Building Innovation Competency in City Leaders | Dr. Jonathan Reichental

Hi, everyone. I'm Jonathan Reichental, and I'm just thrilled to be with you in Miami. Although virtually many people don't know this, but when I immigrated to the United States almost 25 years ago from Ireland, I came to Miami and I lived on south beach for almost two years before then moving up to Tampa Bay on the west coast of Florida, where I stayed for quite a while. And then about 10 years ago, I moved over here to Silicon Valley in California. So in a way, I would love to be there with you in person and back to my old stomping ground. Hopefully after this pandemic ends, I will make it out there again. So I'm really thrilled to be speaking to you. My talk today is about how do we build an innovation mindset so that city leaders can really drive change and create the kind of future cities that we all want. So that's what I'm going to talk about here in the brief time we have together. Let's talk about some of the challenges that our cities currently have. And there are a lot. This is a big, big topic, but I've noticed that there are a few major categories that every city is having challenges with. And one of them, of course, is congestion, is traffic, is the problems with transportation. You know, for the last few decades and probably more, we have been building cities around the automobile instead of cities around people. That's problem number one. But cars, while they've been amazingly successful in so many ways, they are also causing a lot of issues. They are spewing out a lot of carbon that's heating up our environment and creating a part of the reason, part of the rationale for what's creating the climate emergency that we're going through. They also cause accidents. Unfortunately, 1.4 million people die in car accidents every year and many millions are injured. So we have challenges there in transportation. Unfortunately, it's one of the areas that's actually changing quite a lot. It's in a state of remarkable innovation. Our cities have been really successful over the last couple of hundred years. They've brought millions, in fact, billions of people out of extreme poverty. And they've enabled more people to have access to things like education and better health care and more economic opportunities. But it's come at a price. It's come at the price of our environment and many other aspects. For example, in order to produce the high quality of life that many of us have in the urbanized world, a lot of pollution is spewed into the air and into our waterways. In fact, the World Health Organization maintains that about 2 million people are die each year, either directly or indirectly because of air quality. So we need to solve that problem in our communities. And you know, we live in consumer societies. We are purchasing and processing lots of products all the time. And unfortunately it's creating a lot of waste. And we haven't quite figured out on a broad basis how to manage all of this waste. You can see the product of that here in this image. We also know that we have fallen in love with plastic. And in the center of the Pacific there's an area the size of France that is just saturated with little beads of plastic that the fish eat and then we eat. And that can't be good for us. We need to solve the problem of waste management that's created from our cities. We also noticed that while our cities have brought billions of people out of extreme poverty and have been quite successful, we also have to admit very quickly that we failed in many areas. Or another way to think about it is we still have significant challenges to solve and we have to have an innovation mindset for that. For example, in our big cities and even our little and medium sized cities, we are not providing an equal quality of life to everybody. Yes, it's obvious. I know that's an obvious statement, but it's worth calling out and elevating it to a priority. Our societies are not also inclusive. Not everybody succeeds in the models we have today and in the urban environments we have today. We have to work hard, we have to make this a priority for sure and, and ensure that more people, every type of human being, can prosper and create societies that are inclusive and more equal. That's the right thing to do. The existential crisis of our times and will be with us for the next many decades is the climate Crisis. Today over 600 cities are on coastlines around the world, 650 approximately of our cities are based on a coastline somewhere and that they house about close to 1.5 billion human beings. And as the sea level rises, which we know it is, we have a scientific consensus on this now, these coastal cities may really struggle in the years ahead. And this is really relevant for Florida and really relevant for Miami, where when I was there 25 years ago, flooding happened occasionally and where there were big rainstorms, which I was very familiar with. The rain was settled for a while, but eventually drained off. And today the news and the research I've done shows that there is a lot of flooding a lot of the time. And that water that comes after torrential rain, it doesn't easily flow away anymore. So you're seeing the evidence, you're seeing it with your own eyes, that the climate crisis within cities is a challenge that we've created there and can be solved there. Okay, now let's get more down to earth. When many people think of what our cities look like and how they interact with them, how they feel about them, they think of this, they think of bureaucracy and they think of inefficient systems. And, you know, a lot of the time they'd be right. Unfortunately, cities and governments in general have not been at