ISSIP members Arnold Beekes and Haluk Demirkan recently had an email exchange on the role of ISSIP SIG Education and Research whitepapers and practical projects… inspired by their exchange, I offered the following additional thoughts…
I was re-reading your sequence of email exchanges, about purpose of white-papers and practical projects, and had a couple thoughts.
As you know Detroit just filed for bankruptcy, the largest in US history ($18B in debt, and a fraction (less than 50%) of previous population).
SIG Whitepapers are good to produce because as new members join the SIG they can come up to speed quickly.
SIG Projects are good to produce real world outcomes that demonstrate a change in the world.
Since our primary SIG is Education and Research, and our sub-SIG activity of Smarter Cities is just getting started it make sense to think about how to align them.
The original thought I had was to include Smarter City cases in the Service Science courses taught at universities. Cities are a great source of data for urban service system innovation, and a great source of faculty/student projects with local government and industry collaborators.
So I was originally thinking about urban service innovation data sets and courses, and project work for students, faculty, local government, and industry.
How does the following sound to you:
The purpose of the sub-SIG activity of Smarter Cities, as part of the ISSIP SIG Education and Research is five-fold:
– Invite SIG new member speakers from IBM, Cisco, HP, etc. working on smarter city projects that can be cases in a service science related course
– Rough sketch a faculty lecture on Smarter Cities as part of Service Science related courses – stakeholders, trends, cases, and relationship to service science concepts and principles
– Develop a set of example student projects with their local cities, encourage local government and industry mentors who are ISSIP members
– ISSIP Student Members can build their “personal brand” by working on such Smarter Cities projects as part of their service science related courses
– Create a set of ten exemplar projects that student teams could replicate in cities around the world, with academic/industry/government ISSIP mentors
Here is a first cut list of ten student projects including Arnold’s suggest as the 11th Grand Challenge Project
1. For cities in crisis/bust mode (e.g., “Detroit”) produce a smart phone app dashboard to monitor the city vital signs
2. For cities in growth/boom mode (e.g., formerly “Dubai”) produce a smart phone app dashboard to monitor city vital signs
3. Project to study strongest and weakest cities around the world
4. Project to study city flows: transportation & people, water/waste, materials, energy, information – from service innovation perspective (e.g., circular economy)
5. Project to study city human development: buildings & construction, hospitality & retail/entertainment & culture, business & finance, health, educaiton
6. Project to study city government: nested, networked nature of governance from individual households up to city up to nation and continental region
7. Project to create more citizen participation in local government and community activities
8. Project to identify faculty who teach urban sciences and how it relates to service science courses
9. Review and report on top industry initiatives aimed at cities – is their an analyst report that should be part of service science courses?
10. Explore SPLASH and other modeling platforms for holistic service systems, design and implement a world simulators for global cities
11. Grand challenge project:
“We could ‘build’ a new city together, or we could renovate an existing city (Detroit??), while applying the latest and greatest of service science.”
Again, I see the purpose of the whitepaper just to document a snap-shot of some thinking that will help us recruit new members in this area, bring them up to speed rapidly, and then encouraging student-mentoring professional development relationships that can help apply service science to innovation cities as holistic service systems…
Student-mentoring for example is what I am doing now related to Service Thinking applied to IBM Social Business with Hult Students –
https://service-science.info/archives/3084
https://service-science.info/archives/3099
It would be great to have an industry mentor work with a City-Topic and set of university students to do applied projects that other ISSIP members could contribute to or replicate in other regions around the world.
Hope this set of replications is helpful and illustrates the relationship that might exist between ISSIP SIG Whitepapers and ISSIP SIG Projects (especially student-industry-mentor projects) – I am sure there is a lot more for ISSIP to learn about how to do applied projects in the best win-win-win-win-win ways… for all stakeholders – students-faculty-industry-government-ISSIP.
The best way to predict the future is to inspire the next generation of students to build it better.