Dear Students,
On Day 16 our guest speaker, the former CTO of California, shared with us the various barriers to innovation within and among cities that would prevent making cities smarter in terms of sharing information, technology, assets, talent and other resources. What out-of-the-box ideas can you present that will serve all citizens equitably to overcome these obstacles by leveraging technology that will cut through the self-serving agendas of various silo-ed constituents? You may limit your answer to one or two areas where barriers exist.
On Day 17 we had learned about measuring innovation. Please include your own thoughts as to why innovation should be measured in building smart cities.
Today, we had the pleasure of hearing from P.K. Agarwal about some of the major challenges facing Bay area governments in developing toward the goals and opportunities of smart cities. His vast experience through working with the state of California under Governor Schwarzenegger gave us some ideas of the major issues that the government faces, such as figuring out the most efficient way to allocate resources so that technology can be best use to cut down expenses. By drawing our attention to the number of counties in California and other states, we were able to see how the idea of state and regional governments and jurisdictions make implementing and planning for smart infrastructure very difficult. Even the fact that what we consider “Silicon Valley” is compromised of multiple counties and governmental entities within the broader classification of the bay area makes the ideas we have been discussing increasingly difficult in reality and for implementation.
One thing I took away from today’s presentation is that we should broaden our perspective to smart regions rather than smart cities. This is because different regions and municipalities are deeply interconnected these days, allowing for a more collaborative agenda in areas such as public safety, transportation, air quality, water, urban planning, etc. This could also allow us to work collaboratively between project groups within our class, so we can leverage the value of every bay area city in developing our ideas. While there are issues surrounding funding and splitting of such projects, through citizen involvement and more collaborative lifestyles, developments such as these are starting to take effect. Even as resources and the technology hub of Silicon Valley have moved to San Francisco, this movement would be relatively insignificant if the connections and developments between the two areas had been more easily tied.
The framework for success for a smart city, from P.K.’s pint of view, must start with a foundation of vision and leadership, and follow with pillars of education, infrastructure, electronic government, policy, and quality of life as they are developed and implemented. All of this will need continual investment from some source, whether this is citizens or private companies. While our team has developed our own framework of how we believe a smart city should be constructed, we could put more emphasis on collaboration between surrounding cities. Thinking of technology in terms of electronic government may also make our framework more effective moving forward.
From the perspective of an MBA student who has had broad experience in food waste and agriculture in the United States, we were also able to see how government and labeling changes affects how much food is wasted. By using IoT to help families in a smart home setting figure out when food is best consumed and when it is truly inedible. Ideas such as these that have a fundamental problem that they are solving really make the largest impact. We should make sure that our “smart” technologies are solving a problem for city dwellers and truly adding value to their lives.
This week, we also discussed what is needed measure innovation. As in ancient societies such as Mesopotamia, it is incredibly important to document how revenue compares to cost as we imagine what our smart city will look like. In looking at how value is created through innovation, we will need to account for issues such as convergence and the speed of technological change. We need to make sure that our city is building wealth and generating revenue, which San Francisco is currently doing. When we make an attempt to calculate this value, we will need to compute the return on assets, asset turnover, profit margin, leverage, and return on equity of our city. San Francisco’s surplus makes it the perfect opportunity to fund our smart changes, provided that they generate adequate returns that will continue to show gains for the city.
Today we had the privilege of hearing from former California State CTO and President of The Indus Entrepreneur, P.K. Agarwal. He discussed the challenges of collaboration in Bay Area governments. He discussed how these challenges can in part be addressed through technology-drive transformation. He posed the question: how do we leverage “smartness” and why is it important? Though Mr. Agarwal discussed how there is no singular reason (rather, he discussed it is in the eye of the beholder), his presentation contextualized an element of “smart” cities we had not previously discussed – governance. Mr. Agarwal also discussed his framework for success – how a “smart” city is based off the following factors:
(1) Education
(2) Infrastructure
(3) Electronic government
(4) Policy
(5) Quality of Life
These elements are all equally important and must be integrated to create a “smart” city. Thus far, we have incorporated most of these elements into our framework. I believe incorporating more aspects of quality of life would have a ripple effect for our city government and economy – as evidenced by the growth of the tech sector in San Francisco.
In the context of this course, one of the focuses of our project in San Francisco should be stimulating two-way dialogue between the government and the people through integration of systems and processes. However, another area of focus discussed by Mr. Agarwal was dialogue between cities. Too many government entities decrease information exchange between cities. For example, cities are not able to share police and crime reports in an efficient matter. As a result, public safety decisions that affect larger geographic jurisdictions are more difficult to make. Another example is information and registration for your car. Specifically, information about one’s registration, license, recall notices, insurance, smog checks, usage, etc. are managed by different entities. If one wants to submit an address change, one would have to do so through multiple government entities. The vision of “smart” government should be to integrate different entities to minimize bureaucracy, lower costs, and make use of data held by other entities.
Furthermore, Mr. Agarwal stressed that we focus on cross-city collaboration to make a “smart” region. In the scope of this course, we can partner with the other Bay Area cities in the class. On the regional level, different government entities have a significant amount of data. This ties into an issue we are trying to address in San Francisco, and something my previous blog posts have focused on: not the lack of data but the efficient use of data.
Going forward, our teams should work more collaboratively to develop a regional framework and approach to smart cities.
We should also focus on decreasing the cost and effort to set-up a business in the Bay Area. Specifically, we could integrate systems of the Franchise Tax Board, the Internal Revenue Service, county permits, city inspections, and so on. Doing so, would follow the use case of Singapore, to distribute value to all stakeholders through integrating systems and decreasing bureaucracy. By distributing more value, San Francisco will stimulate business, restaurants, entertainment, and taxes that all contribute to the overall quality of life.
Furthermore, we heard from a first year Haas MBA candidate, George Roche, about “at-home inventory management.” His start-up Freshii uses data from Amazon Fresh and other delivery services to provide users data about food usage. Homes build cities, thus, smarter homes are vital to smarter cities. He underscored the importance of ethnographic interviews to understand and address stakeholder concerns. Our team is looking forward to going to San Francisco together and beginning the interview process.
The ethnographic interview process should provide inspiration and reveal the biggest ways in which we can impact quality of life and the city’s triple bottom line. Two innovations San Francisco can create are:
(1) Integrated citizen management system: Businesses have customer relationship management systems to oversee customer needs, provide them portals to access and request changes and, as a whole, provide business-client communication. Cities can engage their citizens in the same way.
(2) Integrated business registration automation: Entrepreneurs who want to begin new businesses should be able to quickly and easily register businesses without having to go through multiple departments and agencies between different government entities.
