Education is the foundation of any country’s future. It provides a path to good jobs and higher earning power. It can also foster the cross-border, cross-cultural collaboration required to solve the most challenging problems of our time.

One hundred years after the U.S. education system first expanded and transformed to prepare children for a booming industrial economy, a new kind of economy based on services and knowledge-based systems is changing the education landscape again. If we want our children to achieve their potential — and realize the potential of a smarter planet — then school itself needs to get a lot smarter.

IBM has a long legacy in working to improve our school systems. In the mid-90s, then-CEO Lou Gerstner hosted the first of three National Education Summits as part of the company’s Reinventing Education program, which focused on public school reform. Two decades later, IBM is at the forefront of developing the deep analytics technologies that are poised to radically transform the way we approach education and the insight we have into each and every student.

Unfortunately schools and higher education systems today are straining under budget cuts, while the demand for students with specialized skills is on the rise. The problem is so serious that the U.S. Department of Education has allocated $5.3 billion for Race to the Top, a national competition to promote education reform strategies. One of its primary focus areas is building data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals how they can improve their practices. Put simply, the idea is to use data to get closer to students to help solve problems.

System-wide improvements in education require big-picture thinking. A holistic, accurate vision starts with a clear understanding of each student and school. By capturing and conveying data, such as attendance, grades and enrollment in activities, schools gain a real-time perspective into how a student or school is doing, where intervention is needed, and learn from best practices being implemented at other schools.

Inspired by this idea of using data to get closer to students and solve problems, IBM is launching a new education platform together with Desire2Learn, a company that is providing learning environments to some of the world’s largest public school systems, including The New York City Department of Education.

In the past, IBM has introduced analytics solutions for education that focus on sifting through large quantities of data and providing intelligence at a systems level across institutions, districts and states. These big picture insights are valuable and can tell us a lot about student achievement and areas for improvement. But with Desire2Learn’s student and teacher focused learning platform, which offers analytics on a personal level, we can help teachers and students glean insights that apply specifically to them.  These combined qualities make this solution truly comprehensive in a way that has not been available to schools in the past.

It is amazing what kinds of improvements you can make schools when you take this transformational approach. In Hamilton County, Tenn., which includes the city of Chattanooga, administrators reduced the dropout rate by 25% by figuring out which students were at risk of leaving school. A key indicator turned out to be students who were two or three years older than normal for their grades. When those students were flagged, schools gave them extra attention and kept more of them in school.

When you put smart tools in the hands of students and teachers, there are almost no limits to the types of data which can be captured and the ways in which it can be used. For example, a math teacher with a total view of a student’s academic records might realize that the reason a student is struggling with word problems is actually because of a problem in reading comprehension. In another instance, a gifted student who isn’t being challenged by their normal course work can access advanced lesson plans or network with a mentor at a university.

These are the kinds of insights we need if we are going to solve the very real problem of transforming our nation’s schools for the future. Our economy depends on an education system built to bring us the next generation of innovators, and I am excited to help lead IBM’s efforts to make this vision a reality.

Technorati Tags: Desire2Learn, IBM

Today, IBM announced the 33 cities that will participate this year in its Smarter Cities Challenge grant program. This marks the second year in a three-year, $50 million, 100-city initiative. IBM sends five- or six-person teams of experts in a range of disciplines to help cities formulate strategies for improving the quality of life for their citizens.

By now, IBM has amassed a wealth of knowledge about how to help cities get started on transformational projects. Last year, the company engaged with 25 cities around the world, including St. Louis in the United States, Glasgow in the United Kingdom, Chiang Mai in Thailand and Johannesburg in South Africa. The previous year, they ran test programs in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Katowice, Poland; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Chengdu, China; and elsewhere. The themes of the projects ranged from education, transportation and to public safety to energy and sustainable economic development. Here’s a post on the Citizen IBM blog from Stephen Mandel, the mayor of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, about the engagement there.

After each engagement, IBM’s Corporate Citizenship team identifies lessons learned. The exercise is partly aimed at improving the program itself, but the team also gleans insights that could help any leader in any city launch an initiative aimed at fundamentally transforming an aspect of how the city works. Here are some of the most critical lessons for leaders:

Be Bold–Even Audacious. If you don’t set a high bar and really challenge yourselves, the progress you make will be marginal at best.

