Posts Tagged ‘Digital Economy’

Istanbul,13-14 September 2012

By Pantelis Koutroumpis

The first of its kind World Intelligent Cities Summit took place in Istanbul on the 13-14 September. The agenda included prominent figures from the Turkish government and local authorities together with international experts presenting best practices for the development of connected and sustainable cities. While primarily a business and policy summit it was a rather interesting meeting in terms of the common direction towards a more sustainable future where ICT plays a critical role.

Idris Gulluce, Deputy & Chair Committee on Public Works, Reconstruction, Transportation and Tourism of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) talked extensively about the importance of local culture and social understanding for the success of smart policies in cities. He underlined the increasing impact of behavioral sciences in designing, implementing and benchmarking policies and took some distance from ‘all-purpose’ EU guidelines and regulations that often oversee social cohesion and wellbeing in favor of preset targets. Gulluce outlined the list of major transport projects planned or underway in Istanbul like the Marmaray rail tunnel under the Istanbul Strait, the Istanbul Strait Road Channel Crossing, the Gebze-Orhangazi-Izmir Highway and the North Marmara Highway including the third Bosphorous Bridge in the city. In response to the decision to go on with these projects, Gulluce was criticized by the press in the room for a lack of planning and communication in the design and launch phases. From the lively discussions it became evident that Istanbul has changed dramatically during the last fifteen years. As he noted, Hurriyet – a newspaper with national circulation – offered coupons for gas masks back in 1994 to address the problem of air quality in the city. Today the most significant problems come from excessive traffic primarily due to the size of the city (~13m residents) and a historic lack of urban building plans. Besides the economic performance of the area continues to lure more young people to the city from the other regions of the country further affecting the local traffic.

Egemen Bagis, Minister of EU Affairs, went on to explain the increasing impact of cities’ social capital in the development of sustainable-living strategies. Transport, energy, water management, manufacturing and financial services all need to change their practices to address the evolving techno-economic ecosystem. He also highlighted the major improvements in Istanbul describing his experiences when access to drinking water was a major issue for the citizens and ‘hair dressers used soda water to work with’. Moving beyond the darker past he mentioned that people are now already beyond the hostilities of the past and that ‘asking for more tulips’ to decorate green areas is evidence for this improvement. In terms of actions by the government Bagis said that 16m tablets have been distributed to students and identified this policy as a critical broadband demand stimulation measure. The gradual shift from military expenditures towards education is another clear sign of the set of policies that Bagis continues to support.

Pierro Fassino, Mayor of Torino, discussed the transformation of a former industrial city into a modern sustainable landscape. His policies include a successful cycle hire scheme and a plan to reduce carbon emissions by 40% by 2020, in line with the 20-20-20 EU agenda. As explained policy-makers have to find the right mix of tools to ‘marry’ digital applications with social cohesion. Direct communications to the officials through social media or simple apps are a global trend that redefines active participation and democratic representation. His policies include a system of systems approach in managing the city linking all information feeds from energy, water, transport, telecommunications and manufacturing to a central location. Fassino described himself as a proponent of the digitization of public data as the only way to efficiently manage modern metropolises.

Hakki Tok, Chief Information Officer of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, pointed to the progress of the city in the digitization domain and announced that a domain name TSD extension has been granted to Istanbul; from 2013 local servers will have the option to be host under the .ist extension, slightly departing from the country’s .tr TSD. Along with mayors and municipal authorities he showed iPhone and Android apps already in operation that notify the IT centers of local municipalities for urgent or everyday citizens’ needs.

Other presentations included pilots for real life Living labs in cities (Hungary, Switzerland and Turkey), water and wastewater applications as financially viable solutions with significant reuse of resources, smart grid applications and local generation of electricity, applications for buildings and retrofits for households to meet the new model of ‘Plus Homes’ by the Fraunhofer Institute and many more.

In a nutshell, this summit showed that Istanbul is turning into a city-model for Turkey and the world both in terms of its size and the digital applications coupled with policy initiatives already in progress. It is also a great place with nice views to Bosphorous early in the morning and exquisite dietary combinations in Taksim Square a little bit later.

Sean Mahdi’s speech identified fundamental c hanges of the banking industry in the past decades. Building revenue heavily on financial leverage is no longer suitable due to increased regulatory intervention and industrial competition. A new business model is required to fully utilise digital technology to seize the opportunities among the customers, especially for those who have broadly interacted with the Internet.