However, we should not invest in these innovations unless we have metrics in place to assess their success. Ultimately, cities have a business model; if these innovations do not positively contribute to San Francisco’s triple bottom line, then they must be reassessed. We can use traditional accounting ratios (such as return on assets) and innovate new metrics to assess both quantitative and qualitative impacts on citizens and the quality of life. These metrics can be measured with cities in the same region (such as the major Bay Area cities) to track net progress. We should ensure our assets are generating either (1) revenue or (2) non-financial benefits for citizens.
In conclusion, Mr. Agarwal quoted Picasso, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.” Ultimately, cities already have a lot of technological tools and data, but it is up to the city and regional government to use these tools and collaborate to make effective data-driven decisions and policies. This is echoed by Freshii in the way they work with households to make them make smarter consumption decisions based off the receipt data. With the 2016 Superbowl being held at Levi’s Stadium, our cities have a unique opportunity to collaborate and make a tangible difference in people’s lives. Doing so will allow, as Mr. Agarwal said, “the next generation of Bay Area residents to be better off economically than those today.”
“There has not been a use case of a city that has used technology to successfully cut costs.” It was appalling to learn from the former CTO of California that no single city has had a documented case of successfully reducing municipal costs through innovation, making our projects with Bay Area cities even more daunting and rewarding. Two particular barriers to innovation within and among cities made a lasting impression on me:
(1) The institution of too many elected officials and lack of cooperation between them
P.K. spoke extensively of “vision and leadership” being the foundation of smart city development. While elements such as education, infrastructure, policy, and quality of life are all important investments, none of these building blocks would be possible without a city government standing behind the smart city planning with full involvement and optimism. The absence of 100% committed city officials is the indirect result of having “too many cooks in the kitchen,” each with silo-ed goals and visions. In particular, Silicon Valley is often loosely defined as the entire Bay Area, when in reality it is a small subset comprising of Santa Clara, San Mateo, Santa Cruz County, and Alameda County. With so many cities wanting to be part of the “Silicon Valley” fever, there are certainly many city officials and entities trying to manage the region with varied interests and stakes, which often halt innovation when the time comes to make personal investments. As P.K. aptly described the government silo’s: “We are all for collaboration—but just do it my way and don’t ask me for any money.”
As a result, we often see innovation and efficiency foster within corporations rather than government entities. I can tie in two examples here from our studies in India and from the presentation by P.K. Firstly, P.K. described an ideal “smart city” as one in which the neighborhood, region, and global communities are all interconnected through a common medium. In Delhi, there is the NCR (National Capital Region) with a governing body that is responsible for managing the entire commercial region—but there is no such governing body in the U.S. besides individual governments. This immediately drew my attention to our visit to GIFT city, governed by the independent corporation GIFT in a public-private partnership with the government. The Delhi MRTS also operated under a similar management structure, in which the MRTS is a private organization that makes independent and more efficient decisions, which minimizes costs and increases value to citizens. Secondly, Clipper Card is also owned by a private company that, with vested interest in both profit and the public, is proactively reaching out to city governments and obtaining their buy-in. This is more efficient and easier to implement than a government-run initiative, because third parties bring a new perspective, a clean business situation with fewer political interests, existing funding from their own fundraising and private revenue streams, and citizen buy-in. Once again, too many government sylo’s create inefficiency and excessive expenses.
(2) Too decentralized and inconsistent public services
P.K.’s primary example of the MyCar Portal demonstrated ways in which citizens are inefficiently managing their car-related expenses (registration, license violations, insurance, traffic, recall notices, gas prices, address changes, etc.) across a variety of platforms. This leaves greater room for error, delayed payments, and difficulty in tracking vehicular activities for the government, which both increases costs and decreases revenue. As a result, eTransformation can come in the form of using technology to integrate a set of related public services that all cities can share and use. This type of innovation supports citizens in helping them make payments, track public activities, and improve their quality of life. For the governments, they can share resources such as crime reports, identify the most problematic regions or issue areas, and collaborate on the same platform to target related problems.
Beyond overcoming these barriers, the presentation touched on a plethora of other success factors: having government, industry, and academic work together, ensuring trust and transparency in all government matters, creating a sense of urgency, fostering a culture of collaboration, and making data open and available (which we can model after San Francisco’s technological transformation). Naturally then, how can these success factors be measured? This is why innovation needs to have actionable metrics, insightful impact, and achievable benchmarks. Some of these metrics include financial ratios about the city’s return on assets (to encourage cities to minimize dead assets and use them to their full capacity) and return on equity (to illustrate steady profit streams). Our team in particular has been benchmarking cities with similar conditions as San Jose and their success stories surrounding public safety, such as New York and Camden, New Jersey. All of this research will culminate into actionable metrics that the City of San Jose can monitor in the next decade, because as Professor Darwin mentioned: “Innovation that cannot be measured cannot be done.” Thankfully, our team’s project with the City of San Jose has the support of the newly elected San Jose Mayor, who is open to collaboration, ambitious about the city’s initiatives, and optimistic about resolving the public safety and high retirement costs of the region. With the insights from P.K.’s presentation and Professor Darwin’s lecture on measuring innovation, we are excited to match the barriers to innovation with solutions leveraging open collaboration.
The lecture “The Challenges of collaboration in bay area governments and tech driven transformation” given by the former CTO of California, PK Agarwal was eye-opening in terms of how collaboration in innovation is difficult for government municipalities in California. Agarwal discussed how it is important to have a collaborative agenda between departments such as public safety, public health, transportation, air quality, water, waste and sanitation, emergency management, recreation, urban planning, economic development, purchasing, and smart region. Although these issues are daunting for creating value through innovation for California government systems, PK brought up a fascinating solution as the framework of success. His framework has three necessary parts for success. First, he discussed how vision and leadership are vital to implementing open innovation. His example of the Singaporean leader’s vision of transforming Singapore from some island into a capitalistic and profit-making nation by leveraging asset utilization of Singapore’s port. Because of Singapore’s innovative implantation, Singapore’s GDP rose by 4% from 2013 while increasing its trade 2.3%. The second layer to his framework includes education (a smart workforce), infrastructure, electronic government, policy, and quality of life. The last layer to the framework is investment, meaning that the people involved must not only believe in the project, but must also create and find funding to execute the innovative ideas. PK’s lecture made me deeply consider how collaboration and innovative ideas are of most importance when creating smart cities. Because of the leadership in Singapore to enable open innovation, Singapore transitioned from a cost-heavy economy to a profit-maximization economy. And what allowed this to occur was the innovation that was created within the country. Because of Singapore’s successes and ability to measure their GDP and trade progression, the rest of the world can adopt Singapore’s practices and implement such changes to construct their own SMART cities.