The United Kingdom, for instance, has set a target of halving carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2025—with a progress report due in 2014. Glasgow, a Scottish industrial city, will require significant improvements in energy conservation to meet the overall goals. But, at the same time, the city has a high ratio of poor people who suffer from what city leaders call “fuel poverty.” Nearly 35% of Glasgow households can’t afford to heat their homes properly. The goal is to address both problems with the same initiative. For starters, the city is paying for a fuel subsidy program for poor people using the proceeds from clean energy projects.

Think Differently. Be willing to try new ways of doing things. Just being more efficient with conventional approaches, even those that worked well in the past, won’t work best now.

Antofagasta, Chile, is a thriving port city in the country’s arid mining region, but it lacks some of the quality-of-life amenities befitting a city of its size and importance. The city leaders decided to take an unusual tactic: Make the city greener, literally, by irrigating parks and open spaces. Yet the dry climate made that goal particularly challenging. The IBM team crafted a set of proposals designed to get the most out of the limited supply of water.

Pick a Target That’s a Shared Priority. To get something difficult done, it will have to be at or near the top of the priority lists of all of the participants. Everybody involved has to pull together or the group will be pulled apart.

The political leaders in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and Charlotte, the county seat, invited municipal leaders from throughout the county to come together and agree on a project they could take on together. The theme they settled on, integrated regional capital planning, may not seem sexy, but, in a state where local government power is dispersed, it’s a necessary step for getting big things done.

Partner with Businesses and Non-profits. It’s important for city governments to engage with other actors in society, including universities and other non-profits, business organizations and individual businesses. Also, the earlier you get all the stakeholders involved, the better.

In Philadelphia, the Digital On-Ramps Initiative is aimed at preparing residents to work and thrive in the 21^st century economy. The initiative is being planned and managed by a consortium of institutions, including city departments, Drexel University, and a handful of civic groups, including the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition, which is made up of representatives from government, business and neighborhood groups.

Encourage Citizen Involvement. Citizens can provide valuable insights into the most effective ways to improve the quality of life in their city. In this social networking era, it’s even more crucial to engage with citizens, and, thanks to all of the new technology tools that are available, it’s easier to do so.

Helsinki, Finland, faces social shifts resulting from an aging native population combined with immigration from Eastern European countries. It aims to open its data to the public, but needs to identify the most effective ways for communicating with a changing citizenry. The IBM team met with a group of citizens gathered at a local university and solicited ideas for open-data applications that would appeal to the people of Helsinki.

Understand the Value of Data. Evidence-based decision making really works. You can do things smarter and better, also more efficiently and more quickly.

In Syracuse, New York, a former industrial center with a sizable housing vacancy problem, city leaders realized that gathering and analyzing data is crucial to identifying which troubled neighborhoods have the highest potential for turnarounds. That way they could focus resources on them. A close look at the data showed—perhaps counter-intuitively—that neighborhoods with a high rate of calls to the police about drug use and loud disturbances have a high potential for being saved. It means the residents care enough to complain.

Invest for the Future. Sure, money is tight, but cities must be prepared to invest up front for long term benefits.

Chengdu, China, has laid out a five-year plan for investing in cloud computing resources to support its many Intelligent Chengdu initiatives. Chicago, Illinois, plans to invest in creating five new science and technology-focused schools, which combine high school and community college, in partnerships with IBM and four other corporations. The city’s leaders understand that they have to invest in programs that will take years to deliver results. They think it’s vital to creating the skilled workforce that’s necessary to sustain a dynamic economy.

Take Action Immediately: The research and final report aren’t of much value if cities don’t take action based on them. These can be small steps: reallocation of funds, new data gathered, a working group set up or a staff position created. The most important thing is to keep the process moving.

A number of the cities were quick to implement some of IBM’s recommendations. For instance, Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, has signed agreements with all its municipalities to develop a consolidated capital budget planning process. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is developing a program for helping residents to continue or resume their educations. And Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, analyzes traffic data more rigorously to improve road safety.

For the complete report, click here.

Technorati Tags: IBM Smarter Cities Challenge

Six months ago, the city of Nairobi, Kenya, was rocked by an explosion that left over 100 people dead. The cause: residents had scooped oil from a broken pipeline, hoping to later sell the product on the black market. The oil accidentally ignited, setting off the explosion.