In order to have a better understanding of this challe nge, research has been conducted by PwC with almost 3000 banking customers across the major markets. It demonstrates that the majority of customers prefer new financial services introduced by their primacy banks (see Figure 1). Due to the deteriorated public trust towards banks, this high level of consumer inertia will not be sustainable because of a concerted effort from regulators around the world to make the process of switching banks easier.

Figure 1

On the customer side, there are five key elements of changing customer behaviour:

1. Customers expect to receive more value from their banks
2. Customers trust their peers over the words of “financial experts”
3. Customers are well-informed about alternative financial products and services because of more accessible financial information and advice
4. Customers are equipped with a stronger bargaining power due to transparent financial offerings
5. Customers’ voices are amplified by the pervasive utilisation of social media (bad experiences spread rapidly and often cause irreparable damage to related brands)

In addition to this, the growth of mobile technology has implied a significant transformation of the traditional interaction model with those financial customers who require more location-based offers, timely and interactive content and more intuitive user interfaces. In particular, a better digital service is  of considerable importance for those customers who have a high rate of mobile usage, now at the point of choosing their primacy banking providers.

Sean Mahdi believes that implementing digital technology in banking will enhance customer engagement through much richer and broader financial offerings. This will initiate new business models, create new value propositions, redefine customer experiences and enable new potential among stakeholders. As a result of this, digital offerings can provide banks with extra revenue streams. Mr Mahdi’s team also tested the willingness of customers to pay for additional digital capabilities such as digital wallet, loyalty cards, social media notification, expenditure analysis, third-party offers and virtual vault storage (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

The result reveals a very interesting fact that customers are willing to pay the perceived value of digital services, while banks currently are struggling to sustain their revenue and marginal growth. In the UK, 65% of respondents said they want to pay just over £4 monthly for converting accumulated points into cash and storage of loyalty cards information. This would contribute additional revenue of approximately £50 per customer annually.

On the other hand, there is an increasing threat from new entrants, such as mobile operators, internet companies and small-and-medium size financial service providers. Mr Mahdi pointed out that although the new entrants can interrupt the patterns and dynamics in banking industry, it is unlikely that they could replace banks as the primary providers of financial services.

According to Mr. Mahdi, the possible solutions for banks to address these issues could be developing a new strategy and vision by positioning customers at its heart, building a strategic partnership between a bank and an innovator in order to acquire and retain new customer, avoiding being displaced by obtaining first-mover advantage, or becoming a high-quality, fast follower. The winner will be those who can recognise the changes in the market and conduct a clear digital strategy for securing primary customer relationship.

Reference:

The New Digital Tipping Point Pricewaterhouse Coopers (16 Jan. 2012)

Ovum-DCE Smart Cities Europe 2012

The Lancaster, London 19-20 June 2012

You can find the Chirpstory for the event here.

In many ways the event revealed the broader problems with discussions around smart cities. There is the aspirational vision – cleaner, less-congested, less polluted and more prosperous cities – contrasted with the complex reality of current “smart” ICT projects, often mired in difficulties around business models, administrative jurisdiction, privacy and security issues and any number of other complex multi-stakeholder problems that crop-up when you try and integrate the physical and digital worlds; problems which go far beyond the scope of a simple technological fix.

The day started with an intoduction by Larry Hirst of the Digital City Exchange and Imperial College and Neelie Kroes of the European Commission, and a laying-out-of-issues by David Gann, the principle investigator of the Digital City Exchange.  The vision of the Digital City Exchange is to create the equivalent of a telephone exchange for a city’s data. This platform will then be accessed by citizens, businesses and city administrators to assist decision making, create products and services and inform city management. The key point about this exchange is that it seeks to be an exchange for all types of sectoral data: energy, transport, health, waste, environmental and any other areas you can think of to place a sensor. This goes far beyond the sectoral approach we see in many projects.

The imperative for such projects was underlined by Manel Sanromá, CIO of the City of Barcelona who pointed out that the human race is becoming steadily more urban, a process that has been going on for millennia. A result of this fact is that it is the quality of life that is available in the cities that is going to determine how we live in the future, because although you “can’t guarantee that France, the United Kingdom and the United States will be around in a thousand years, you can be virtually certain that Paris, London and New York will be”.

As such, cities themselves, through offices such mayors and other municipal offices that currently seem to be  undergoing a renaissance, are going to be the source of the impetus for moving to a smarter urban future.