The first innovative idea that would serve all citizens equitably would be to program databases into government computer systems to analytically measure the progress in population, revenue streams, and impact that is being created in a respective city. Since these databases often require highly-skilled information technology workers, by increasing the demand of technology-educated individuals, the market will also hopefully increase the supply of I.T. focused people. With more and more people being educated in computer science and other computer-emphasized education courses, there will be an increased amount of innovation in technology since more people will be able to read and create new technologies by using code. As well, by creating a database system that will be used across all of the municipalities, this will cut through self-serving agendas of various silo-ed constituents because every government will be working on the same platform. When different companies and governments work on the same platform (such as Facebook or Microsoft Word) it allows for easy transitions of information and most importantly, allows for collaboration.
The second innovative idea which I would be excited to see implemented in municipals is an innovation department in each major city that analyzes information from census data and leverages open innovation to implement technology to address a city’s needs. For example, if a city’s census data showed that traffic was outlandish on Monday and Tuesday mornings, the innovation department could utilize a sensor technology similar to Tyco’s to see why so many cars are on the road on Mondays and Tuesdays. By measuring the sensor data, the innovation department could notice how on Mondays and Tuesdays, there is construction which closes the bike lanes which doesn’t allow for bikers to ride on the sides of the roads, so more people are in their cars. With this information, they could collaborate with the construction companies to leave bike lanes open, allowing for traffic to reduce and an overall increased transportation efficiency to occur. To summarize, an innovation department in major cities would allow for a deeper analysis of data and a more collaborative environment between businesses and the government.
Today we had a guest lecture from the former CTO of California, P.K. Agarwal, who called for a shift in perspective when looking at innovation. Specifically, he questioned the notion of a Smart City and instead proposed the concept of a Smart Region. That is, as processes around the world continue to shift and develop, the role that geographical location plays in relation to economic growth, productivity, and competitiveness has become increasingly important. More specifically, the economic role of regions is becoming more prominent and within those regions, smartness must be generated through a collaborative agenda among different agents.
Silos can be seen as things of the past—obstacles that need to be removed for true innovation to take place. Not only do different departments within a government need to create horizontal structures among themselves, but also governments, as a whole, firms, and knowledge institutions need to link or cluster up. Known as the Triple Helix of Innovation, the relationship among universities, industry, and government forms a collaborative network or an agglomeration economy, in which assets are linked and leveraged to gain economic sustenance and growth. Therefore, by aggregating key economic actors within the same geographic proximity—or region—each cluster takes advantage of its own unique strengths, leading to new market opportunities and benefits.
In Berkeley, this Triple Helix model would serve as a conduit to bridge the silo-ed verticals that are prevalent. By collaborating on issues such as public safety or transportation, different agents such as students at the university and local businesses could create a more productive environment for operation. Additionally, searching and hiring costs can be significantly reduced, as clusters provide readily available applicants for hire and grant firms access to a network of other companies and resources that provide inputs such as UC Berkeley. Consequently, a flow of knowledge and ideas results, causing a spillover in which collective learning is facilitated among clustered firms and actors. When working together with other actors, the ability to implement innovative ideas grows rapidly. Also, clusters form new business arrangements in which new product or service innovations develop in order to exploit current consumer bases of each actor. These new developments can be leveraged and produced at lower costs and risks since the parties involved share common business goals.
However, ultimately, when all these changes are made, there needs to be criteria for which success can be measured against. Day 17 centered on measuring innovations and how metrics could be used to assess their success. From financial ratios to compute the return on investment to more qualitative metrics should as impact on society, we brainstormed numerous ways that we could measure success in our smart cities models. Actionable metrics, ultimately, allow for the cities to keep track of and build upon their efforts.
On February 9th, we had the privilege of hearing from P.K. Agarwal—former CTO of the State of California and President of Indus Entrepreneur. Because his career, he brings first-hand experience in working for government with private corporations to marry policy and technology. P.K. has vast knowledge on how to bring smart technological changes into cities, so we were all very eager to listen to his presentation. He starts by asking us “Why do cities care about being smart?” Indeed, the question is a “trick” question because there is not a single answer. He uses Malaysia as an example. For them, the aim of building smart cities is to bring in private investment and create jobs. Cities hope to be “smart” for a myriad of reasons—but without a doubt, none of these changes can happen unless there is “innovation” embedded into the structure of government.
The problem we are facing with government is that there are too many independent governments in America to work efficiently. The Bay Area, for example, is comprised of 9 counties and 101 cities. Each of these cities has their own elected government jurisdictions, budgets, priorities, problems, etc. So what areas can regions collaborate? PK suggests these areas:
• Public safety
• Communication
• Public health
• Air Quality
• Transportation
• Water
• Waste & Sanitation
• Emergency Management
• Recreation
• Urban Planning
• Economic Development
• Purchasing
The main takeaway from his lecture is that technology is a tool; the real issue at hand is collaborative agenda. Collaboration between government is a pre-requisite for technological transformation. Find common identifiers, he says. A brilliant example he gave was Silicon Valley, where the cities governments needed to collaborate to find a solution to simplify starting and ending businesses. A decision the governments made was to make tax ID number the common identifier. Prior to this initiative, tax ID numbers were in different formats across cities within the Silicon Valley. This streamlined organization and oversight of business development in Silicon Valley. Instead of solving the big problem, scale the problem to bite size pieces. Without a fluid structure that leads to easy coordination between governments, then bringing about change will be difficult.
On February 11th, we learned about how to measure innovation and the importance of doing so. In lecture, we learned there are many ways to measure innovation: ROI, ROE, social impact, etc. It is important to measure innovation because what are “valuable” changes over time. Land and livestock used to be extremely valuable, and then during the Industrial Revolution the value shifted to plants & equipment. In current day, the most lucrative assets are intellectual property, equity instruments, & debt instruments. Additionally, it is important to measure innovation because ratios are useless for comparing different firms and industries, helps firms track against its past performance, serve as measures of profitability and risk, and help in planning and control functions. The example given in lecture was Microsoft vs Apple. After crunching numbers, Microsoft spends a lot more in R&D than Apple, but has a much lower ROE and profit per employee. This signals that Microsoft might not be utilizing its assets to its fullest. Without these ratios, firms are unaware of where profits are being left on the table. Applying this to smart city planning, cities should look at its balance sheet and see where it is spending most and cut costs. Cities should also see where it revenues are coming from—capitalizing on where it receives the most revenue and seeing where improvements can be made for areas where revenues are low.