The city was sent into turmoil. A power outage hindered efforts to communicate and rescue victims. Traffic was backed up, making rescue efforts even more difficult as emergency medical personnel battled against time to get to the victims. The water supply in the surrounding neighborhoods dwindled to a trickle as fire fighters used up the last drops of the resource to put out the fire.

The explosion and its aftermath show the vulnerabilities of cities when confronted with major disasters. But the situation didn’t have to be so bad. If Nairobi had had a system for managing disasters some of the loss of life and property could have been prevented.

Rio de Janeiro shows the way. The Brazilian city teamed with IBM to create an intelligent operations center, which serves as a model for how cities can improve management of their critical services. The IOC coordinates the activities of more than 30 municipal and state departments plus private utility and transportation companies. “You can imagine the impact that using a city-wide intelligence system would have had on the day of the Nairobi explosion. In seconds, city officials would have known exactly how to respond to the disaster and lives would have been saved” says Tony Mwai, country general manager, IBM East Africa.

Mwai led a roundtable discussion of government services in Africa in Nairobi on October 6, 2011. A white paper summarizing the takeaways from the conference,  A Vision of A Smarter City: How Nairobi Can Lead the Way into a Prosperous and Sustainable Future, was published today.

As Nairobi seeks to enhance its image as one of Africa’s most attractive business hubs, it continues to face the dual challenge of unprecedented population growth and over-stretched infrastructure. The doubling of the city’s population in the next ten years will introduce new challenges – chief among them the need for a streamlined response to safety and security issues.

Many gains have been made. For instance, car-jackings in the city have dropped by half due to more effective policing. Yet one of Nairobi’s biggest headaches remains its public safety record. With the increasing population, public safety concerns have grown as resources are simply too over-stretched to meet rising demand.

In Nairobi, residents have grown accustomed to 90% of all calls to emergency services going unanswered. In a city where the wealthy are able to buy their security by investing in electric fences and high-tech alarm systems, the poor are often at the mercy of thugs who prey on them.  Nairobi is now looking to technology to resolve its security issues.

A lot could be done without spending a tremendous amount of money. For instance, private companies have already covered over 90% of the city with cameras that are used to pinpoint security black spots and reduce crime. But because none of these private firms share these resources with each other, or allow that information to be viewed by the government, the impact of these impressive investments is limited.

The white paper suggests that bringing these two groups together by deploying a city-wide video surveillance system would allow all stakeholders to harness this vast network of cameras to the good of the city. These pieces of infrastructure could be instrumented to produce valuable data that can be used as intelligence to help make better public safety management decisions in real time.

In addition, by enhancing the use of analytics solutions to manage events like the Sinai fire, public safety officials could bring together vast amounts of relevant information to protect the public’s safety.

The Rio initiative is already capturing the imagination of Kenya’s government. Officials envision a future city that will be able to better handle disasters like Sinai–speeding response and saving lives.. “We look to Rio as the future we want, a city where technology allows public safety to be more accessible to residents,” said Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Information.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Anthony Mwai, Bitange Ndemo, IBM, Kui Kinyanjui, Rio Intelligent Operations Center

These facts came to the fore during a panel discussion between five of the top healthcare experts in the country that was conducted by Bloomberg BusinessWeek at its HQ in New York on Jan. 26. Video clips were posted on the publication’s Web site today. (The event was sponsored by IBM, which was why I was invited.)

The title of Bloomberg’s discussion series is “Fix This,” and while it’s clear that fixing the healthcare system will take more than an enlightened group discussion on a Thursday night in New York City, the quality of the expert’s comments pushed me to a firm conviction: The way to fix healthcare is to  get the smartest people together from all segments of the system–including government–and call on them to find common ground because the nation’s financial viability depends on it.

Here’s a hopeful message about the potential of healthcare reform from Dan Pelino, General Manager, IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences, who introduces Bloomberg’s video package.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Bloomberg panel was made up of a Dream Team of healthcare experts. The panelists included Ronald Williams, former CEO of Aetna; Gregory Curfman, executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine; Gail Wilensky, a senior fellow at the international health foundation Project Hope and a former director of Medicare and Medicaid during the administration of President George H.W. Bush; Jonathan Bush (the president’s nephew), the CEO of athenahealth, a major provider of information technology services for the healthcare industry; and Ralph de la Torre, CEO of Steward Health Care System, on of the best managed hospital companies in the country. The panel was moderated by Norman Pearlstine, Bloomberg LLC’s chief content officer.