Interesting themes that emerged from subequent sessions included:

The human element: the unpredictability of human nature and the risk of making any broad predictions about how the “human agent” will react when embedded in a smart city. A point raised in both the Transport session by panellists Sue Flack, Anders Roth and Jeremy Green, and by Nilay Shah in his “View from the Top” session as he tried to imagine what a smart city would look like using the tools of process engineering.

What is a smart city?: This is likely to differ from city to city, but what are the essential elements and what is the essential infrastructure needed before you can even think about calling yourself one?

Governance: we may use phrases such as “managing the smart city”, but more often the level of decision making is unclear, a hierarchy and decentralisation are often suggested but we still don’t know who to go to for a particular kind of decision.

Who will pay?: Something of an old warhorse in debates about almost any topic, but one that is particularly uncertain when business models are as contested as they are in the digital environment. A point made strongly by Allan Mayo of the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills who said the assumption that it was all going to be paid for by advertising was naïve.

The smart cities agenda suffers from a certain amount of tension between a bottom-up versus top-down approach. The former is responsive, but limited in scope by barriers between sectors and the latter is slow to develop and ill-defined, but necessary if the full potential of the agenda is to be realised. Hopefully the Digital City Exchange will go some way to filling this lacunae.

Tuesday 22 May 2012, Crayon London

By Koen van Dam

After previously attending the Internet of Things Meetup Meetup #6, it was only a matter of time before DCE would return to another edition of this informal get-together of a community focused on machine to machine communication, open data and trying to change the world. For IoT Meetup #8 the talks had a smart city/smart home/energy focus.

Before the three speakers gave their short presentation sparking off some interesting debates, Owen Davies explained the recent rebranding of Pachube to Cosm. In addition to providing a fresh new design and a name which is easier to pronounce (no more feeling smug hearing other people struggle with this after finally getting it right yourself), the new website wants to offer users more than just a place to store their data to be processed elsewhere. New graphs, maps and data visualisation are part of this. Furthermore, Cosm wants to be a stronger community-based platform, making it easier to see what others are doing and how they use their data and to facilitate discussions.

Claire Rowland, service design manager at AlertMe, a company specialising in home energy and security monitors, gave an inspiring view of how the user experience with smart home devices should look like. She stated that “a home is not a computer”, not the least because homes can be messy and things are not black or white as would be the view of a computer. A clear example of this would be a teenager sulking in the bedroom: present in the house (so don’t set the burglar alarm) but not really actively interacting with the rest of the family at that point either (so don’t go in there and ask if the temperature is right). Furthermore, the house is the last place you want to feel out of control and computers sometimes do make us feel like we’re not fully in charge (especially when they are not working as they are supposed to). As a result, Claire stated that any technology incorporated in the home should feel “homely”. An alarm system using terms like “armed” or “disarmed”, for example, make it sound as if there is a war going on instead of providing you with peace of mind before going to bed. Finally, what other companies building home energy management systems or a burglar alarms do wrong, is that they create devices that require more attention, not less. It will be interesting to see how AlertMe is going to address these challenges, especially when we see a world in which more choices may have to be made by the consumer (e.g. which energy supplier to use, when to run the washing machine so it’s the cheapest, at what time to charge an electric vehicle so the carbon emissions are the lowest, etc). If devices don’t bug us for the ordinary tasks it could make life simpler, but on the other hand we would give up some autonomy as well… and we’d have to trust the algorithms to make the right choices.

Paul Tanner shared his search for a low-power home hub. Such a device would sit in between the sensors and actuators in your home and the (cloud-based) services that can do something useful with the data and allow you to control it. Since a hub would always be turned on, low energy use is a key requirement. Of course the hub needs to speak different languages and protocols to talk to all possible devices, and can be programmed in a flexible and efficient way (for example using Node.js). Unfortunately, Paul hasn’t yet found the ideal device… but surely he’ll keep on looking and playing around with what is currently available on the market.

Tracy Hopkins of machine to machine technology and network provider Neul explained why she thinks white space – the license-free UHF broadcasting frequencies that became available after the switch to digital television – is key for enabling the internet of things. Current wireless networks are not ready for the large volume of data that will be transmitted by sensors and other devices and to solve this Neul promotes a new open communication standard called Weightless. This would offer a low cost way to transmit data since, after an initial investment in a base station, people could operate their own networks. Tracy expects that smart cities will drive the internet of things, and they have already done some trials in this domain (e.g. refuse collection based on bins that tell the council they are full).