As P.K. painted a picture of the ways in which cities operate in silos and the inefficiencies that result from too many layers of government, it became apparent that cities have lagged far behind corporations in moving towards open innovation models. For example, it was not until recently that cities began to share information from their crime reports, compare their paperwork and processes, and use this information to make better-informed decisions. Furthermore, in some states, over 20 state government departments must be touched in order for an individual to start a business, and each department has different identifiers for their paperwork; although this creates confusion among applicants and slows down the process, these states have resisted change due to the high costs, and potential businesses have flocked to states that have simplified processes. These examples illustrate how inefficiencies exist at both the city and state levels due to a lack of cooperation among multiple cities, government departments, and layers of government. Cities and governments can ultimately learn from corporations that have moved towards open business models and already begun to experience the benefits of a shared economy.
Before cities can begin to cooperate with one another, I believe that they must first recognize that each city has unique strengths and weaknesses just like corporations. Successful businesses understand their target customers, their unique value proposition, and also their potential weaknesses that can be exploited by competitors. Looking back on previous lectures, this could be seen in the example of P&G and Clorox. P&G had plastic technologies but lacked a path to market, whereas Clorox lacked R&D but had effective distribution. Therefore, the two companies created a joint venture to leverage each other’s unique strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. This type of partnership was only possible because each business acknowledged their weaknesses and the fact that the solutions to their challenges may lie outside their internal operations. Similarly, I believe that city leaders need to shift their mindsets and begin operating more as unified regions, or “business partners”, rather than independent entities each trying to reinvent the wheel to solve the same problems. Although this may seem like a political issue, there are many businesses cases that will benefit all the parties involved and thus create little political tension.
One example of a potential collaborative agenda is uniting to address public safety concerns across multiple cities. Most cities within the Bay Area spend a majority of their budget on public safety, and they are constantly investing in new technology ranging from upgraded police cars to surveillance equipment. In many cases, this technology can be highly controversial or costly. For example, as early as 2009, San Francisco supposedly obtained StingRay, a cellphone data surveillance technology that can pinpoint a phone’s location and is regarded by many as privacy intrusion. Recently, San Jose has considered the use of drones that would be used for search-and-rescue missions, bomb squad operations, and other emergencies (no surveillance or video recording). On the East Coast, Camden, New Jersey has invested in a Real Time Tactical Information Center that has reduced crime by over 30% and been described as military-style surveillance. These are just a few examples of the elaborate technologies that exist and are being used in cities throughout the world to thwart crime, and there are many other technologies that police departments can choose to employ. However, many cities are unable to experiment with this technology due to the high costs or public controversy, and this is where open innovation can play a role. Bay Area cities can unite to identify areas that would benefit from public safety pilot programs, and then they can share the costs for these programs to reduce the burden for a single city. Once the program is launched, all the cities can share the data and work together to draw key insights that can then be applied to other cities.
If cities are to launch joint pilot programs and share the costs, then they will need to have appropriate metrics and goals to ensure that each city understands the purpose of the program. In the public safety example, multiple cities might fund a pilot program that requires a high upfront investment, and cities will want to have access to information such as the incremental revenue generated, the reduction in crime within the area, citizen satisfaction, and other data specific to the type of technology. This open data will ensure complete transparency and that these types of projects do not create political tension. By making a business case before the project is launched and clearly stating the shared goals, cities will be able to make intelligent investments that benefit all the partners involved.
We need metrics to measure innovation in order to make informed decisions. There are many ways to spearhead innovation, such as streamlining government bureaucracy, encouraging collaboration among different government entities, and creating frugal innovations for the poor. But with limited funding, time, and resources, how do we choose which will make the most impact? Or which will make the most immediate impact to convince stakeholders to offer more funding? We need improved metrics to make those decisions. The New York City Police Department is leading the way on this with hot spot policing and data analytics. By using an experimental design that incorporates randomization and controls, they are gathering data and computing metrics needed to find pockets of criminal activity and determine how many officers to deploy. Data drives action, and this initiative is a great example of leaders who, instead of relying on gut-feeling, use data to make informed decisions.
Our guest lecturer, a former California CTO, encouraged us to not look at the Bay Area as a collection of discrete cities, but as a single region with much opportunity to create value through collaboration. Unfortunately, capturing this value will be a great challenge, particularly in implementing eTransformation through systems integration. We can agree that cities need to share resources in order to be smarter, but this won’t happen unless the departments within each city break out of their own silos. In order to complete the paperwork needed to start a new business, one would have to deal with at least 20 different departments. Streamlining this application process to a single online form should greatly encourage more new businesses to form, which can provide a boon to the Bay Area’s startup culture. However, when our lecturer tried to do this, he spent two months just trying to get the 20 departments to agree on a single standard to numerically identify businesses. One department would complain that their own identification systems take a character fewer than the common standard and refused to change. They also could not agree on who would pay for changes in their IT systems because the amount would be different for each city. Systems integration should have been a quick win to facilitate collaboration, but progress is stifled by the self-serving agendas of different silo-ed entities.
As we consider the technologies that we can use to create smarter cities, we must not forget that this should not be a disconnected silo-based effort. NYPD’s use of data analytics can greatly improve its capabilities in fighting crime, but still won’t tackle the deep roots of New York’s problems with crime. Collective action from a multi-sector coalition is needed to solve community issues that are entangled with one another. For example, broken schools or lack of accessible child care might have prevented people from obtaining and maintaining the jobs they need to have financial security, which prevents many form rising out of poverty. Our guest lecturer gave us a framework that provides a great starting point to plan successful smart cities. By starting with a foundation of vision and leadership, followed by education, electronic government, infrastructure, policy, and quality of life, we will be thinking through a wide variety of stakeholders and can see how they can work together towards a common vision.
Earlier this week, former CTO of California, P.K. Agarwal, talked to us about his experiences working with the State of California and how governments can approach smart city models in the Bay Area. Mr. Agarwal also shared some of the obstacles that are preventing cities from becoming smarter so that we remember to consider them in our own framework development. Given that our main objective is to come up with a smart city framework that allows for the integration of information, technology, assets, talent and other resources, there are a few key areas that Mr. Agarwal addressed that are highly relevant to our discussions.
First, Mr. Agarwal asked us to think about how we even define a smart city. We have talked about how cities have effects on neighboring cities, and Mr. Agarwal challenged us defining that scope of influence as part of the city. Now, this would be called a smart region. He pointed to the Silicon Valley as an example of the difficulty in defining a smart city, district, region, etc because there really is not one right answer. Depending on who you ask, there are many variations to what is included in the Silicon Valley.
