What makes Canadian cities such as Waterloo, Ottawa, and Toronto hubs of high-tech entrepreneurship and successful Intelligent Communities? Since moving to Canada, Professor Darius Ornston, author of When Small States Make Big Leaps, which chronicled how the Nordic countries developed the ability to enter new, tech-based markets, has similarly studied two Intelligent Communities of the Year in Canada and tells us how these Canadian communities represent a collaborative approach which has...

What makes Canadian cities such as Waterloo, Ottawa and Toronto hubs of high-tech entrepreneurship and successful Intelligent Communities? Since moving to Canada, Professor Darius Ornston, author of When Small States Make Big Leaps, which chronicled how the Nordic countries developed the ability to enter new, tech-based markets, has similarly studied two Intelligent Communities of the Year in Canada and tells us how these Canadian communities represent a collaborative approach which has...

This week marks the start of another global awards campaign at ICF. We begin the search for the successor to the current Intelligent Community of the Year, Binh Duong, Vietnam. Who will it be? We begin by naming theSmart21(see the video) on March 20th.  This year’s S21 Awards and Conference will be held in Taipei, Taiwan. Taipei was the 2006 Intelligent Community of the Year and this year hosts the Smart City Expo andThe Smart Cities and Intelligent Communities Forum, produced by the Taiwan...

A NY tech exec and mother decides to serve her community by running for office in one of the most high-profile districts in Manhattan.  Elizabeth Golluscio looked at her city’s $106 billion budget and found that there was limited transparency on how decisions were being made.  She looked at challenges like unlicensed E-bikes (part of the 56,000 deliveries of food in NYC each day!) and met with Police and found a basement in the precinct full of them.  She got a sense of what was happening...

ICF announced early this year that it issued a license for its third Institute. The new ICF Institute will be based in Atlantic Canada, in the city of Fredericton, New Brunswick at New Brunswick Community College. The new Canadian institute joins those established in Dublin, Ohio (USA) and Hsinchu, Taiwan to further promote the Intelligent Community Forum’s method for accelerating the growth of regions and states by transforming clusters of cities and towns into economically robust and...

A NY tech exec and mother decides to serve her community by running for office in one of the most high-profile districts in Manhattan.  Elizabeth Golluscio looked at her city’s $106 billion budget and found that there was limited transparency on how decisions were being made.  She looked at challenges like unlicensed E-bikes (part of the 56,000 deliveries of food in NYC each day!) and met with Police and found a basement in the precinct full of them.  She got a sense of what was happening...

How does a university become a key driver for starting, building and maintaining industry-academic partnerships for the benefit of the local economy?  Durham College’s Chris Gillis shares how he develops successful partnerships and overcomes many of the obstacles that keep other communities from moving ahead on this vital piece of the economic puzzle. In his current role, Chris is the college lead for applied research project development in the areas of electric, connected & autonomous...

  In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Amy Rowland, Award-Winning Novelist and Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.   Amy Rowland’s second novel, Inside the Wolf, was published by Algonquin in July 2023. She is also the author of The Transcriptionist (Algonquin 2014), which received the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Amy is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Amy Rowland, Award-Winning Novelist and Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.   Amy Rowland’s second novel, Inside the Wolf, was published by Algonquin in July 2023. She is also the author of The Transcriptionist (Algonquin 2014), which received the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Amy is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks further with Karl Grossman, Journalist, Host of the Enviro Close-Up TV program and Professor of Journalism at SUNY at Old Westbury. They continue their discussion on the changing landscape of journalism, particularly at the local level. Karl Grossman has specialized in doing investigative reporting in a variety of media for more than 50 years. He teaches as well as practices journalism. He is a full professor...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Karl Grossman, Journalist, Host of the Enviro Close-Up TV program and Professor of Journalism at SUNY at Old Westbury. They discuss the changing landscape of journalism, particularly at the local level, and what may be in store for news reporting in the future.   Karl Grossman has specialized in doing investigative reporting in a variety of media for more than 50 years. He teaches as well as practices...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks further with José Roberto Lagunes Trejo, Research and Strategy Lead at Mexico City’s Fundación Hogares. They discuss trust and how a social index the Fundación has created is helping repair the social fabric in Mexican communities.   José Roberto Lagunes Trejo is an architect and urban designer from Veracruz, Mexico, who works on the intersection between urban design practice and community development. Since...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with José Roberto Lagunes Trejo, Research and Strategy Lead at Mexico City’s Fundación Hogares. They discuss the method used by José Roberto's organization to reinvigorate rundown neighborhoods and build trust among citizens in places where mistrust and fear have become embedded.   José Roberto Lagunes Trejo is an architect and urban designer from Veracruz, Mexico, who works on the intersection between urban...