So, we need good user experience for home (energy) management, a low-power hub to tie it all together within the house, and a wireless network to turn this into a smart city. It’s a good thing all these issues are being addressed with the same enthusiasm!

Wednesday 28 March 2012, Crayon London

By Koen van Dam and Claire Thorne

The “Internet of Things”, the vision of a world where physical objects are connected and part of a world-wide information network, has been a buzzword for more than a decade now. With the widespread use of smart phones, the availability of cheap sensors and microcontrollers and the rise of data sharing platforms such as Pachube (pronounced as “patch bay”), groups of enthusiastic people are working on making this idea come true and developing business plans taking advantage of the recent momentum.

In cities around the world people are gathering at monthly “IoT Tech Meetups”: informal, evening discussion groups with speakers presenting their work/ideas/businesses. And there’s free beer. The IoT Tech Meetups are founded by Ed Borden (Pachube, Chief Business Development Officer) and Alex Deschamps-Sonsino (who also was a panellist at one of Digital Economy Lab’s Guardian Tech City debates). The meetings are held in different – interactive and interesting – venues each time, courtesy of space sponsors. We joined the 6th meetup in London at Crayon in Oxford Circus.

Tech Meetup attendees seem to range from the techy enthusiast who tinkers with sensors in their spare time, to the d-i-y app developer and the business-savvy start-up sponsor. Everyone there was genuinely passionate about ‘big data’ and ‘building things’.

The evening started with a brief introduction of the Air Quality Egg – a new project to set up a community-based sensor network for local air quality. They are currently raising money online to implement it via kickstarter. In the first of three talks the “mbed-based gateway” (slides) was presented, which kindled a discussion on what we need first: applications and sensors, or gateways which collects data from (wireless) sensors and allows for them to be connected to the Internet. Without gateways sensors are not part of the IoT, but without sensors and attractive applications people will not purchase a gateway…

The second talk addressed open telematics and introduced the E:drive app (slides and Beta registration) taking advantage of data which is collected under the bonnet of all modern cars. This could be used for personal journey data collection and in visualisation apps, showing fuel economy management with a social, competitive personal ‘rating’. Potential applications include total energy use/management (car and household), smart roads, car sharing schemes, real-time traffic flow monitoring, and police investigations into car crime.

The last talk of the evening was about Data Citizen Driven City and the work of MediaLab in Madrid. For example, some of their six research projects focus on data visualisation (see their façade project) and engaging citizens in data capture (see their City Sense competition entry). They have a strong focus on documenting every step and making this publicly available and acting as a mediation hub bringing people with the same interests together. Also, they have ongoing open calls for collaboration.

Digital City Exchange touches on several aspects of the Internet of Things, including challenges and opportunities of dealing with dynamic and distributed sensors, access to data and making it available to others, and finally the development of applications and services on top of such data.

We’re certainly keen to participare in future sessions. Note that the IoT Meetups are usually booked up well in advance – before all speakers or even the venue have been confirmed! Another clear sign that this is not just a series of presentations but a community of people who share a common vision and want to make things happen.

Watch this space…

Tuesday 6th March, Imperial College Business School

By Antoine Vernet

Anthony Finkelstein, dean of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at UCL and a professor of Computer Science was at Imperial College Business School on March 6, to give a talk entitled “Engineering Challenges of the Digital Economy”. His talk addressed discrepancies between technical issues of software development and the necessity to address consumer demand and to build sustainable business models for software companies.

The discipline of software engineering needs to rise to the challenges presented by the digital economy. In his talk, Anthony Finkelstein addressed 10 challenges facing software engineering in the digital economy. These can be roughly separated in two groups: first, those that have to do with software architecture, software design and software requirements. Second, those, perhaps harder to overcome, that concern software development tools, modelling and middleware.

The risk is that the influence of software engineering as a discipline on practice will decrease. If software engineering wants to train the next generation of software engineers, it needs to address those challenges.

