Report to: Development Services
Committee Date:
September 8, 2009
SUBJECT: Intelligent
Community Forum – Building the Broadband Economy Summit 2009 (BBE 2009) – New
York City: Report on Outcome
PREPARED BY: S. McCrimmon,
ext.2655
RECOMMENDATION:
That the report entitled “Intelligent Community Forum –
Building the Broadband Economy Summit 2009 (BBE 2009) – May 13 – 15, 2009, “Report on Outcome”, be received for information.
That Staff be authorized and directed to do all things
necessary to give effect to this resolution.
PURPOSE:
The purpose of this report is to
inform Council on the results of Markham
staff’s participation in the Building the
Broadband Economy Summit, and meetings with the Canadian Consulate and
Ontario Government representatives.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
In early May 2009, Markham
staff conducted meetings in New York City
with the Trade Commissioner of the Consulate General of Canada and the Ontario
Program Officer from the Ontario Ministry of International Trade and
Investment. These meetings were intended to introduce the Canadian Federal
Government and the Ontario Government to Markham’s
Markham 2020: Strategic Directions for
Our Economy. Markham
staff met with Suzanne Klatt, Trade Commissioner of the Consulate General of
Canada, and Didi Aisitin, Ontario
Program Officer from the Ontario Ministry of International Trade and Investment.
The meetings resulted in an agreement by all participating
parties to strengthen the relationship between the locally engaged offices in New
York City to promote the Town of Markham’s
four key sectors of opportunity based on collaborative economic development programs
and activities.
During the information sessions at the Intelligent Community
Forum, Markham staff engaged in
discussions on the best practices of the World’s Intelligent Communities. These practices reflect how communities adapt
to the demands of the Broadband Economy in order to achieve greater
sustainability and economic growth. Also, Markham
staff participated in discussion on the factors that determine a community’s
competitiveness in the Broadband Economy.
BACKGROUND:
In May 2009, Economic Development
staff travelled to New York to
participate in the Intelligent Community Forum, with the objective to gather
market intelligence on what is required to succeed as an Intelligent Community,
covering the Intelligent Community indicators, political strategy and tactics,
technology, and multiple examples of best practices.
OPTIONS/ DISCUSSION:
Canadian Consulate Meeting – Markham staff held one-on-one meetings with Suzanne
Klatt, Trade Commissioner of the Consulate of Canada in New York City, and Didi Asistin, Ontario Program Officer of the Ontario Ministry of International Trade and Investment,
to discuss the Markham 2020 Strategy with a focus on the opportunities
within the four identified key sectors.
Suzanne Klatt shared an initiative that IBM
is launching in the United States,
Smarter Planet,
which she perceives could be an opportunity for Markham. Didi Asistin received information on our
strategic plan and agreed to forward the information to Mike Moen, an incoming
Consul & Senior Economic Officer for the Ontario Ministry of International
Trade and Investment.
Intelligent Community Forum
- Markham staff attended the Intelligent
Community Forum, where award-winning communities (Issy-les-Moulineaux France, Bristol
Virginia, Eindhoven Stockholm, Tallim Greece,
Fredericton New Brunswick
and Moncton New Brunswick)
presented ideas regarding their improved economic prospects within the current
contexts of the economic downturn. In an open discussion forum, community
leaders and educators described their communities’ specific programs ranging
from boosting broadband use, entrepreneurship training to boost their global
competitiveness. Panelists engaged with
the audience in an interactive exchange on success factors, unexpected
challenges, and best practices.
Markham staff participated in
round table workshops on the transformative impacts that “next-generation
communications” will have on how we live, work and govern. Participants were made aware that online
community vs. physical community have barriers to overcome. Email, blogs, texting and other Web-based
tools are being used everywhere to build relationships, help community groups
organize and enhance community life. For example, the city of Eindhoven
Netherlands developed “Brainport” which can best be understood as a flexible
and open platform for innovation, It is a public-private partnership of major
employers, the cities of Eindhoven, Helmond, Veldhoven and research institutes,
the Chamber of Commerce, the SRE, and leading
universities. Staff meets regularly with all the key stakeholders to
identify their strengths, needs and objectives, then looks for opportunities
for stakeholders to collaborate on business, social or cultural goals.
Any stakeholder of “Brainport” has the opportunity to create new initiatives or
partner with other stakeholders. The SKOOL program provides over 800 Dutch
primary schools with a combination of hardware and software that vastly
simplifies the integration of information technology into education.
Students receive SKOOL laptops from Paradigit, a systems integrator in Eindhoven that was
founded in a university dormitory and built a fast-growth business producing
built-to-order PCs and name-brand systems. When students start up the
laptops for the first time, the systems automatically connect to the SKOOL
server, download all of the applications specified for that school and
configure themselves. SKOOL provides remote management of all servers and
PCs at its client schools, as well as an online interface for students and
teachers to communicate and share content securely.
Panel discussions were held by the
Top Seven Intelligent Communities to showcase their specific projects for the
Intelligent Community awards. The Moncton,
New Brunswick example is attached to this
report.