When you watch ICF’s videos on Youtube, what you see publicly are representatives from a city celebrating when their city is named Intelligent Community of the Year. Sometimes, as in the case of the mayor of Espoo, Finland, you see tears of joy. Sometimes, you see Eindhoven representatives from The Netherlands donning red shirts in celebration or Columbus representatives from Ohio storming the stage behind their mayor like a football club. What you do not see is the incredibly hard work done...

When you watch ICF’s videos on Youtube, what you see publicly are representatives from a city celebrating when their city is named Intelligent Community of the Year. Sometimes, as in the case of the mayor of Espoo, Finland, you see tears of joy. Sometimes, you see Eindhoven, The Netherlands representatives donning red shirts in celebration or Columbus, Ohio representatives storming the stage behind their mayor like a football club. What you do not see is the incredibly hard work done by a...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Idoia Postigo, Director General at Bilbao Metropoli-30. Idoia shares the story of how Bilbao recovered from industrial decline and revitalized itself into a city that won the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize in 2010. Since the inception of the Association for the Revitalization of Metropolitan Bilbao (Bilbao Metropoli-30) in 1991, Idoia Postigo has been responsible for promoting and disseminating the...

In part 2, Chairman and CEO of Toronto’s Institute Without Boundaries and now the Brookfield Sustainability Institute Luigi Ferrara talks about sustainability, why we are far away from it and what Brookfield is going to do to move it into the consciousness of communities.   Luigi Ferrara, Dean, Centre for Arts, Design and Information Technology, leads program development, partnerships and innovation centres that provide students with challenging and exciting real-world learning...

Chairman and CEO of Toronto’s Institute Without Boundaries and now the Brookfield Sustainability Institute Luigi Ferrara dives deep into how cities are being rebuilt and redesigned for sustainability and why Europe and Asia lead North American communities in this important area.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Craig Taylor, best-selling author of Londoners and, most recently, New Yorkers: A City and its People in Our Time. To tell the story of New York City post-9/11 and COVID, Craig lived in New York City for over 5 years and immersed himself in the city's extraordinary soup. New Yorkers is a series of interviews with 200 people from every class, race and corner of the city. Craig came away amazed at The Big...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Krista Nightengale, Executive Director at the Better Block Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to showing communities how to build a more walkable, bikeable, liveable neighborhood to improve quality of life and attract talent. Krista Nightengale is the Executive Director of the Better Block Foundation. She began her career at the city magazine in Dallas where she served as Managing Editor, Executive...

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina is one of America’s most trusted epidemiologists. She publishes Your Local Epidemiologist, a widely read website and newsletter covering a range of public health issues that translates evolving science into readable language for the general public. In this episode of The Intelligent Community, she discusses information integrity and the politics of COVID in places as diverse as New York and Florida.   Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD is an epidemiologist, data scientist and...

Now that COVID is no longer a global pandemic, what is it? And what is the lesson communities learned over the past 3 years? In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, Director of Population Health Analytics, to learn these answers and more.   Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD is an epidemiologist, data scientist and internationally renowned scientific communicator. She is the Director of Population Health Analytics, a nonprofit,...

Connectivity by itself adds little value – it is what people do with it that counts. Learn from communities that have leveraged their broadband assets for business retention and attraction, market differentiation, talent attraction for remote work and regional partnerships. Speakers Include: Tiffany Bower, Project Officer, Economic Development - Future Industries, Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia Ron Gaudet, President, Gaudet & Associates Rose Klukas, Economic Development Officer, City...

ICF Co-Founders Robert Bell, John Jung and Lou Zacharilla discuss current issues relating to broadband connectivity in our communities.