Every City Wants to Be Innovative. How Can They Get There?
Word from down under: Cities need to get smarter about data, younger people need to lead the charge, and the U.S. is not exactly out front on this stuff.
When Nokia released a detailed analysis on civic tech in the southern hemisphere, titled A new world of cities and the future of Australia — which gives a thorough accounting of the emerging smart city landscape there — we talked to Warren Lemmens, Nokia’s CTO Oceania, about the report’s findings and its implications for U.S. cities struggling to get a handle on the smart city landscape.
You write that cities do not have the capacity for incremental urbanization. In what sense?
Urbanization is largely about peoples’ densification of cities and finding the balance between sustaining standards of living, preserving the environment and maintaining jobs through economic development. Cities in Australia generally have a focus toward their rate payers [local tax constituents], and they have limited revenue sources, measured largely by the cost efficiency of the municipality.
Rate payers generally don’t accept investment in services beyond the scope of their municipal services. So municipalities are generally resource constrained, both for skills and financing, to adapt to disruptive changes. The support for change usually comes from heroics of leading individuals, rather than systemic programs from shared planning objectives.
You argue that small incremental technology programs aren’t the answer. Why not? What’s a better way?
In our view, one of the most important aspects of a smarter city is its maturity and capability with regard to data sharing and data management across all sectors of government via a common platform.
A city can easily fund any number of projects to make garbage collection and water drainage more efficient. A city can invest in smart lighting, smart parking and video surveillance — but each of the projects results in a specific improvement within the traditional silos of city operations.
We strongly believe that the real “smarts” happen when all these projects collecting all these data sets start to come together ,and innovation with the citizens and businesses at the center takes place. The city typically struggles to fund and even understand the need for such a central data administration, so we are encouraging governments to see cities as critical productivity engines to justify this more strategic investment.
You advocate a “collaborative ecosystem” for cities — meaning what?
We have some positive momentum with start-ups and innovation in Australia, but our start-ups do have a culture of protecting their ideas — their intellectual property — to such an extent that they sometimes do not often benefit from the wider innovation community. We are trying to improve this collaboration.
From where we sit, we think that the U.S. and Israel and even the U.K. have a more collaborative culture than Australia does, and we want to do something about it. Many times a great idea is lost because the start-up is trying to build an entire ecosystem to accommodate their product when they could leverage existing elements and just focus on their product idea.