NEXT STEPS:
Economic Development staff is working
on business opportunities including:
-
Follow up with contacts from the ICF to assist in the
development of the template that would outline the steps for the Town of Markham
to consider making an application in the future to be acknowledged as an
Intelligent Community. This would involve identifying a project based on a
selected theme from ICF which would provide a framework for understanding how
communities succeed in building inclusive and sustainable prosperity in the
Broadband Economy. The themes focus on a
particular success factor in the work of Intelligent Communities, and allow
applicants to highlight their achievements in this area. Past themes have
included sustainability, leadership
and culture of use.
-
In partnership with the Intelligent Community
organizations, Markham to host a
half-day workshop, titled “Creating the Intelligent Community" that will provide
staff and community leaders with essential training and guidelines to prepare Markham
to excel in the Broadband Economy.
ALIGNMENT
WITH STRATEGIC PRIORITIES:
The Intelligent
Community Forum Summit is an integral part of the Town’s 10-Year Economic
Strategy, “Markham 2020”. The Summit
program focused all of Markham’s four
targeted economic sectors, and addressed the objective of building a talented community
and a networked community.
RECOMMENDED BY:
__________________________ _________________________________
Stephen A
Chait, Ec.D., CMC Jim
Baird, M.C.I.P., R.P.P.
Director,
Economic Development Commissioner
of Development Service
ATTACHMENTS:
EXAMPLE OF AN INTELLIGENT
COMMUNITY PROFILE:
Moncton,
New Brunswick, Canada
- Collaborative leadership in the face of crisis
For most of the
20th Century, the city of Moncton
was the transportation hub of Atlantic Canada, a region made up of the four
provinces bordering the Atlantic Ocean. The Canadian
National (CN) railroad had its repair shops in the city, and a cluster of
transport-dependent employers, such as the Catalog Centre for the nationwide
Eaton's department store chain, formed to take advantage of fast, convenient
access to the national rail network. CN employed 5% of the workforce and its
purchasing generated thousands more jobs.
In the 1980s,
however, Moncton experienced the
perfect economic storm. CN announced in 1985 that it was closing down the
Moncton Shops facilities in a drive to boost productivity. The Eaton's Catalog
Centre also closed as the department store business model fell under attack,
and several local factories fell prey to the period's rapid
de-industrialization. A once-proud transportation cluster found itself facing
not only economic upheaval in the short term but serious worries for the
future. Because rail and transportation had dominated its economy for so long, Moncton's
workforce was educated for an era of manual work, not the emerging knowledge
economy. The city's downtown had a high vacancy rate and, due to lack of
investment, the community's physical infrastructure was in decay.
Moncton’s
historic motto is "Resurgo," Latin for "I rise again." As
the Eighties came to a close, it was an open question whether Moncton
would ever be able to rise again.
Collaborative
Leadership
ICF has
identified strong collaborative leadership as a critical factor in the success
of Intelligent Communities. The Moncton
story explains why it is so important.
Moncton
responded to the crisis by organizing a series of regional economic development
planning exercises beginning in 1989. The first planning process,
Symposium 2000, brought together local government and business leaders not only
from Moncton but from the
neighbouring city of Dieppe and
town of Riverview, as well as
provincial and federal agencies. But it was not just a talking shop. The
government and business leaders came prepared to make deals, and they reached
agreement on a series of big steps. They formed and agreed to fund the Greater
Moncton Economic Commission, the first regional economic development agency,
and subsequently approved its first strategic plan. They forged a partnership
between local and provincial government to focus on attracting new business to
the region and made individual commitments to infrastructure investment.
Most important, they formalized collaboration among Moncton,
Dieppe and Riverview on sharing the
management of municipal services such as water and policing, and on joint
development of projects like the Greater Moncton International Airport. This
collaboration reduced the costs of government in the region while focusing
everyone on pursuing new economic opportunities.
Call Centre
King
In the late
Eighties, the hot opportunity turned out to be the call centre. Both
outbound and inbound call centres experienced a boom in this period, and Moncton
had the potential to benefit because of its low costs and one special
attribute: it has one of the highest rates of bilingual workforce in Canada,
with half of the population speaking French and English. Both leadership and
collaboration played a role in what happened next. The incumbent carrier NBTel
(now Aliant Telecom), proved willing to step up to meet new requirements. The
first Canadian carrier to build a 100% digital network in the early 1990s,
Aliant created a suite of services to support call centers, including the
leasing (rather than purchase) of costly switches and systems for home-based
employees. The provincial government joined forces with Moncton
to actively promote the city as a place to base telecom-intensive service and
IT operations. The province helped the city to attract call centers for over
two dozen national and international firms including ExxonMobil, UPS,
FedEx and the Royal Bank of Canada.
By 1994, call centers had become a major source of new jobs, exceeding goals
set in 1991. But the 1994 plan recognized that success in call center
development was not enough; the next step was to focus on "knowledge
businesses" – natural and applied sciences, business and finance, computer
programming and information systems.