1. The question of the evolution of architecture needs to be explicitly stated. Software architecture has been addressed predominantly in an ad-hoc way. The relation between requirements and architecture needs to be clarified and studied more formally.
2. The discipline has to move to an evidence-based practice and rely less on anecdotal and quasi evidence-based practice. It needs to encourage reproducibility, and reorganize the curricula to reflect an evidence based approach.
3. Scalability. Problems of scalability need to be addressed and studied in depth, not just approached on an ad hoc and in a learning-by-doing fashion.
4. Reconcile web standards and software engineering standards: w3c and OMG. This is a major challenge and work on the technical side as well as negotiation to set new standards are necessary.
5. Resources estimation. Probably the main challenge mentioned in Anthony’s talk: there is very little we know about estimation of development cost and time. Getting a better understanding of cost and time estimation for system development implies studying programmer productivity in depth, along with rethinking of curricula in software engineering, making business models an important object in software engineering.
6. Software as a service: the challenge is in maintaining quality of service and allowing for interoperability. Clients also need to have a clear idea on how to walk away if they want to change provider. Data hosting, security and ownership are critical issues here.
7. Think about apps as channels. More and more, apps needs to be thought of and conceived as channels capable of evolving and changing what they deliver. Another step is to use apps as building blocks for user-side customization of apps through personal combinations.
8. Adaptive system. We need to develop ways of building systems that account for themselves.
9. Reconcile business and software engineering.
10. Inter-product and inter-supplier dependencies are not properly addressed: the field has to move away from a “garage” approach to development to supply chain or software ecosystem thinking.

Finally, Anthony Finkelstein ended his talk by stating that, in his opinion, the biggest challenge was to reach a point where business model and software would be co-designed simultaneously.

An MP3 of the talk may be found here, and the slides from the talk may be accessed here.

Wednesday 8th March, Imperial College Business School

By Richard Foulsham

Lem Lasher, as Group President of Global Business Solutions and Chief Innovation Officer of CSC is in a unique position to assess the influences upon and potential future direction of the digital economy, having both the analytical capabilities of a leading edge consultancy and a business that’s involved in the day to deployment of IT around the world within his remit.

During this lecture he shared with us some of the “points of view” that his organisation has developed around “next practice”, likely developments that clever players in the IT market can use to gain an advantage, and identified some of the areas that he thinks will grow and become important as the digital revolution gets underway.

This revolution in technology has been brought about by the growth of the internet. Mr Lasher predicts that we are barely into the foothills of this revolution with another 20 years of change ahead of us. This development will consist of  a relatively predictable advance in the technology, but Mr Lasher sees the real source of disruption being the development in business models that will take place in this new, connected environment.

The drivers of the current market as Mr Lasher sees it are globalisation and everything that overworked word entails – increased competition, the rise of China and India – but more interestingly he also identified a consistently difficult regulatory environment as being something that is affecting companies ability to differentiate their products. One interesting thing to ponder is whether the technological revolution and the  process of globalisation are really parallel or dynamically entwined. It is hard to imagine the economic growth of India without the business space that has been opened up by technology. Equally, the globalised markets that are the bain of many democratic politicians’ existence have grown up around the opportunities offered by a digital market place.

Organisations have responded to these challenges by becoming more complex and adopting a greater variety of forms than has been the case previously. Mr Lasher identifies a process that could be described as a “democratisation of technology” which has affected the way technology advances:  technologies are available at low enough cost and can be operated by non-experts – the iPad and the child are given as an example and anyone whose watched toddlers playing Angry Birds will find it hard to disagree – meaning that public bodies and private corporations cannot dictate to the market, but rather they have to respond to the market in a way that keeps revenue intact and minimises risks from regulation.

These effects are not consistent across sectors, and Mr Lasher then went on to describe a matrix for predicting the degree of business model disruption likely to result from these changes in a particular industry. He identifies two major predicting factors: whether the organisation deals in physical product or data, and the degree of regulation in the industry. This model has a remarkable predictive power which two examples will suffice to illustrate. The music industry – no physical product and little regulation (or at least little ability to enforce what regulation exists) – has gone through an exceptionally torrid time recently, whilst banking, dealing largely in data, but doing so  in a highly regulated environment, has itself suffered little in the way of disruption whilst, ironically, wreaking havoc on the rest of the economy.

Mr Lasher ended his presentation by describing a number of specific areas that he sees as likely to become increasingly important in the future. Some are predictable, others more of a surprise.  There was also a list of things that may prove to be the downside of the bright, shiny digital future that glistens enticingly at us from the cover of a thousand company brochures.  Whatever happens, it’s not going to be boring.

You can access a recording of Mr Lashers presentation here.

Technology Visionaries RAEng lecture series

Wednesday 22 February 2012, the Royal Society, London

By Claire Thorne and Koen van Dam

Unsure of how many notable FREng’s to expect in the audience, we arrived at the Royal Society (the current base for the RAEng during their refurbishment). With twenty-four FREng’s on the delegate list, including one on stage, we weren’t disappointed (but possibly just a little underdressed!).

