The earth has become a posh world today. Human needs are not easy anymore. What existed a few decades ago as a dream is now true? The amount of information being generated and disseminated is growing exponentially.
Human history is packed with reminders of how the human world has changed in the midst of great leaps. The creation of wheel, fire and farming transformed human beings from nomads. The economic transition culminated in assembly line manufacturing. The age of Planet Wars was one of the most creative periods. The human imagination and ingenuity to invent and create something new have been bought by any downturn.
The earth has become a posh world today. Human needs are not easy anymore. What existed a few decades ago as a dream is now true? The amount of information being generated and disseminated is growing exponentially.
It is not a eureka moment anymore to discover something new or innovate something new. Small and incremental revolutionary improvements happening all around us are what we see. There are few trail breaking technologies that get relegated once during a phenomenon of a decade.
Today, your idea, you’re thinking, your need will already be addressed, looked for, worked on – partly of the world. To understand similar needs, suggestions and feelings, you would like to collaborate with individuals. You will have to debate, analyze the concept from different points of view, and consider the worldwide market’s need to give your idea form.
Tools for social networking, such as Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter, aim to meet this void. Facebook and Twitter’s rapid growth is testament to the very fact that users are more than willing to share information, question each other, and exchange ideas.
Organizations are seeking to build on this common awareness of people and to be prepared to channel this information into producing and inventing something new that could be revolutionary.
What is lacking is a web platform that enables businesses to exploit crowds and enable them to interact and innovate with people in different parts of the world. Through multiple networks, the power to communicate and engage with individuals already exists. The platform should place a mechanism in the air that encourages individuals to get ideas, extend the ideas that are feasible, and produce something.
Only a century ago, the planet had come a long way from a predominantly agricultural and agrarian society. Today, over half the population of the world lives in urban areas. According to the Health Organization, by 2050, up to 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. If you read this, the chance is that you are living in a city yourself. You almost definitely face First World problems every day, such as poor access, traffic congestion, long queues and crowded public spaces. There are more fundamental problems facing the less fortunate urban population, such as access to food, water, sanitation and living spaces. Over the last 50 years or so, our cities and concrete populations have also expanded at a rapid rate. Yet, even with the key developments in technology over an equal era, we have almost managed to meet the demands of the huge urban population effectively.
Get Smarter for the Cities
It is important to know that cities and unique areas are dynamic environments that require sustainable development programs to provide people with a quality of life in order to really make progress on this front. Over the last decade, many cities have been looking for technology and innovation to build a contemporary infrastructure that fuels sustainable economic processes for cities, thus maintaining the quality of life for citizens by wise management of natural resources, with the spread of technology and thus the encompassing power of the web.
As they are named, Smart Cities work to render smarter societies rich and interconnected with knowledge through efficiently exploiting technology such as the ever-present smartphone, wearable devices, etc., to ensure smooth and productive functioning. Not all is futuristic. Some towns have already begun to explore these possibilities. In 2013, 21 smart cities were recorded in a study by IHS Technology, so the number is expected to quadruple by 2025. By 2016, global spending on smart cities is expected to be $40 billion annually.
Open Innovation: pushing Smart Cities’ growth
As the main driving force behind the development of smart cities, transparent and collaborative innovation has emerged. A top-down, central planning approach to public government has its drawbacks, as many cities and municipal corporations have accepted. In addition, the increasingly complex landscape of technology, information, applications and business models that emerge in a connected world poses a challenge for many city authorities.
Experts agree that a model of innovation that is bottom-up, collaborative, people-driven, is ideally suited to pushing technological developments towards smarter cities.
Smart Cities and Innovation in Partnership around the World
The famous list of the top 10 most intelligent cities on earth by Boyd Cohen reveals a worldwide spread across America, Europe and Asia. While the American approach to smart cities has concentrated mainly on narrow, single functional areas such as transport and mobility, in its smart cities initiatives, Europe has been experimenting with using open innovation platform methodologies across all major areas within the public sector.
One such program that aims to introduce open innovation into the general public sector and governance is the Open Cities Project. It is a 30-month project that aims to exploit existing collaboration technologies and channels across 7 major European cities, such as Crowdsourcing, Fiber to Home, Open Sensor Networks and others. The Future Internet is another European public-private collaboration initiative aimed at encouraging creativity, the creation and implementation of, and the application of, internet-enabled technology to smart infrastructures and business processes. Forbes summarizes the use of technology by major US cities to become ‘smarter’.
Idea poke can be the Forum for Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation. Innovative ideas may come from anywhere, from everyone, and by sharing and cooperation, these are often realized. Idea poke is an innovation center that offers community-based ideas and solutions that are part of the ecosystem.