The discussion was wide ranging, but Pearlstine kept pushing the panelists back to the essential question: What’s it going to take to fix healthcare? Here’s the prescription that I drew from their responses:

Integrate the pieces: Physicians, hospitals and insurance companies need to be better integrated with one another so they can coordinate care for patients and deliver it in ways that are most effective and efficient. Steward is a model for this approach on the physician-hospital front.

Put the patient at the center: If you design a patient-centered system, you’ll get better outcomes. There’s also a better chance that the participants will focus more on preventative care, and that individuals will begin to take more responsibility for their health–including crafting more healthy lifestyles.

Change the incentives: Shift away from paying for individual services rendered to successful outcomes. Value quality over quantity.

Adopt technology: Of all the major industries in the United States, healthcare has been the slowest to adopt new technologies. And it shows. The Obama administration’s program for helping physicians and hospitals implement electronic medical records is a start, but digital records won’t fulfill their potential until insurance companies, government agencies, hospitals and physicians share data seamlessly.

de la Torre had the most dire view of the consequences of not fixing healthcare. We’re headed for near bankruptcy as a nation. His hope is that the crisis will force the many factions and interest groups to come together and, finally, fix the system.

If that sane thing happens, the conveners of the initiative would do well do invite this group of experts to the table to help craft solutions.

Technorati Tags: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, IBM

Much of the growth in new markets comes from the entrepreneurial companies who are building the new applications.

IBM is an integrator. In the Smarter Planet sphere, the integrator can take new technologies and services to market more quickly than the startups can. So IBM has a strategy of forming partnerships with innovative startups, and, in some cases, buying them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To get the most value out of new sources of data, interconnectivity and analytics, cities have to integrate their data and their operations–breaking down the barriers between individual departments. Technology is one of the key tools for integrating this information and these operations.

So IBM has built a platform for integration called the Intelligent Operations Center. “Think of this an analytics hub were we can do high volume real time data analysis, including predictive analytics,” he says.

The idea is to pre-integrate a lot of the pieces of technology in the intelligent operations center. Now IBM is partnering with companies or buying them. One example is i2, a leader in public safety.

We want startups to see this as a development platform they can build upon. Together, we can build a total solution.

We’re also working on integration platforms for other industries, including the financial sector, health care sector, etc.

Here’s a quote he uses frequently when he talks to city leaders about making their cities smarter: “Gentlemen, we have run out of money. Now we must think!” Sir Winston Churchill.

The Galley has been gathering applications from software hackers, artists, community activists, engineers and urban planners who want to participate by producing installations, performances, workshops, apps, etc.  The call for proposals closes January 20, but Dillon says it’s not too late to get started on a proposal and urges people with innovative ideas to bring them forward. Find out more here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The plan is to use the entire city of Dublin as a living laboratory for events and experiments. But the scope of the thinking is global. The exhibit will tie in with the Dublin City of Science conference which will bring hundreds of scientists from around the world next July to showcase the latest advances in science, encourage cross-discipline and cross-border collaboration and promote the role of science in society. The HACK THE CITY organizers also hope to take elements of the exhibition on the road in the future to cities around the world, including San Jose, California.

IBM is one of the sponsors of HACK THE CITY and will take the lead in one of the projects–an effort to use technology to develop practical solutions to urban problems. “The idea is to come up with solutions that we can then publish out to the world,” says Martin Kelly, a partner in IBM’s Venture Capital Group.

Science Gallery is an enlightened organization. It’s about promoting science, but it does that by mixing science, technology and art. Approaches like this help create well-rounded individuals and transcendent societies.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin

Holley was a member of a team of five IBMers who spent three weeks in New Orleans in September as part of the company’s Smarter Cities Challenge program.  New Orleans leaders had asked for an assessment and advice on how to use technology to make the city run better. The IBM team responded with a package of recommendations for how the city can better gather, integrate and manage information about everything from crime statistics to city services. They delivered the formal report to New Orleans this week.

Click here to view the embedded video.