The lecture by Prof Nigel Shadbolt FREng (Prof of Artificial Intelligence, University of Southampton) was part of the RAEng’s Technology Visionaries series and promised a whistle-stop tour through the vast topic that is Open Data.

Presenting in his current Government role as co-director of the Open Data Institute (ODI) [pdf] (along with WWW inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee) Nigel set the scene by highlighting the historical significance of data (c.f. the Copernican revolution and the realisation that cholera is spread by contaminated water). He went on to sail through current innovation and the big issues surrounding: open data, smart cities, linked open data (and his 5-star rating for the release and structuring of data, open standards, unique resource identifiers and linking data) the latest UK Government developments, and data visualisation.

Open Data and the power of the crowd

Nigel illustrated the power of open data using the standard examples of:
•    the Government’s open data initiative and the data.gov.uk website;
•    the London DataStore (“open the data and the apps will follow”);
•    the variety of ways Ordnance Survey’s OpenData is already being utilised;
•    the exercise of producing a Postcode Paper, with content generated using illegally reproduced, but so-called ‘open’ Government data (preceding the data.gov.uk website).

One of his more inspiring examples of using open data for real-world societal and often unexpected impact was the mapping of earthquake-hit Port-au-Prince. Within days of the earthquake, the first detailed map of the city was produced for Open Street Map, via the power of the crowd. Open data does not just work one way, for people to consume; it also allows members of the general public to contribute and to improve data sets.

Open Data and smart cities

There was some mention of research on smart cities and, in particular, reference to UCL’s research in this area, the CASA group headed up by Prof Michael Batty. Nigel suggested that cities were one of the clearest examples of places where open data is collected and used.

The evolution of the humble mash-up through to complex data visualisation was demonstrated by examples of a UK crime heat map as well as combining data-sets on cycle hire and pollution. If you’re looking for a striking example of how this can impact our lives, check out the local crime and policing website, for England and Wales. Thanks to the ‘opening up’ of data on this platform (and therefore the plethora of opportunities for useful applications to be built on top of the data which followed) police officers now have a better view of crime, than they had of the same data set while it was closed.

For anyone interested in open data and cities, that the UK’s first Open-Data Cities Conference will be taking place in Brighton on 20 April 2012.

The web of linked open data

Nigel discussed the concept of the semantic web, thought to be the next step forwards from the WWW in which documents (and data) are linked – but now in a way that is ‘computer-understandable’. The more recent view of this concept is to consider instead a web of data. In principle it’s the same idea as the semantic web, but the web of data better captures the concept of interlinked sets of data. The DBpedia project is a clear example of how data from the better-known ‘-edia’, Wikipedia, can be structured, categorised and interlinked. Nigel showed us a graph of the network effect of such structured data, where more and more resources can be linked, greatly improving the power of the whole.

Note that the lecture’s URI is to be confirmed…

Citizen Science

The field of citizen science – the seemingly limitless opportunities it offers the public to engage with technology and repurpose data, and for creative design and education – is an area Nigel referred to during the Q&A as particularly exciting. Although he had little time to go into this in detail, he did flash up a slide featuring the Galaxy Zoo iPhone App (based on the success of Galaxy Zoo) during the lecture… co-developed by a former colleague from Imperial College London’s Astro group, Dr Joe Zuntz!

The latest UK Government developments

Nigel raised new infrastructure requirements and issues of security and privacy amongst his concerns, or indeed areas to focus on, for the future (c.f. a book Nigel co-authored The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy as We Know It).

Following on from issues of security and privacy, the BIS ‘midata’ project is working with retailers, telecomms and energy companies to explore issues surrounding the use and control of individual’s personal data. The midata aim is to return the economic value of the individual’s data back to the consumers. (Note the synergies with Digital City Exchange’s research and our focus on new business opportunities, jobs and growth).

Who’s the ‘winner’ of open data?

It was unfortunate that the evening’s ‘in conversation with’ part focused more on the future challenge for the UK education system in equipping employees with the necessary technology/logical-thinking skills, and less on Nigel’s ‘vision’ of the future of data, its use(s) and its potential impacts.

Nigel was however given the chance to elaborate on the impact of his vision when he was asked ‘who would be the winner of open data?’. He argued that the ‘winner’ is not only the governments who receive direct input from citizens and the “free” applications built on top of government data sets. He said the ‘winner’ is not only the businesses who can make better-informed decisions. He said the ‘winner’ is not only the people who get access to information which wasn’t previously available to them (and are therefore demanding/implementing greater transparency). Nigel said that all parties involved would benefit.