Continuing with this idea, one of my takeaways from Mr. Agarwal’s presentation was to look at ways to encourage a collaborative agenda. For instance, for San Francisco, we are looking at ways to make water management “smarter”. The technology used is not the “smartness”; rather, it is how the technology is used in an area. By implementing water usage sensors and tracking this data, cities can collaborate with neighboring cities that are using the same resources (and in this case, same sources of water) to focus on ways to be more efficient with that usage. By getting cities to work together on such a pressing resource, city officials can ideally collaborate to come up with ideas or even share ideas about minimizing water usage. Furthermore, I think this can minimize self-serving agendas because collaboration is an external process, meaning that others will be able to see the work being done in a certain area. This would place a sort of peer pressure to discourage work that does not align with the vision of the group (of cities, regions, etc).
Mr. Agarwal also talked about the five stages of eTransformation, a concept that has enhanced economic competitiveness and has transformed the back office work by shifting towards an online government. This has also minimized work that may not directly serve constituents since it keeps information automated and visible. One of the barriers in eTransformation comes before integration and transformation can be achieved. One possible way to decrease the barrier to integration is to utilize one of the success factors we discussed. In the scientific world, there are certain molecules called enzymes that lower barriers to allow reactions to occur. I see success factors as these enzymes. This metaphor says that those barriers will still exist- there is no way to completely get rid of barriers- but there are ways to decrease that barrier so that the reaction, or as in this case, the integration, can occur. I think utilizing a sense of urgency will encourage the integration of a smart model of water management given the current state of water supply.
Later in the week, Professor Darwin talked to us about the need for innovation and ways that we can measure innovation via metrics, benchmarks, impacts, and accountability measures. After learning about the history of wealth creation, I see the importance of measuring innovation in building smart cities for a couple of key reasons, including its usage for future benchmarking.
The early Mesopotamian society served as the kernel of innovative creation. From there, society evolved to kingship, which was the beginning of corporations, highlighting the need for orders and laws. Without documented information from the Mesopotamian society, the kingship societies would have had to very likely restart from where the Mesopotamian people had to begin. With the transfer of information from generation to generation, future societies were able to leapfrog off the successes of previous societies to continue societal advancement. This leapfrogging is only possible because of the measurements of how successful previous processes were. When studying more unsuccessful processes, people were given the opportunity to see how those processes can be improved. Without knowing what is wrong, it is difficult to innovate something that will work instead.
Another reason to measure innovation is to make sure we are progressing as a society. This idea relates back to one of our previous lectures, where we talked about how innovators must be inventing with the future in mind because the future is where we want to progress. We need measurements of current inventions to see if they are meeting present or future needs. Then only we can invest in initiatives that are advancing our current assets. That being said, Professor Darwin also talked to us about how we need to be innovating our measurements of innovation (ex. open balance sheets) as well in order to look for new opportunities businesses can grow into.
I really enjoyed this week’s series of lecture and meetings, as we had the opportunity of furthering our understanding and discussion with P.K. Agarwal and Professor Darwin regarding the barriers to innovation posed within cities and their respective process of shifting to become smarter. It was fascinating to learn about the primary areas of focus that can be improved using technology: public health, transportation, air quality, water, waste & sanitation, emergency management, recreation, urban planning, economic development, purchasing and smart regions. However, he emphasized the fact that a city can never achieve its optimal level of ‘smartness’ if the government and public officials are constantly looking at technology in silo-ed constituents, in comparison to integrating technology seamlessly for the citizen community as a whole. This idea of improving inter-connectivity between the various sectors of a city needs to be ingrained in the business process idea of a smart city, so departments are able to communicate without barriers to understanding – with the importance of realizing that without transparency and a seamless flow to communication, there will always be more problems that arise in the future, in turn limiting the potential of a smart city from being materialized.
As we studied various smart city efforts and government models around the globe, one point I found interesting was the fact that through technology, eDemocracy is driving major transformation in cities. Especially from my own perspective and experience from a first-world country like Malaysia, I have come to realize that countries that are not ready to uptake such a complex development model (while with the best government intention of improving citizens’ quality of life) will only result in the opposite effect: a decrease in overall productivity and economic competitiveness. Agarwal raised a truly crucial point that all of us need to take into consideration while we build our respective smart city models – “When integrating technology, we must always think from the CITIZEN standpoint, and not the government standpoint”. Otherwise, it would only result in the further development of silo-ed constituents as distinct sectors focus on areas for innovation and improvement, without actually thinking about the benefit and opportunity for impact as a whole to the citizens.
While processing this food for thought, having our next meeting with Professor Darwin to further solidify our process of measuring and implementation innovation in San Jose through our background analysis of used Public Service development cases across cities in the United States was a huge step forward in our understanding of smart city innovation. Any city can attempt to achieve innovation through methods like smart E-policing and mobile technologies. However as I read up on more used cases by places like New Jersey and Manhattan, Washington DC, San Ramon, Oakland, and San Jose, I realized the extent to which city officials are attempting to integrate technology into their respective cities in order to promote innovation. However, all of these efforts lie in the common thread of improving communication between the government, public officials, and the residents of the community. The incorporation of technology revolves around the convenience of information sharing and accessibility with the goal of strengthening these silo-ed relationships to create a unified stream of thought between all of the active members of the community. Therefore, this is exactly how innovation should be measured in the building of smart cities. Innovation can only be measured as a success within a city, if it manages to successfully directly address the concerns and primary issues faced by citizens, for citizens. By doing so, it creates a smart city where citizens play an equally active role in contributing to the sustainability of its future.
P.K Agarwal provided us with an insider perspective to some of the challenges to government collaboration. First, I will discuss some of the barriers presented and then P.K’s recommendation as to how to overcome these obstacles.
Obstacle 1: “Infrastructure still eats up costs”
P.K noted that there has not been a case study that has shown the use of technology to cut down expenses. Consider that even if you automate many services (i.e: paying for your parking ticket online), there are still some citizens who are unable to access online services so those physical channels still remain open. Keeping the physical channels open and maintaining the online channels, eats up costs. However, I think in the long run, the government will save money, as everyone will have transition to this new system.
Obstacle 2: “There are too many independent jurisdictions”
Another aspect to consider is that there are over 90,000 government entities that operate independently from one another. In the bay area alone, there are about 101 counties. Therefore, to implement a program that integrates horizontally and vertically is a challenge given the sheer number of people and their current operating systems. For instance, if you were implementing an integrated solution throughout the bay area, whom would you invite to the first meeting? The mayors? Committee members? Then once you get everyone together, the devil is in the details. People will have to take a lot of time compromising and negotiating. P.K said that the decision to choose a barcode identifier took 2 months – as some systems have to have the code start with 00 or “_”.
