way forward must involve a partnership of all stakeholders - inclusive of but not limited to public sector authority, private sector resources, entrepreneur innovation and direct local citizen support.