Waterloo, Canada, home of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion and the city responsible for 10% of successful startups on the Toronto Stock Exchange was named the 2007 Intelligent Community of the Year last week.
The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) announced its winner at its annual “Building the Broadband Economy.” The ICF’s five criteria for the Intelligent Community award are based on how advanced the communities perform in deploying broadband, building a knowledge-based workforce, combining government and private-sector “digital inclusion,” fostering innovation, and marketing economic development.
Waterloo beat out Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom; Gangnam District, Seoul, South Korea; Issy-les-Moulineaux, France; Ottawa-Gatineau, Ontario-Quebec, Canada; Sunderland, Tyne & Wear, United Kingdom; and Tallinn, Estonia. Waterloo placed in the top seven last year, too, when Taipei, Taiwan won.
Conference speakers and participants cited lack of coherent US public policy for broadband technologies, compared to the other global regions in the competition. New York City was the last United States winner, in 2001.
“The town that invented the BlackBerry . . . they have created the Nirvana of intelligent communities,” said Lou Zacharilla, director of development for ICF. said after a two-day conference entitled Building the Broadband Economy.ICF pointed to Waterloo’s 45% job growth in high tech industries, along with the community’s depth of broadband penetration. Seventy-five percent of the city’s adults access the Internet, with 76% of businesses and 47% of households deploying broadband technologies.
The ICF also awarded its Visionary of the Year distinction to Wikipedia developer Wikia, Inc., together with its co-founders Angela Beesley and Jimmy Wales.Cornell University’s “Technology Farm,” as it calls its Agriculture and Food Technology Park, won the Intelligent Facility of the Year Award. ICF underscored Cornell’s imaginative technology-incubator approach to commercialization in agriculture.
Sunderland, United Kingdom won the Lifetime Achievement Award, as a region that has placed among the Top Seven Intelligent Communities five times. The British community turned its decaying industrial economic base, with 24% unemployment, into a showcase of balanced economic development, whose employment rate now exceeds the United Kingdom’s average.
Layer 8 thanks to Dr. Jay Gillette, Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at Ball State University and director of its Human Factors Institute who contributed this report. He has written extensively on information technologies and policy, and worked in academic, industry and public policy organizations.