Key takeaway #1: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste!”
Given all the silos, it may seem slightly hopeless as to where to even begin implementing a solution. However, P.K. asked us to consider utilizing a crisis. In that when there is a sense of urgency, then the current issue at hand will become a priority and people are willing to compromise more. For instance, the start of WWI and WWII united the American people and pushed everyone to collaborate and share resources. In this same manner, P.K. asked us to utilize Super Bowl 50 in which there will be an influx of at least 2 million people coming to the bay. And it becomes questionable if our transportation system can support this oncoming wave of people. This is a perfect “crisis” because it will force transportation agencies to try to integrate with one another at a fast pace.
Key Takeaway #2: “Great leaders needs a vision”
One of the secret sauces to implementing smart solutions and utilizing a crisis is to have a great leader with a vision. The vision of a smart city is that the next generation will be better off economically than those today. He gave us a use case of how Singapore maximized the efficiency of their port because it was the prime minister’s vision to make Singapore the conference hub of the Asia-Pacific.
These key insights force us to refine and focus our smart city recommendations. Perhaps in thinking about the cost, we need to also consider the deferred revenue. For instance, when focusing on education – Professor Darwin mentioned the possibility of having the City of Oakland form a partnership with TechShop to provide their services to students. The benefits of this program will provide students with afterschool activities and tools to innovate. These benefits will translate to higher productivity from the next generation. As for the second obstacle of having too many independent jurisdictions – this forces us to look at public safety differently. Originally, the big idea to lower crime is to unify all information (i.e: database) across agencies through a standardized process and then taking this data to anticipate problems and then coordinate resources to help respond/prevent crime. Perhaps the first step is to think about what all the public agencies have in common (maybe an identifying code?)– and then create a separate committee to try to unify and standardize all the information. Then it would be great if Mayor Libby Schaaf created a sense of urgency in terms of a deadline or goal to push people to work for a vision. The vision could possibly be to increase the quality of life to make citizens and businesses feel safe.
The next thing to ask is how would one go about measuring the impact of these solutions? Professor Darwin presented a few ways to unconventionally measure innovation. He scraped the old accounting methods, and showed us that an open innovation system requires a new balance sheet. A new balance sheet means new metrics. Professor Darwin presented a different way of looking at ROA and ROE – which I think are necessary if we are thinking about sustainable business models. I think that when thinking about impact, we should consider doing impact evaluation using econometrics. In that, we can use lean start up principles to implement the TechShop idea and IBM’s public safety products. We can craft a careful experiment, compare control/treatment variables, and then run a regression to measure impact. In addition, I think that Eric Reis coined the term innovation accounting in that one can measure innovation through macro metrics. For instance, for public safety we can measure how effective the new system is by response time, crime rate, or even how many people are feeling safe enough to walk outside (population density). Overall, I think there is a lot to consider during the actual implementation of a project, but it is even more important to track the progress after execution.
This past week in class we had the honor of meeting Mr. PK Agarwal, former CTO of California and Silicon Valley enthusiast. Mr, Agarwal spoke to us about the technology driven transformation that is happening in cities throughout the United States. From Chicago to San Francisco, the idea of smart cities has started making news articles and “Watch-lists” as the next upcoming innovation. Why? With an increasing and rapidly urbanizing population, the demand for resources such a water, electricity, healthcare, and education continues to drive further away from supply. Clearly, cities are the key to whether we as a society can bridge the demand and supply gap during this demographic transition while maintaining growth that is both sustainable and equitable. The goal is to incorporate technology into something as essential as the three utilities of water, gas, and electricity that comes incorporate into your home or office automatically. According to Mr. Agarwal, computing and telecommunication infrastructure (IoT) can provide the transformation to increased economic competitiveness, eDemocracy, on-line Government, and back of the office efficiency.
The challenge with this, however, lies in the overbearing nature of multiple governmental jurisdictions – Federal, State, Local, District and sometimes even more. The Bay Area itself consists of 9 counties (SF, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda, Marin, Contra Costa, Solano, Sonoma, and Napa) and 101 cities for a total population of 7.3 million. The irony in this situation lies in the fact that the presence of too many jurisdictional entities has created silos that prevent the development of overarching Bay Area governing body with representatives from each county/region. With each one of these municipal governments handing their own budgets and policies, coordination and cooperation becomes a logistical hassle and daunting barrier to overcome.
(1) Process: Every city and county has its own process and way of handling municipal government and it is not standardized to a certain extent. Therefore a “one size fits all” solution is not possible in the context of Smart City implementation. The closest we can get to that solution is development of a process framework for Smart City implementation that can be applied to every city once certain details have been inputted. This requires city collaboration and expert policy review.
(2) Resources: The resources of a city involve its employees, citizens, and municipal land. When developing a smart city, the “not in my backyard” concept largely comes into play. Ideally, all municipal officials would want efficiency in their city governments and resource allocation, however, when it comes to trying out pilots or projects, no city wants to take the risk of being first and thereby taking on additional resources while risking the viability of existing ones.
(3) Funding: Personally I think this is the foundation towards the “yes” or “no” in the decision making process. If we were to create a collaborative smart city initiative with multiple cities, who would put down how much investment and what rate or metric will determine this amount?
Issuing municipal bonds to fund Internet of things and machine to machine integration within cities would provide return to investors who want to increase the risk averseness of their investment portfolios and achieve tax exemption on their earnings. During a period of low interest rates, now would be a great time to issue municipal bonds and undertake infrastructure financing projects.
McKinsey Insights estimates worldwide spending on infrastructure and construction to be $2 trillion a year, with Internet Communication Technology (sensors etc) spending is just 1.5 to 2% of that. Advances in cloud computing, big data, and open data in the upcoming years will foster the industrialization of the Internet. In fact, the share of global infrastructure spending on ICT today will be the same so we don’t have to necessarily increase our percentage of funding, but rather ensure that our investments are smarter and move technology from being an afterthought to having it embedded in our urban master plans.
Professor Darwin’s lecture on measuring innovation echoed the importance of not only embedding technology into our future development plans, but also finding a way to measure its success through benchmarks and targets.
This can be done through public private partnerships with large data analytics private companies that could be in charge of optimizing resource distribution and management in cities. Until the time the city can integrate these processes within themselves, it would be best to contract out the duties to a private company that focuses on many generalization from data convenient and citizen-friendly.