More
partnerships ensued. Moncton
tapped the resources of national and provincial government agencies, including
the Atlantic Innovation Fund and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, to
spur attraction and start-up of knowledge-based businesses. A New
Brunswick R&D Tax Credit helped companies justify location of scientific
research facilities in the Greater Moncton area. The Greater Moncton Strategic
Partnership linked local government with universities, colleges, local media
and leading-edge companies to fund talent-attraction marketing in order to feed
the rising demand for qualified people.
With the call
center business continuing to attract companies including Fairmont Hotels,
Rogers Communications and Lottomattica, Moncton
increasingly saw homegrown ICT businesses prosper, from the Atlantic Lottery
Corporation and Red Ball Internet to Vimsoft and PropertyGuys.com. By
2006, almost 45 out of every 1,000 workers in the Moncton Census Metropolitan
Area (CMA) worked in customer service,
information or related clerk positions, compared with an average of 12 for Canada.
Moncton had witnessed a 300%
increase in employment in ICT companies, a 153% increase in employment for
graphic designers and illustrators, and a 43% increase in jobs for writers and
translators. While New Brunswick
suffered a net loss of 3,900 people from 2001 to 2006, the Greater Moncton area
gained 6,800.
In 2008, the
call center sector paid more than C$290 million in payroll and generated a
total of C$765 million in regional economic activity. But newer businesses were
also making an impact. The community's hospitals have become catalysts for an
emerging life sciences cluster focusing on medical informatics, bio-markers and
bio-statistics. The Atlantic Cancer Research Institute is the largest in
Atlantic Canada. L'Université de Moncton is well known for research on cellular
lipid metabolism and is home to New Brunswick's
only medical school, while private company DDx Health Strategies is pioneering
in remote support for the pharmaceutical industry and MedSenses offers health
care e-learning solutions. A local entrepreneur went from working as a video
game repair technician to creating a state of the art video lottery machine
system. Global lottery giant GTECH acquired this Moncton
grown company in 2004 and was itself acquired in 2006 by Italy's
Lottomatica, which chose to maintain production of the systems in Moncton.
The result has been a gaming cluster, which now includes a unit of Oracle and a
significant number of homegrown companies and development centers for
multinationals.
Moncton
ploughed economic growth back into infrastructure, building a new City Hall,
widening bridges and roads and opening up parcels of land to development of
corporate headquarters, call centers and media studios. One of the most
satisfying milestones was the opening of the Emerson
Business & Technology Park
on the brownfield site that had been home to CN's Moncton Shops. The developer,
Canada Lands Company, put C$50 million into cleanup and redevelopment of the
249-acre site, which also includes the CN Sportplex and residential
units.
Connecting
to the Internet Age
Greater Moncton's
latest plan, Vision 2010, calls for updating the region's economic development
for the Internet age. In 2007, Moncton
partnered with Cisco and Hewlett-Packard to install the first free outdoor
wireless mesh network in Canada.
In a mesh network, data traffic is handed off between wireless nodes, most of
which operate without a landline connection. This reduces the cost of cabling
but requires high-quality design and a large number of nodes to succeed. City
workers installed the entire system, mostly on lampposts and traffic signals,
in three days across six city blocks. The network has since been expanded
selectively to local parks, shopping districts and the Magnetic Hill concert
site, where it supports e-commerce for local merchants as well as communication
and Web browsing. The City has even created a Community Access mobile WiFi
service that allows it to deploy coverage for special events on demand.
But mobility is
not just for sporting events and concerts. Moncton's
municipal buses also offer free WiFi. By making it convenient for bus riders to
access broadband, the new service has increased usage of public transit, with
positive impacts on both emissions and congestion. In response to demand, the
bus fleet is scheduled to grow from 27 to 52 buses by the end of 2010.
Moncton
is also deploying ICT to improve municipal services. A van equipped with
high-speed data collection technology evaluates the condition of pavement on
city streets and feeds information into the city's Asset Management System. The
city has also installed 20,000 wireless meter-reading devices in its water
system. They measure water flows so precisely that they can detect leaks within
the household, which saves citizens money while promoting conservation.
Building inspectors and other outside workers are taking laptops on the road
and connecting securely into city systems to access information and file
reports.
One
constant amid these waves of changes has been the process by which Moncton
built and continues to build its broadband future. Community leaders in
government, academia, institutions and businesses continue to connect and
collaborate to a remarkable degree. From 2004 to 2008, the chair of the City
Council's Prosperity and Economic Affairs Committee was the founder and chair
of the public-private Moncton Technology Planning Group (MTPG). Members of MTPG
have been board members of Enterprise Greater Moncton. The Mayor of Moncton and
senior staff also sit on the Board of Enterprise Greater Moncton, and are
involved in MTPG as well as the city's Prosperity and Economic Affairs
Committee, of which the past chairman of the Chamber of Commerce is a member.
Representatives from provincial and national government agencies also have
representatives in most of the groups. In some places, having such a tightly
knit leadership group becomes a barrier to progress by reducing transparency
and stifling new ideas. But in Moncton,
it seems to have been key to the successful fight back from the economic brink
and the continuing effort to build a strong, diverse and prosperous community.