the leading edge of innovation again, that's why we need more of an innovation mindset, because it's those mindsets, that leadership skill, those people that say, we want to collaborate, we want to be open minded, we want to be creative, those are the ones that are pushing the needle forward and changing the game. They're creating cities that are no longer just analog like this, but cities that are now digital. Cities present us with a massive digital transformation opportunity that you will see in a few moments is worth trillions of dollars. We can move from a world that looks largely like this today, all around the world in our cities, to, to a world of efficient services where people can, when they have the moment and the convenience, get on their smartphone or their laptop or their smartwatch and interact with government in a much more optimized way. It's a win, win for everybody. Now when we look at the different opportunities for innovating for an innovation mindset, what's great about the smart city movement, it's so diverse. It includes things like health and education and public safety and our buildings and waste management and energy and digitalization. It's just an incredible space to be part of because you can just choose one of these areas that you're interested in and you can have a career and do amazing things and change the game in, in just those areas. Or you can choose to be more of a generalist and bring new ideas to multiple areas of our cities. So if you want to see the other items here, I just thought I'd move away for you. So you can see the other items there. There they are. So where does that leave us? Well, I've really presented a high level view of some of the major challenges that we are facing right now and will face increasingly in the future. And this presents not only an opportunity to do the right thing, to innovate and solve these problems, make transportation a more pleasant experience and less impactful to the planet, to have societies that are more inclusive, to Be able to produce and consume clean, abundant energy and to digitalize all these inefficient services. Wow. I look at that as opportunity. I don't look at that as an overwhelming problem. I look at that as how can we get into this and fix it? And Frost and Sullivan just in the last few weeks have spoken about the opportunity and they believe it's worth about $2.46 trillion. $2.46 trillion by 2025. By 2025. Right. Which is just four years away, based on when I'm doing this short presentation. So if we can get into a mindset of innovation and groom that in our city cultures, we will move the needle forward. We will change the game and, and improve the lives of millions and millions of people. Let's look at how some of this is happening right here. You have, on one side of my screen, you have New York City just a few years ago, which was dominated by buses and cars and people running in every single direction. And then the mayor, working with his team, had an idea. And for a short period of time, they said, what would happen if we pedestrianized Times Square like you see right here? Or what would happen if we made it available just for people? If we made the city back, gave the city back to people and took it away from cars? What would happen? That is a creative mindset. Right? That's the beginning of thinking differently. You are open minded to creativity. By the way, it was tough because the bus drivers, the truck drivers, the cab drivers didn't want this to happen. They fought it. They said, we can't do this because the traffic will be worse and more inefficient. And you know what's really interesting? When they ran the data on this, the traffic actually improved in Manhattan after they pedestrianized it. And the idea was so welcomed that it is now permanent. It wouldn't have happened without opening everyone's mind by having this bold idea and by leading through it. When we look at some of our city issues, they seem intractable. Right? Let's go back a couple of decades or more to Los Angeles, the great City of Angels. And people, some of you might remember that if you looked at downtown Los Angeles from a distance, it had a cloud of smog over it, terrible smog, and you could barely see it. And today Los Angeles has very little smog. And it's clearer. How did that happen? How did that happen? Well, it happened because of an innovation mindset. First of all, it was about leadership. Let's solve the problem. Let's lead. Despite how intractable it is. It was about thinking differently. How do we solve the problem? What is required? Entrepreneurship. Let's engineer solutions. So you have things like conversion from leaded fuel to unleaded gasoline. Then you had the engineering qualities, so you moved from, away from the catalytic converter. Sorry, you put the, you implemented the catalytic converter so that you could get this cleaner air which was being produced by the fumes from vehicles. So a whole series of different qualities there that went into making this happen. When we look out now, the next few years and decades, we are at the beginning of an energy revolution, an energy revolution where we're moving from carbon based energy to non carbon. We're moving from oil, gas and coal to solar and wind and thermal and nuclear and hydro. We're not going to be totally away from it anytime soon. There will be a mix. But hopefully the clean energies, the non carbons, will start to dominate over the carbon based energy again. This requires leadership. It requires tough discussions with your community. It requires some risky investment. These are the qualities of a leader's innovation mindset. We know now that there are new technologies that are coming out that allow