One application for this system would be for the water management in San Francisco. With the current drought, water usage in San Francisco has been a very debated topic. Incentivizing citizens to consume thoughtfully would require using data that is already being generated and analyzing it to create convincing arguments geared towards citizens to save water. This can be taken a step further by contracting out a private company to make a digital personal management tool that would allow a citizen to keep track of the electricity, water, and utility usage throughout the days and months. This could be couple with a home security management system that could be overseen by the municipal police department as well. This type of citizen engagement platform has many applications and perfectly represents the intersection between technology, government, business, and the end consumer in achieving a smarter city.
On Day 16, P.K. Agarwal spoke to us about some of the obstacles to collaboration in Bay Area governments as well as tech-driven transformation. According to Agarwal, the term “smart city” was born during the time that he worked under Governor Shwarzenegger. He began by briefly explaining the cases of Malaysia and Portugal, which are looking to smart innovations to bring in investments since technology does not cut down expenses for governments. Next, Agarwal delivered some statistics on the composition of the United States such as the number government collections and entities in the country as well as the number of counties per state.
A major problem that Agarwal delineated is that the United States has a unique infrastructure problem; we have too many governmental jurisdictions and boundaries that complicate collaboration toward building smarter cities. This led to one of Agarwal’s chief arguments: the building of smart cities really means smart regions. For example, the Bay Area region is not currently organized to deal with smart city solutions as a collective unit. Agarwal is a proponent of smart regions because they would be more efficient, offering the same interface among cities and leaving more room for open innovation and collaboration.
Agarwal then divided up the need for a collaborative agenda into several key categories, such as public safety, transformation, and economic development. He also explained that technology is driving transformation through the concept of eDemocracy, or using technology to communicate effectively and make decisions. Furthermore, Agarwal asserted that there are five stages of eTransformation: publish, inquire, transact, integrate, and transform.
Finally, Agarwal gave us his framework for success in collaboration among governments. First, vision and leadership must lay the foundation. Next, education (smart workforce), infrastructure, electronic government, policy, and quality of life, must be addressed. I was intrigued by Agrawal’s framework as we develop our own. I found several parallels between his framework and ours, specifically the importance on vision and infrastructure. However, I appreciated his government perspective since we naturally tend to focus on the business viewpoint.
We also heard from an MBA student who explained his idea of Freshii, an implementation of IoT that takes electronic receipts and parses out items in order to assign freshness dates to each food. With a focus on reducing food waste in the United States, the student’s point of view considered several issues I had not though about. Certainly, distinguishing between the “best by” dates of foods and their true expiration dates is key to using food more efficiently as a resource and creating a smarter city. Yet it never would have occurred to me if we had not had this presentation.
This week we also discussed how to measure innovation. Professor Darwin discussed innovation using the example of Mesopotamia. He detailed the need for innovation long ago and noted the different waves of innovation. First, it was land and live stock; second, it was plant and equipment; third it was intellectual property, equity, and debt instruments. In considering how businesses create wealth, we looked at both the traditional balance sheet engine as well as “The Open Innovation Wheel.” It is critical in measuring innovation that we track useful ratios such as return on assets to assess progress from one point to another. As Team Berkeley, we plan to utilize these measurements to not only identify innovation gains in the past, but to plan for them as we attempt to make Berkeley “smarter.”
PK Agrawal, the former CTO of the state of California, joined us in our continuing discussions on the topics of effective municipal organizations as well as feasible implementation of appropriate technologies. Overall, his tone towards smart cities and effective governance through use of technologies seemed skeptical. He touched on various inefficiencies in the current bureaucratic system, the difficulties with current interfaces/protocols, and challenges in collaboration. It seemed like a very bleak sort of outlook, as if the government is largely operating in a “hands-tied” manner. Agrawal also introduced a framework of his own, one that somewhat resembled team puri’s very popular burger frametwerk. His framework differed in that the investments play a hugely important role in success and identifies this areas as one of the major challenges to progress.
To inspire discussion on practical technology solutions to urban problems, the former California CTO introduced several successful case studies. The most stand-out to me was the clipper card example. It had a productive structure: private company ownership with investment in both public benefit and profit goals to obtain a buy-in. This initiative proved more efficient and faster integration because it bypassed much of the red tape required to get through wholly public entities.
In thinking about government improvements in its citizens’ lives, PK Agrawal is biased by his previous experiences. What he has firstly engaged with is an inefficient, politically driven system that has an immense responsibility, but has also created a significant number of pain-points for its customers. In this sense, Smart City initiatives may seem a bit premeditated as there are already so many issues that should be solved. In this way, it is important for us to consider technologies that are equitable, and easy to access.
One of the recent initiatives that I have seen pop up in San Francisco are Parklets. This is a largely citizen-driven effort which has repurposed parking spaces into mini parks. It’s not entirely technology-driven, but it does provide a positive externality to a city. It’s quirks like these that have brought techies in from the OG Silicon Valley, to San Francisco, incidentally another topic which PK covered. Council Members should consider these technologies as indirect catalysts of innovation. To make them more accessible, these parklets should be strategically placed in communities of various socioeconomic status within a city.
Ideas need not be out of the box to break silos. What is more necessary is a shift in paradigm. If groups within the government considered integrated solutions which allowed for the parieto-optimal option, many of the issues which PK Agrawal spoke on could be solved. Technology provides a means of hybridizing various entities to produce an integrated output. Smart grid technologies incorporated with city data, business plans which allow citizens to invest and gather returns, and even just funding in unique projects can engage the community together to demonstrate what the needs and desires of people are. City council must be open to these feedbacks and consider options rather than set boundaries for these initiatives.
Measuring these initiatives becomes critical in determining success or failure. Traditional metrics of ROI, ROE, etc. may speak loudly to business-centric individuals. However, it must be strongly considered that these initiatives are created for people. Public transportation is to move people, an efficient grid is to deliver electricity to the end user, and ultimately, sustainability affects the communities and the environment. As a result, successful innovations need not be singularly measured in financial values. Rather, reach, impact, time frame, and positive externalities should be effectively accounted for.
The most striking of our guest speaker’s assertions was that there has been no documented case study in which technology has saved governments money. However, this does not mean that it’s not possible. I believe this may be the case because the people implementing or pushing the solutions have been taking a closed, as opposed to open approach. What I mean by this is that rather than looking for a solution that can break the barriers and create synergies between each silo of government, they think of solutions that will benefit their specific silo. The problem with this is that the different departments within a government must work together in order to actually increase efficiency, reduce expenses, and increase quality of life for citizens.
Another one of our speaker’s points is that these solutions usually have winners and losers, meaning that a solution that benefits one department may impose and administrative burden or cost on another, so a framework by which the benefits of a new solution can be weighed out equally between departments/silos of government must be created. In the case of e-governance and “smart solutions,” two areas in the City of Oakland where the greatest barriers exist are inefficiencies in public safety and in leveraging its assets to create community. In terms of public safety, there are software platforms from CISCO and IBM that have become so cost effective that it is only in their implementation that governing bodies must be careful.