New Orleans has made great strides in its comeback. For instance, the city moved up 44 positions in the ranks of MarketWatch’s Best Cities for Business for 2011, from last place to 33rd. The economic indicators are improving: the city’s unemployment rate beats the national average, personal income growth is high and growth in economic output is above average.

Yet the city’s information technology systems still lag way behind those of most major American cities. Mayor Mitch Landrieu and his staff recognize that fact, and their challenge for the IBM team was to help the city integrate information from its many departments. Today, all of the city’s information is stored in separate technology silos and is hard to access. As a result, if Landrieu is walking in a neighborhood and gets questions from residents about city services, it’s difficult for him to respond with detailed answers.

Holley, who is an IBM Fellow and is chief technology officer for the company’s worldwide application innovation services, felt quite comfortable with this task. He and his IBM colleagues recommended the design of a system that would give the city managers a single view of each citizen and an integrated view of the city’s key service indicators.

In a city with a reputation for past mismanagement and lingering public corruption, the system also needs to make all of the city government’s activities more transparent and to be able to track performance of managers and departments.

The team called for the creation of a mayoral dashboard that will allow Landrieu to track the performance of the city on a near-real-time basis by viewing key indicators represented graphically on a computer screen–and even on his mobile phone.

For Holley, spending three weeks in New Orleans was an intense experience. The team worked seven days a week and lived together in a B&B in one of New Orleans’ neighborhoods. They met with a host of city leaders from government, academia and community organizations. “It was an invigorating experience. It was like a roller-coaster ride that we didn’t drop off until the last day,” he says.

Early on, when Holley toured the city and people told him about how the neighborhoods had once looked, he felt like he was peering back in time. Now he feels that he’s looking toward the city’s future.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Kerrie Holley, New Orleans

The Clemans run a custom cabinetry business, Cabinet Fabrication Group, in a small downtown factory within walking distance of their home–so they’re betting their future on Syracuse. There are several factors in the Near West Side’s change of fortunes, but the key one, according to Chris, is that the new residents have changed the culture of the neighborhood. “Criminals are more comfortable operating in an area where people tolerate them. We don’t tolerate them,” he says.

The unwillingness of residents to accept criminal or even nuisance behavior is one of the key factors in determining whether an urban neighborhood can be stabilized or make a comeback, according to research conducted by a team of five IBMers who performed a deep analysis of Syracuse’s housing vacancy issues this fall. The team is part of IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge program–where the company sends teams to help cities worldwide assess and solve some of their most challenging problems. The Syracuse team recently presented a report laying out their findings and recommendations to municipal leaders. Their message: Armed with accurate information that correlates causes and effects, the city can craft successful strategies for revitalizing neighborhoods.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The team’s core insight relates to an observation that author Malcolm Gladwell made in his 2000 bestseller, The Tipping Point. Gladwell cited a phenomenon he called the Broken Windows Theory: “If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a a signal that anything goes.”

In Syracuse, a crucial indicator was the frequency with with residents of economically distressed neighborhoods call police to report drug-related activities. If they don’t call, the neighborhood is likely on a slippery slope. But, “when somebody calls to complain, the police respond and make arrests. It means the neighbors care,” says Jing Shyr, a distinguished engineer at IBM who was on the Smarter Cities Challenge team.

Overall, Syracuse doesn’t have an especially bad housing vacancy rate–just 4.6%. But that’s misleading. When you drill down and look at individual neighborhoods you see that several of them have vacancy rates topping 10% and others, on the bubble, have rates between 5% and 10%.  Rates that high are strong signals that a neighborhood is in trouble and, left alone, could get a lot worse.

Shyr and her colleagues examined vast amounts of information about crime and police activity, real estate trends, poverty rates and other socioeconomic indicators for Syracuse’s 32 neighborhoods. They found some correlations between socioeconomic indicators and vacancy rates that surprised them. For example, in neighborhoods where the male unemployment rate was lower than the rate for women, vacancies typically weren’t that bad.  Digging deeper, the team found that lower-income men and women frequently compete for the same jobs. In neighborhoods where many woman have jobs, a lot of men are idle–which can lead to drug use and crime.

