Smart People for Smart Cities

During recent trips to Medellin, Colombia and Merida, Mexico I was fortunate to experience the commitment to a society of open access and digital fluency - a sustained commitment by leaders in every sector to their people so they can thrive in an age rapidly evolving with each new innovation.  The trips highlighted similar needs and opportunities with initiatives in the United States and Canada. In many ways we are all focused on realizing digital dividends so critical for economic development. National, regional and local commitments are making a difference - and collaborations of institutions are essential to sustaining efforts. In Medellin and in the town of El Carmen private and public leaders in government, education, entrepreneurship and technology are partnering with the Marina Orth Foundation to build a generation prepared in English, robotics, technical support, and coding. Their ties go back to the 1960's. In Merida, Mexico the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, susta...

What is normal today will not be normal within a very short period of time. A world without human ingenuity would hardly be one we'd recognize - or in my case, want.  Today that ingenuity is largely driven by technology innovation.  I'd be curious to know how fast our digital reality shifts, since the initial Moore's Law has jumped out of the computer and into our everyday existence.  Driven in the last century by the Internet, the world's largest collection yet of shared information, our connected experience grew from 0.4% in 1995 to about 49% in 2016 .  Now driven by the Internet of Things, we're adding about 5.5 million connected devices a day with billions predicted by 2020 .  This creates entirely new possibilities for connecting us in cities and globally.       Nevertheless, humans as individuals, and certainly as groups, tend to change much more slowly than the pace set by technology.  In 2016 the World Bank published a repor...