Economic Development Journal of Canada | Economic Development Journal of Canada, 2014
Originally published June 19, 2014
By John G. Jung
"The Day Salman Khan Quit His Job...
Education, as practiced for the past millennium, is not particularly productive. Teaching has always been one of those professions, like medicine or music, in which customers vastly prefer quality to productivity. A teacher can effectively teach only so many students... The problem appeared insoluble until 2004, when Salman Khan began tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in math over the Internet... Nadia prospered and soon other relatives and friends sought Khan’s help. So he decided to pre-record tutorials and distribute them on YouTube...The videos turned into a viral hit and attracted enough financial support from donors to let Khan leave the hedge fund. One of his supporters, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, said, "It was a good day when his wife let him quit his job."… Today, the Khan Academy has an online library of more than 4,300 videos on elementary and secondary math as well as computer science, biology and other topics..." from Brain Gain.
Stories. Brain Gain is all about stories. That is one of the things that differentiates this book, third in a series by Robert Bell, John G. Jung and Louis Zacharilla from any traditional book on economic development, strategic planning and community development in our cities. Brain Gain explores the most important issues facing cities today - how to attract and retain talented people and secure and retain investment that creates and sustains jobs for the citizens of these cities. By citing stories, Brain Gain becomes an effective teaching tool illustrating Intelligent Communities’ successful relationships and results that might not have been recognized before in concepts or professional presentations. These stories become memorable insights into the way communities solved their problems and hopefully will inspire others.
According to David Brunnen of Europe’s Groupe Intellex, "ICT-inspired job growth is widely reported but for many folk the reality is the opposite – job destruction. Brain Gain considers how to manage the balance between Drain and Gain… More than any other book, Brain Gain rams home the reality that ‘collaborative advantage’ is the new ‘competitive advantage’ – and the winners will be those community leaders who best apply these global insights to their own local economies. This book could not have been written without the global insights that bubble up through the long-term knowledge sharing programs of the Intelligent Community Forum."
The Intelligent Community Forum grew out of the three author’s direct experiences with the World Trade Centers and World Teleport Associations in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The success of the Smart’95 conference in Toronto in 1995 began the journey of the authors along with cities that were succeeding at entirely new levels due to high speed connectivity and IT-enabled applications in all industry and business sectors and all segments of people lives. Since then, these authors and their colleagues in a unique international jury have reviewed thousands of cities, town and villages.
According to Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos who studies Intelligent and Smart cities at the Urban and Regional Innovation Research Centre in Greece, "Brain Gain offers the authors’ latest insights from more than a decade of research into the most Intelligent Communities on the planet. These cities have found ways to prosper from the relentless rise of Information Technology (IT) and connectivity that, in other places, is destroying jobs and making whole industries obsolete at an unprecedented rate …The book explores these issues, not in theory or at the global level, but through the experiences of cities and regions that have faced challenging problems and found imaginative solutions."
Through compelling insights and stories about communities as well as institutional and private sector champions, Brain Gain looks at how robust high speed connectivity is enabling and often driving global economic change and the shifts in our societies’ cultures and well-being. We all know that change is inevitable. What this book does is to put these concepts into context and builds on the positive narratives of citizens, leaders and change agents in communities as diverse as Columbus, Toronto and Taichung, each home to millions of people as well as communities such as Stratford, Pirai and Mitchell, home to thousands of people. These centers, have benefited from the application of connectivity and IT to give their businesses, many of which are SME’s, a global competitive edge resulting in significant new employment for each of them. Toronto is our leading model for the world right now having been named on June 4 as the 2014 Intelligent Community of the Year, succeeding Taichung, Taiwan. Other success stories in Brain Gain come from the Intelligent Communities of Chattanooga, Eindhoven, Oulu, Riverside and Waterloo.
Each previous book by these authors has followed a theme. The theme of Brain Gain is all about talent, investment and jobs that are created, attracted, retained, but also those that may be disrupted. Pulling on a future theme, "Community as Canvas", you will read about Intelligent Communities such as Taichung, Eindhoven and Toronto that look differently at their communities and their culture that is built on rich and colourful lives and experiences. They are creating something new using new tools and ideas, but also by taking risks and accepting risk as necessary in an innovation ecosystem. The mayors and community champions in our 126 Intelligent Communities are the new entrepreneurs. The social capital that they generate will be returning on their investment 10-20 years from now. Intelligent Communities are the story of our era and the three co-authors have the privilege to tell their stories.
John G. Jung is the Chairman and Co-Founder of the Intelligent Community Forum and one of the co-authors of Brain Gain. He is credited with originally conceiving the concept of the smart and intelligent communities over a quarter century ago. He is also an award winning registered urban planner, urban designer and economic developer.
Brain Gain is the latest book from the Intelligent Community Forum www.intelligentcommunity.org it is available in book or Kindle format at Amazon.ca and Amazon.com