Before the IBM team performed its analysis, Syracuse leaders had strong impressions about what’s wrong with their most troubled neighborhoods, but they didn’t know for sure. Now, armed with more detailed information about causes and effects, they can craft responses with a higher likelihood of success.  Also, based on data trends, they can predict when a neighborhood is about to go down hill, and act proactively to stabilize the situation. “You’re using data to help the people in the community fix their community,” says Shyr. “You can help them reach a consensus. It’s no longer about who shouts louder. They have a mathematical model that helps them do more scientific decision making.”
Like the Clemans, Shyr now has a strong desire to help turn around Syracuse. She has no plans to move to one of its impoverished neighborhoods, as they did. But she’s willing to do statistical analysis work for  the city on a volunteer basis. She says: “I said, ‘Call me. I’ll help out.’”

Here’s a related blog post by Leslie Plant, one of the IBMers on the Challenge team in Syracuse.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Syracuse

Today, IBM is convening a conference, US Competitiveness: the Next 100 Years, to generate ideas for rekindling America’s competitiveness in the years ahead. For live blogging from the event, check in between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. Please Tweet to #uscompetes.

The latest:

4:45 p.m. Close – Jonathan Fanton, Roosevelt House Fellow:

“A vision of a fair, just and humane society will advance our economic gains, if we can achieve it.”

We can’t count on government alone or industries to carry the burden of our reinvention.

We’re at an inflection point. All of us need to think differently We need to take responsibility for coming up with fresh thoughts for making our economy more vital.

“It’s individual initiative we have to find ways to unleash.”

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The Start: 2:00 PM

Welcome – Jennifer J. Raab, President Hunter College:

She points out that the Roosevelt House is an apt place to hold a competitiveness event. 70 years ago the US was struggling with the Great Depression and IBM was struggling to stay in business. They came together to create Social Security—the biggest accounting application of all time. Ultimately, it became the foundation for economic security for American citizens. The idea for Social Security was hatched here when FDR met with Frances Perkins, later his secretary of labor, when he was president elect in early 1933.

She says there are no more important public private partnerships than those that support public education. At Hunter College, $5000 a year in tuition will buy you a world-class education. “We’re training the next generation of America’s workforce and applying those skills to society and business.” We can’t boost our economy without creating qualified employees for the workforce.

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2:45 PM

Keynote – Bridget van Kralingen, IBM General Manager, N. America:

Our theme today is the importance of public-private partnerships in helping to restore America’s global competitiveness.

It’s needed to be the catalyst for change and innovation.

There are some great examples of public-private partnerships that helped transform society. Social Security didn’t just build a safety net. It also gave people confidence in the ability and willingness of US businesses to play a constructive role in society.

The US space program, another public-private partnership spawned a number of industries.

We believe that PPPs can play the same important role today.

We have several challenges. Economic. BRIC growth has sustained and 115 countries in the world are growing faster than the US. Our competitive environment. We talk about creating jobs. “I’d argue that if you create skills, you create jobs. Skills create jobs.” The US now ranks 7^th among the OECD countries in spending on R&D—down from No. 1.

“We have a couple of dysfunctional behaviors. The recession has led to a lot of grinding and short term thinking, which works against innovation.”

“We have to create the future, not just focusing on fixing the symptoms today.”

There are great current examples of public private partnerships.

One example is a partnership of IBM and New York City. We’re creating a technical high school in Brooklyn, with two extra years of schooling. They’ll earn an associates degree. We’re in the process of announcing a similar program with the city of Chicago.

We’re also doing a partnership with New York State—investing with the state and other companies to create the next generations of chip technology.

“We put our money where our mouth is.”

We can use these partnership to drive growth and regain the US competitiveness that we need.

——

The Context:

Here’s van Kralingen’s post on the A Smarter Planet Blog.

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3 p.m. PM

Keynote – Robert Steel, Deputy Mayor, NYC

The good news is New York City is growing. Most US cities are not growing. We’ll add 1 million people in the coming decades.

We launched Plan NYC in 2007. Mayor Michael Bloomberg laid out wherewe want New York to be over the next decade. The goal is to create a sustainable city.

We have 3.7 million jobs. Health care, finance, retail and business services are the four largest categories.

Unemployment is still unacceptably high, though. We don’t want to live in a city with high unemployment. The headline number is 8.6% but it actually understates the problem. For men of color in the Bronx, the unemployment rate is probably 40%. That’s unacceptable.