Of course the issue of privacy was addressed as it is hard to avoid in this context, but his enthusiasm and belief that this is the right path are both infectious and convincing. Unfortunately Nigel could not yet answer the question how all of this would affect research, but that is a challenge for us digital economy researchers to take home.

Watch Nigel’s lecture online: In the spirit of all things open, view the talk online.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for forthcoming lectures in the Technology Visionaries series – see you there!

29th November – 2nd December 2011, Barcelona, Spain

by Francesca Bria

The first Smart City Expo hosted more than 50 cities around the world, 118 businesses, over 6000 participants and 2000 panellists. The Expo announced the creation of a global Network of Smart Cities coordinated by the City of Barcelona, encompassing cities and businesses around the world. The objective is to promote policy actions and activities in this new field, by creating global common standards and criteria for the effective implementation of smart cities at a global level. The Expo was a meeting point for professionals active in the field of digital future cities, including heads of public administrations, practitioners and academics. Barcelona has made extensive investments and policy commitments with the intention of becoming one of Europe’s leading smart cities, promoting big innovation policy initiatives such as launching Barcelona Smart City Campus next to the 22@ district, an urban hub for businesses, innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. The conference organisers invited speakers of the highest rank such as Carlo Ratti, Director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab, Anthony Townsend Research Director of the Institute for the Future, Jeremy Rifkin founder of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Abha Joshi-Ghani Manager of Urban Development of the World Bank, Neil Gershenfeld, Director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, Adam Greenfield, founder and managing director of Urbanscale.

Developing the smart and sustainable cities of the future is not an easy undertaking at a time of urgent societal challenges such as financial crises, environmental disasters, climate change, ageing populations and increasing unemployment. All these issues will require innovative solutions that challenge traditional ways of doing things. Organisations are required to move from closed innovation models to open and collaborative innovation models that can unleash the power of social production and collective intelligence.

It’s not just about the technology

One of the most challenging issues addressed during the different panels at the Expo was  that smart cities are clearly not only about ‘plumbing’ or a ‘technological fix’. On the contrary smart cities need to solve societal challenges through future technologies following a holistic approach that integrates technological innovation with urban planning, sociology and anthropology. For instance ‘defining innovative social meaning of technologies and investigating how urban technologies will impact public services and people’s lives’ are, according to Jonathan Wareham Vice-Dean of Research at Esade Business School, amongst the most exciting research questions. Integrating non technological elements, such as social relationships, institutions and social norms is going to be challenging, but that’s where the big impact will lie, leading to the discovery of new services that will transform people’s lives.

Innovation in smart cities

These issues focussed on civic innovation were further discussed during a panel moderated by Esteve Alimirall titled ‘Open innovation for developing smart cities’. I was one of the panellists together with Jake Barton and Peter Corbett, both members of Code for America, one of the most interesting projects worldwide on open innovation in the public sector. In the panel I emphasised the importance of creating collective action and awareness, moving beyond the things that IT is already good at doing (such as data aggregation, sensing, tracking) to more complex aspects of social and collective intelligence. As Jeremy Rifkin reminded us in one stimulating debate during the Expo, what is happening with the smart cities is a new revolution in which new distributed energy models will shift towards a system similar to an ‘internet of global energy’, with a multitude of nodes with the capability to produce and distribute energy. This revolution according to Rifkin will provide an opportunity to create thousands of businesses and millions of jobs. From a more critical perspective Adam Greenfield, the author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing stressed the need for open civic innovation to emerge. According to Greenfield, there is no such a thing as a smart city, the city should empower people that can become smarter and collectively shape and transform the urban environment.

Cities in the driving seat

The public sector, and specifically cities, have an important role to play as the orchestrators of urban innovation platforms. Urbanization is occurring at a rapid rate; in 2050 75% of the population will live in cities. Cities can then set the rules of the game, building smart cities as open cities that facilitate innovation ecosystems to emerge, creating new entrepreneurial opportunities and jobs for future generations. This is why the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development is supporting 13 pilots in European cities that are developing smart applications in areas ranging from transport, education, health and environment.

Smart City Expo & World Congress will host again the second edition next November 2012.