us to do things we can't currently do, like the Internet of things. Being able to put these little devices all over our cities and they can do things like check the quality of air, they can look for open parking spaces, they can count traffic and they can help with public safety as long as we respect privacy and we don't create a surveillance society. What does this require from the leader? It requires leader to be educated on new technology and to be open minded to the use of new technology. So there's more qualities, right? Open mindedness and the ability to experiment and take risks and to learn about the new technologies. There's several. What happens when you do that? Well, you get completely new solutions for your city. Here we go back to Manhattan again and in New York there were a lot of phone booths, as you know, about 22,000 is my understanding. And of course they weren't being used anymore because everybody has a smartphone or some sort of cell phone. And so some smart person stepped up with an innovation mindset and said we don't need those anymore. What do we do with, what do we do with these spaces? Well, they have a footprint and they have power and they have telecommunications. So they replace them. And they're in the process of replacing thousands of them now with digital signs just like this that are free WI fi. You can make free calls. It has information on it for, for city participants and you can use it for advertising. All of it is in a way that is a sustainable business model. Let's open up our minds again. Our city landscape is going to look different soon. We'll be incorporating robots. Here you see a robot that is actually acting as a security officer in a parking lot. Are we ready for that? Are we open minded enough? We're going to see the emergence of drones in a big way in the years ahead. Drones in the sky, delivering things, and drones on the ground as well. It's already happening in some communities. It's happening in some communities because those leaders are inviting innovation. They're inviting it in. They're asking, come into our community, experiment with us, collaborate with us. Let's see what's possible. And almost last but not least, one of the greatest transformations we are going to see in our urban communities over the next few decades is going to be the emergence of autonomous vehicles. It's often said that the most disruptive technology of the first 50 years of the 21st century is going to be self driving vehicles. And sure they are coming. And eventually we won't be able to drive. Cars will drive themselves and they will look different and they will behave differently. And then we can do things like not have lanes or not have traffic signals and not even have to have the grid system. We will need to be open minded and ready to make bold bets on that. And I never thought in my lifetime that I would be an investor in a flying car company. But flying cars are coming, not for everybody. And I don't think they'll be owned. They'll be more like an Uber where they're on demand, but they'll be expensive. They won't be for everybody. And their ownership will be out of the range for most because the economics don't seem to make sense anytime soon. But it won't stop flying cars from populating our urban environments in the future. Now let me summarize some of the things we've talked about today. I painted a picture of the challenges we have and just a small amount, a small amount. There are a lot of challenges, but if we get them right and some cities have shown where they can do it right, everybody rises to a better quality of life. And that's what it's about at the end of the day, that people have a better quality of life. Now, the innovation mindset to make this happen. We talked about all the new tech that's coming, all the transformation that's coming. Some cities will go fast, some will be slow and some will be laggards who don't move quickly at all and their communities don't see the benefits. So we have to start to move people along in a positive, progressive fashion. And that's going to require qualities like curiosity. Have curiosity. Include everyone in the conversation. Include as many people as possible from all of your community, children and students and retired people and organizations. Include people from the region and even people outside the region. Collaborate and create partnerships. Right. Have the courage to do it an innovation mindset requires courage. Of course, if it was easy, everybody would do it. You need to experiment and I showed you many experiments in my short presentation and how some of them actually amounted to great results. They won't always work. You will have failures and that's part of the courage part. Right? And finally, you have to have leadership that's committed to innovation and an innovation mindset. My time is almost up, so I just wanted to say as I wrap here, if you like this topic and you're intrigued by it, you can check out my best selling book on this. It's called Smart Cities for Dummies. It's not just for dummies. It's for everybody. It's for city leaders. It's for vendors. It's for community members. It's for universities. It's a remarkably generalized textbook or guidebook that so many people can appreciate. So go to www.smartcitybook.com and you can buy it any anywhere in the world. If there's a city or a place where you are where you can't get it, I will send it to you. I will sign a copy and send it to you and you'll see a link for that in smart citybook.com so that's it for me. I just had a short amount of time. I wish you all the very best. I hope there was one or two insights here which were useful to you. I wish you all the very best. Thank you very much.