Also, unemployment is longer term than in past recessions.

Jobs and innovation are the key themes for economic development.

There are four pillars of economic vitality in New York. 1) Improve the quality of life in the city. 2) Create a pro business environment. 3) Invest in the future. 4) Innovation and economic competitiveness are key.

A good example of a public-private partnership is the High Line, a former elevated rail line that has been converted to a park—which has stimulated a lot of economic development. The city invested $120 million. There’s $75 million of private money. A lot of buildings are being constructed and remodeled. Thirty buildings are done or on the drawing boards. “We look for situations where public money encourages private money.”

Concerning talent: After the financial crisis the economic development corp. in the city surveyed employers to find out the skills that would be needed for the future. The answer was science and technology. Our R&D per capita is too low. So our of this came the idea of trying to turn NYC into a new Silicon Valley. This is the Applied Sciences NYC program. We had seven submissions from a total of 17 academic institutions.

We give advice, real estate and up to $100 million in funding What do we get for it? The range of proposals goes up to a 2-million square foot campus and $2.5 billion in investment.

“This is a big idea. It’s about innovation, thinking ahead and planning. It’s about thinking ahead and changing the nature of the city’s economy.”

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The Context: Robert Steel talks about the Applied Sciences NYC initiative, a public-private partnership aimed at creating a larger pool of people with technical skills in New York City.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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3:30 PM

Panel – New Thinking on Public/Private Partnerships

Moderator: Stan Litow, IBM vice president for corporate social responsibility, asks about entrepreneurialism and education

Participants:

John Seely Brown – Author

No skills last that long. We have to create a disposition to learn. You have to connect to learn, and you have to learn continually. “The half life of skills today has gone down to about five years.”

In the past, people defined themselves only by what they created themselves. Today, the kids are saying: ‘I am what I create, what I share, and what other people build on.’

Kathryn Wylde –CEO,  Partnership for New York City

Ronald Reagan popularized the concepts of public private partnerships. He understood that it wasn’t about business taking over government responsibilities but investing around government priorities.

We’re working with the business community to create early state investment funds. It’s a stream of activity, not one offs. We have set up technology media labs. We have startup incubation labs. We work in partnership with the city’s economic development corporation.

Robert Steel – Deputy Mayor, Economic Development, NYC

We can’t develop a clear vision of that a new science and engineering university in the city should be. We need ideas from organizations that know how to do this.

Some of the institutions are making joint submissions, and some of them chose corporations to be part of their submissions. IBM is one.

“We had a dating service for these guys to come together.”

Expect an announcement in January.

Bridget van Kralingen – IBM, General Manager, North America

You have to keep changing your business models and operating models. We’ve gone through significant changes. We are going much broader with the ecosystem of companies we partner with, and many of them are small companies and innovative startups. We have an entrepreneurships program where we’re helping more than 1000 startups develop their offerings and their business capabilities. We’ve extended it to a program with cities worldwide, called The Smarter Cities Challenge. We do a little project with each of them. We identify innovations and improvements. We offer the skills to build, produce and deliver.

John Seely Brown

We have to reinvent the notion of the land grant college which helped build the US economy in the 20^th Center.

You need to have a dialogue between the universities and the ecosystem of innovation around them. It’s not one way—with all the ideas coming from the university and then being developed out in the economy.

In the Applied Science NYC project, where more than one dozen universities are making proposals for a new science and engineering university in New York, every participant will be a winner. They’re all transforming their thinking through this project.

Robert Steel

“None of us should go to sleep tonight not worrying about the plight of public education. We’re cheating our children and other people’s children.”

“Better public education solves about nine problems.”

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4 p.m. Q&A with the panel:

John Seely Brown – Author, on the role of technology in improving national competitiveness.

“Knowledge is being created so there’s too much to know. We need machines like IBM’s Watson to help us figure things out.”

Kathryn Wylde –CEO,  Partnership for New York City

Robert Steel – Deputy Mayor, Economic Development, NYC, on access for people with disabilities.

“The honest answer is we’ll do a better job by having advocates keep us informed. When we have groups that have special needs, we’ll have to address it by find out what are the best practices.”

“We’re dealing with the issue of taxies. Do we retrofit every taxi or do we dispatch special taxis to help people with a disability. We’re debating the issue right now.”