The City of Oakland, like any governing body trying to adopt one of these solutions, must make sure that this solution works with the goals that other connected departments are trying to achieve — but more ideally should see if these platforms can break down a barrier and create a synergy between the two departments. Once the silos between departments start to break down and those departments realize that implementing these solutions will not necessarily result in a loss of power, the entire population will benefit as well. Not only will citizens have easier access to services, but business will benefit as well. Cisco explains this in the following paragraph:
“The proliferation of e-government creates the possibility of entirely new IT products and services. From a corporate user perspective, a more efficient government means a more efficient business. Businesses can access government procurement processes quickly and fairly. They can more readily access and relate to regulators and other licensing authorities. In addition, paperwork can be filed electronically, reducing the total cost of interaction with government. These cost reductions are passed to consumers and customers and increase business efficiency overall.”
The next step after implementing these solutions is having metrics in place to ensure that they are successful. Say a city implements a new solution — it will see an increase in its assets while maybe its liabilities increase (if it is paid for with debt), but then revenues will increase as a result of implementing the smart solution (say a public safety solution from IBM or CISCO) and expenses may decrease because of computerization.
Moreover, a smarter city will attract more business, more business will result in greater tax revenues, property values will then increase, and tax revenues from these properties will also increase. However, this positive loop of greater net income and greater retained earnings for the city will only happen if we can convince each silo of government that a smart solution will benefit is just as much as the next department, and that it will burden the department in question just as much as the next department (thus making sure risks and benefits are equal across the silos/departments).
Problem: Difficulty In Sharing Data Among City Agencies
In San Francisco, there is a plethora of citizens who repeatedly drain the system. For example, a patient diagnosed with high cholesterol was lying in the street and numerous passer-byers reported her to 911 and the police. After a thorough investigation, it turned out that the pharmacy gave her medicine that was different from what the doctor had prescribed to her. Had the city established a central database of the patient’s medical and report history, it could’ve prevented the system from being drained.
Solution: Citizen History, Present, and Future Database
To prevent human error when prescribing medicine or future system drains, the city should establish a central database that contains its citizen’s medical, criminal, residential, and other information. By restricting access to this website to the public and granting access to necessary city agencies, San Francisco could better forecast future problems and be more efficient in catering to the citizen’s needs, which will allow its operations to run more profitably.
Thoughts on why we should measure innovation in building smart cities…
Professor Darwin made a great point during our lecture last Thursday. He stated, “What cannot be measured cannot be built.” His statement translates directly into the topic of building smart cities – we can’t solve a problem if we are not able to measure the impact of our solutions. Measuring and applying specific and relevant metrics when trying to solve a problem is critical when trying to make economic, environmental, social, and political progress because it allows us to step back and observe our current progress, to either pivot or grind our strategy.
A great example that highlights this importance is San Francisco’s attempt to reduce water consumption. With the state of California under a drought, it is imperative that people conserve water. To encourage water conservation, San Francisco is working with the Department of Water and Power to install meters in faucets, which signals consumers how much water has been displaced. Such information is what drives consumer behavior, and further allows the city to consume less water. This information can later be used to adjust water flow levels, which will save the city lots of money.
Measuring = information = smart decisions = better future.
Last week, during class, we had the opportunity to meet PK Agarwal, the former State of California CTO and entrepreneur. During his presentation, he provided the class with insights that I believe will be valuable as we continue to delve deeper into our city projects. Mr. Agarwal took the time to share with us his experiences working with the government and various cities in the State of California as well as his views on the creation of Smart Cities. One particular theme that Mr. Agarwal emphasized during his presentation was that although the development “smart cities” pave way to endless potential, there are certain barriers that will hinder optimal innovation.
One of the major obstacles lies in the fundamental structure of current governments. Today, governments and officials attempt to work and mitigate issues in a silo-ed manner. In other words, various groups that address issues in areas such as public health, safety, transportation, air quality, and water current work separately in silos, failing to create integrated systems that in turn help to maximize efficiency. Consequently, public sector institutions have been slow in making progress in comparison to other institutions such as corporations.
Another barrier to optimal and efficient development of smart cities is that there are too many governments on the state and local level that work independently without collaboration. In the United States, there are hundreds of local governments throughout the country. In the Bay Area alone, there are nine counties and one hundred and one separate cities. These cities, although all interested in addressing some of today’s most pressing issues, often choose to work separately rather than in collaboration creating a the vicious cycle of reinventing the wheel. This barrier results in a massive bureaucracy that hinders the creation of swift process.
As PK suggested during his presentation, these barriers can be addressed through the use of technology but more importantly an increased willingness from various governments to collaborate. Mr. Agarwal reminded us that collaboration amongst governments can ultimately lead to quicker innovation and, in turn, long-term and successful progress. Technology serves as a tool that can encourage collaboration and allow governments to address many of issues. There are many ways in which leveraging technology can cut through the self-serving agendas of silo-ed constituents and to establish working partnerships between different governments.
The first way that technology can be utilized to increase collaboration is in the realm of air quality. Many cities throughout the country have begun to recognize environmental cleanliness as a major issue in society. More and more cities have become interested in investing in technologies that will allow for more accurate tracking of pollution levels and even systems that can help to lower overall pollution. Consequently, cities have invested millions into researching technology. Environmental improvement is a great area in which cities can collaborate. For example, cities like San Jose can work closely with other cities such as Mountain View, Cupertino, and Santa Clara to create technology to better address pollution and other environmental issues. These cities can share resources and contribute expertise to create a more comprehensive pollution tracking system. In the long run, the cities that work together can also create integrated systems that help track the overall environmental progression of the region. Another area of opportunity in which technology can be utilized to encourage collaboration is in the area of safety and crime. Cities in close proximity can contribute to a centralized database that will provide information to better address relevant issues. For example, San Jose can work in tandem with other surrounding cities to create a large database that shares information on how to better fight crime. Although these are simply preliminary ideas, technology has endless potential to bring together many cities to join a collective effort in bettering the quality of lives of its residents.
In addition to hearing from PK Agarwal last week, Professor Darwin gave the class a presentation on metrics used to measure innovation. These metrics require a deep understanding of the elements of a balance sheet such as the city’s assets and liabilities. There are also key ratios in which we should look out for to gauge the efficiency of a city. These ratios include ROI, ROE, and other ratios. To me, innovation needs to be measured because it is a quantitative way of tracking the progress of the city. This is an essential element that is needed to ensure that our projects will bring about substantial progress.