I have been thinking a lot lately about Smart Cities, Smart Shopping, Context Aware Computing, Smart Cars, Smart Health Care and future state industrial and sociological patterns.
Tech City, a technology and innovation cluster in Shoreditch in East London (aka Silicon Roundabout) recently launched the Tech City Map. This led me to thinking about Open Innovation and Smart Innovation Networks, or as I call it [SINNER – Smart Innovation Network: Neighbour Enabled Relationships]
[source: Steve Nimmons]
Smart Cluster
If a Smart Cluster (building on the vision of Tech City) could be manifested, how could Open Innovation and the construction and analysis of Social Networks yield better collaboration, higher success rates for investors and the creation of additional routes to market?
Combining the potential of a Smart Cluster, Open Innovation, the Big Society agenda and a ‘joint’ view of corporate social responsibility and sustainability in the geographical region of the physical cluster could yield more ‘joined up’ and positive societal outcomes.
Social Networks are not always Smart Networks, it is interesting to think to what extent therefore is there opportunity for network intelligence, the ability to prune, grow and discover ‘nodes’ of interest for connection.
Could it all be linked together using the Smart Cluster as a pattern to co-ordinate Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) across companies in the cluster to help drive localism, civic pride, regional development and the delivery of meaningful outcomes in the Big Society Agenda? Going to the extreme, could an umbrella ‘not for profit’ organisation sit over the cluster co-ordinating CSR and localism from the constituent parts below. This could be created as a social venture, with maybe even seed funding from the Big Society Bank.
