A snippet of the future for leaders and cities

In early July, I was fortunate enough to be a part of the Future Leaders, Future Cities business delegation to Japan lead by the Hon. Steven Ciobo (former) Minister for Trade, Investment and Tourism. I was invited by Austrade as a young business leader in the Smart Cities space with my company ZEMCON and The Smart City Podcast with support from Arup.

The delegation itself was quite unique, over 50% of the group were women and all of us were under 40 (which is telling of the #smartcity times ahead). Although everyone was Smart City focused, we came from different professional backgrounds, from planning to virtual reality and from social enterprise to compliance, which made conversations insightful and very interesting!

The delegation was focused on trade and investment opportunities between Australian businesses and Japanese technology companies. We visited a number of large tech companies including NEC, Fijitsu, Hitachi and Softbank, learning about their latest advances in technology which all included advanced facial recognition. We also visited some Smart City developments in Tokyo such as Kashiwa-no-ha as well as the disaster and resilience centre in Roppongi Hills, which given the prevalence of earthquakes in Japan, was highly relevant.

One key take-away for me is that Japan is facing a number of challenges, arguably the largest and most pressing being the impacts of a declining and aging population. Their focus on Smart Cities is about combining their technological know-how with a human-centred approach in a concept called Society 5.0. 

Japan is concentrating on “the three Ps” people, productivity and participation to continue to build their economy sustainably. The important learnings for me, were that although Japan is quite advanced in some technology, Australia has a lot to offer to this global Smart City conversation and many high potential collaboration opportunities that are win-win definitely exist. 

Among many other things, Australia has a lot of experience we could share about what we have done, and continue to do, in the health and well-being of people, in diversifying our workplaces and in how we are embracing new forms of work for innovation. These may not seem so “Smart City” but actually they are at the heart of making our places more accessible, liveable and sustainable for all.

Hear more about the key themes from the Future Leaders, Future Cities delegation in Episode 50 of The Smart City Podcast.

https://thesmartcitypodcast.com/2018/07/27/scp-e50-bonus-key-themes-from-the-future-cities-future-leaders-delegation/