Re-Inventing Cities

Colin HarrisonIBM Distinguished Engineer EmeritusStartupFest, 10 July 2014, Montreal

A few successes and (mostly) failures

• Successes– 1974 Distributed, real-time control system (CERN)– 1978 First clinical MRI system (EMI)– 1992 Mobile Wi-Fi MAC-Link protocol– 2008 Smart Cities Architecture– … and so forth

• Failures– 1980 Magnetic Bubble Memory– 1985 Medical Imaging business– 1993 Mobile Web– 1996 Intelligent Agents– 2003 eLearning– … and so forth

The world’s greatest innovation…

Gilgamesh built the city of Uruk…

Cities exist to allow large numbers of people to live in close proximity.

Why?

Cities have interesting scaling properties…

Fig. 1 Scaling of urban infrastructure and socioeconomic output.(A) Total lane miles (volume) of roads in U.S. metropolitan areas (MSAs) in 2006 (blue dots).

L M A Bettencourt Science 2013;340:1438-1441

Published by AAAS

Invention scales faster than population

Metropolitan Patenting, Inventor Agglomeration and Social Networks: A Tale of Two Effects by Deborah Strumsky, José Lobo, Lee Fleming

The Urbanisation Challenge

The Urbanisation-Innovation Challenge

1. Today 3-4 bn people live in cities2. Some 200,000 people per week migrate into cities and

increase their resource consumption (become richer)3. If nothing changes, by 2100 we expect to add another 3-4

bn urban residents4. If nothing changes, there will not be sufficient water, food,

and raw materials for that urban population5. Not to mention the environmental impact6. Implicitly, we are assuming that we will innovate our way

out of this problem7. The size of the “innovation gap” is hot research topic

Ladies and gentlemen of the Start Up community…we have work to do!