New York competes not just with Chicago and LA. We have to compete with Boulder and Austin. People can live in a lot places. “Dealing with the quality of life can’t be underestimated.”

The Context:

Here’s a video of John Seely Brown talking about collaborative innovation and other innovation issues:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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4:15 p.m. Presentation – David McQueeney, IBM Research, talks about IBM’s Watson, the computer program that beat former grand champions at TV’s Jeopardy!

We’ve been building computing systems for 100 years, and now we’re asking computing systems to take on more and more challenging problems.

Computers can tackle thinking problems, which for a long time humans thought were reserved for out domain. Watson is one of those.

The Watson project in IBM Research shows that the kind of leaders you want in a research division are people who can pull together a large number of complex technical threads and build something that none of the individual researchers could have done by themselves.

“Watson changed the way people think about what computing might be useful for.”

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McQueeney talks about the government’s capabilities for taking advantage of vast amounts of data to improve services for citizens and enable collaboration.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: IBM, national competitiveness, new york city

Two months ago, IBM announced plans to invest $3.6 billion over the next five years in New York to extend our leadership in semiconductor technology. Investments will be made in our East Fishkill chip fabrication plant and at Albany Nanotech, a strategic collaboration of New York, SUNY Albany, IBM and other technology companies aimed at creating the next generations of computer chip technologies. New York is investing $400 million and other corporations are chipping in another $400 million. The investments are expected to preserve or create 6,900 high-tech jobs in the state.

The alliance between IBM and New York, which blossomed into Albany Nanotech, stands out as a model for economic development and job creation in the 21^st century. The state, the university and the technology companies involved all have their parochial interests, but they also have interests in common, and they find that by combining their efforts and sharing resources they can accomplish things that they could not achieve on their own.

If the United States is to remain competitive globally, it’s vital for government, business and educational leaders to reach beyond their comfort zones and forge strategic alliances that cross societal boundaries to get important things done.

(Today, IBM is convening a conference, US Competitiveness: the Next 100 Years, to generate strategies for rekindling America’s competitiveness in the years ahead. The event will be held at Roosevelt House in New York City. For live blogging from the event, check in between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. on the 8^th. Please Tweet to #uscompetes.)

In this era of financial instability and governmental austerity, some argue that government can no longer afford to launch bold new programs aimed at making a big difference in the lives of citizens. Efforts like the US space program, Social Security and the Internet are no longer possible. The failure of Congresses’ Supercommittee to forge a budget compromise seems to confirm this conclusion.

We, at IBM, disagree. We believe it is still possible to launch bold, world-changing initiatives and investments in our future. They just need to be approached differently, with focus on bridging gaps in political viewpoints and strengthening our nation. Today, government must work collaboratively with businesses, universities and community organizations to tackle our most demanding challenges and improve our global economic competitiveness.

New York City is in the final stages of choosing among seven competing proposals for its Applied Sciences NYC initiative. The plan is to build a new world-class science and technology campus that will be an engine for economic development for the city, an opportunity to expand for universities and a source of talent for corporations. Universities, including Stanford, NYU, Cornell and Columbia, have teamed with each other and, in some cases, industrial partners, to put together proposals, and the city has pledged to provide free land and up to $100 million in capital spending.

But science and technology education does not start at the university level. We need to create a large talent pool of people with technical skills that businesses need to be competitive. That is why IBM formed a partnership earlier this year with the New York City Department of Education, the City University of New York and NYC College of Technology to create a new public school, called P-TECH (Pathways in Technology Early College High School), which combines high school and the first two years of college. The goal is to prepare students to fill entry-level jobs in technology fields and provide them with foundational knowledge that will allow some to pursue science and math degrees in a four-year college. IBM is providing software and helping to develop the curriculum and coordinate mentoring and internships to build the skills we need to stay globally competitive. P-TECH graduates will get first crack at jobs with IBM.

Innovation is vital for improving America’s competitiveness. But while scientific and technological innovation are necessary, they’re not sufficient. We need to develop creative new approaches to solving complex problems and to making our society more productive—and public-private partnerships are one important way to do that. At a time when some of the old tried-and-true solutions don’t seem to be working, it’s time to try something that does work.

Technorati Tags: Albany Nanotech, IBM, US competitiveness