Thursday 24th – Friday 25th November 2011, Utrecht, the Netherlands

By Koen van Dam

The University of Utrecht organised and hosted a LERU Research Seminar and invited researchers of members of LERU, the League of European Research Universities, to discuss a proposal of a Joint Programme Initiative (JPI) on dimensions for new research under the Urban Europe research programme. Participants came from the Netherlands (Utrecht, Amsterdam and Leiden) as well as France, Germany and Belgium (Paris Sud, Munich and Leuven). The United Kingdom was represented by Professor Phil Allmendinger from Cambridge and Dr Koen van Dam from Imperial College London. The delegates came from a wide range of academic backgrounds, including computer science, geography, spatial planning, regional economics, cultural anthropology as well as childcare and education.

Professor Peter Nijkamp (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, chairman of the scientific advisory board of JPI Urban Europe and former president of the Netherlands Research Council NWO) presented the “Urban Europe strategic research framework” which has been prepared over the previous months with input from stakeholders and researchers in a number of meetings and workshops held in 2010 and 2011. Peter Nijkamp and Karima Kourtit co-wrote the document describing the proposed framework.

The Joint Programme Initiative is a concept of the European Union to involve individual countries (governments, funding agencies and universities) wanting to work together in research. It is a bottom-up approach allowing countries who want to work closer together on common topics to organise themselves and speak with a united voice. As such it provides a framework to coordinate national research programmes and helps simplify projects which cross borders. Currently urban issues are not yet part of any existing European frameworks, so in 2010 the JPI Urban Europe was started to coordinate research and make better use of European funding for studies improve cities in Europe. See the JPI Urban Europe website for more information.

The framework is based around four “urban images” namely Entrepreneurial City 2050 (Transforming urban areas in Europe as hubs of innovation and creativity), Connected City 2050 (Realising eco-friendly and intelligent intra- and inter-urban transport and logistic systems), Pioneer City 2050 (Ensuring social cohesion, integration) and Liveable City 2050 (Reducing the ecological footprint and enhancing climate neutrality), each highlighting the strategic dimensions of the initiative. From these three research issues have been identified: Urban Megatrends, Urban Networks and Connectivity and finally Socio-ecological Sustainability of City Systems. For each of these issues a number of research themes and illustrative research questions have been defined, providing a clear overview of the broad scope of the JPI. During the seminar three additional “experimental” projects were introduced. The first relates to monitoring and information systems and the drivers of long term urban developments, the second to behaviour, technology and planning in urban patterns, and the third to resilience, efficiency and social participation in cities as a response to new challenges.

From this strategic research framework the next step is to go towards a call for projects in a pilot phase. The seminar participants were asked to give feedback to the strategic research framework as well as to the proposed call. At the next Governing Board meeting in Oslo (14-15 December 2011) this work will continue and the supporting funding councils will meet in January. It is expected the call can be launched shortly afterwards with the first projects starting towards the end of 2012. The idea is that these initial projects, with an expected duration of two years, showcase the added value of European cooperation as well as the relevance of the theme to Europe. Eventually the aim is that the theme could become a part of the next EU funding programme Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, because governments, funding agencies and research institutes have shown commitment to this research direction.

During the seminar the participants had the chance to comment on the described research theme as well as the plans for the proposed call for projects. I was able to introduce the Digital City Exchange programme, the specific challenges and our aims, and stress the importance of the cross-departmental organisation and cooperation. Discussing the JPI Urban Europe research themes I questioned, among other things, the fact that energy was not explicitly mentioned as one of the challenges underlying the framework, even though this touches all aspects of living and working in cities. Regarding the proposed call, I asked if the plan was to encourage synergy between the projects funded, or if this is not a requirement. It was explained that individual projects will be funded based on their own merit. Given the common subject of study, it is of course hoped that projects will have closer links and that findings and results can be shared. Furthermore, I suggested it is important to make cross-disciplinary research a fundamental requirement to study cities – and not just “things that happen to be in cities” – to ensure the themes are really addressed and phenomena not studied in isolation, which received support from the other participants.

Finally, I asked if the initiative could perhaps also be used to map existing projects in Europe and encourage cooperation of people working projects which are already running or are based on other sources of funding. The answer was that this was indeed part of the plan and that an overview of projects studying cities and urban areas has been prepared and will be made available. Furthermore, organising workshops or facilitating the organisation between the institutes would be another possibility which could encourage interaction between researchers across institutes and borders. The aim is thus not only to launch a call and organise European funding, but to start build an Urban Europe community.