Easy to Stay, Hard to Leave: Municipal Design Using Platform Strategies and Specialization
Easy to Stay, Hard to Leave: Municipal Design Using Platform Strategies and Specialization
Thinking about municipalities as platforms opens a new line of thinking about how any place, big or small, can thrive.
Everything falls before the force that is digital transformation. Nothing survives unchanged. Newspaper publishers aside, that is largely a good thing: digital transformation improves our understanding of the world by orders of magnitude and dramatically increases the rate of human progress.
Digital transformation might be more impactful geopolitically than on industry because the effect on municipal, regional and national existence is so pervasive. Employment, education, health care, transportation, security, environment - naming any walk of civic life unaffected by digital transformation is an unenviable task.
At the municipal level, the term “city as a platform” has been around for a while. Big companies have paid attention; Google parent company Alphabet launched Sidewalk Labs years ago. The premise is that digital transformation in the form of internet of things (IoT) applications and an overall focus on measurement and technological progress leads to economic future proofing - and greater outcomes for citizens. It’s a socially responsible approach with the right idea at its heart: make people’s lives better.
The platform line of thinking.
In software development, the term "platform" raises useful ideas for municipalities. One is uniqueness. Your smartphone is not your friend’s smartphone in any meaningful way: the cluster of apps you each use will overlap to a degree but the content of those apps, how you use them, which apps you pay to upgrade and which you use for free makes your phone a foreign object in your friend’s hands. For smartphone manufacturers the platform strategy is a massive home run. Not only do you as a consumer desire a smartphone for the particular way you want to use it - which drives demand and usage - but your myriad upgrades open up new revenue streams. Hard to put down and produces multiple sources of revenue - not a bad little business!
In light of digital transformation, it is uniqueness and multiple sources of revenue that makes the platform analogy so powerful when applied to municipalities and even to nations. It goes beyond IoT, it goes beyond optimizing transit times and real time infrastructure monitoring. And it opens a path to sustainable, meaningful citizen happiness.
The smartphone’s components.
Let’s flesh out the municipal smartphone platform analogy and put it to work. At its most basic level, a smartphone has four groups of components:
Chassis - the casing enclosing hardware components
Hardware - touch screen, battery, camera, logic board, earpiece speaker assembly etc.
Operating system - backbone and interface governing hardware, software and end user applications
Applications (apps) - programs designed to run on mobile devices, e.g. mapping, social media, video, productivity, leisure, commerce
The chassis, hardware and operating system are the foundation upon which apps are installed, and the apps which make each smartphone a unique and personal user experience. Without apps the smartphone has a lot of sophisticated but inaccessible features. Powerful but uninteresting. With the apps, the smartphone exerts its full capabilities - an incredibly useful platform around which so much of modern life is centred.
Applying the smartphone analogy.
You see where this is going. The chassis is the city, country, or region (state, province etc.) It is your geopolitical unit of measure. The hardware and operating system together comprise critical infrastructure like the electrical grid, transportation network, ICT, and government services like fire, policing and medical. They are what flicks on the proverbial lights and turns up the heat. Chassis, hardware and OS together are geopolitical built environment building blocks.
So, what are the apps in this analogy? What are the things that make living in a given municipality a home run? What makes it compelling to citizens, businesses, investors? What creates that sense of community and wellbeing, and drives economic prosperity? What shifts a place into a happiness, hope and prosperity platform for citizens?
Over the course of dozens of interviews the basics are obvious: the apps are the key places, resources and tools that make a place feel like home. Schools, public entertainment spaces like rinks and libraries, even the local geography matters in terms of place. Resources include the local government, business, and labour. Business improvement areas and accelerators provide key parts of the toolset.
What’s missing are measures of effectiveness, happiness or resilience. That is, how good are these apps? Because if the apps aren’t special what’s to stop someone from switching smartphones, i.e. moving to a different place? What’s also missing is design. It’s one thing to have a library, university and main street, it’s entirely another for them to be integrated and networked — where people flow naturally between places, conveniently supported by local resources and tools.
Toronto’s UHN and MaRS.
An excellent large scale example of this is the co-location of Toronto’s University Health Network and MaRS Discovery District. UHN comprises “4 world-leading hospitals, 7 state-of-the-art research institutes and affiliated with the University of Toronto, and is the “fastest growing medical commercialization centre in North America.” Meanwhile, MaRS is North America’s largest urban innovation hub, housing some 1400 cleantech, health, fintech and enterprise software companies occupying 1.5 million square feet of space.
Together UHN and MaRS represent the benefits of economic complexity: a growing and potentially massive sustainable innovation ecosystem designed to encourage the collision of ideas, specialized talent and invention upon which a modern economy depend.
The smartphone analogy meets municipal specialization.
One interviewee referred to this collision of digital transformation and municipal forward thinking as “Apple-ization.” Another noted that while the presence of a university or college makes a very big difference, that’s a far cry from saying cities and towns can’t compete without them.
Therein lies a key potential antidote to the traditional talent exodus problems smaller towns stare down year after year. Revisiting the smartphone-municipality analogy: who are the app developers? They’re the local leaders charged with designing their municipality for and with their fellow citizens. What do they need and how should they think about the future so that they can build an attractive and resilient platform for and with their fellow citizens? In its paper, Kinetic Cities: The Future of Municipalities, Deloitte suggests designing nimbleness, scalability, stability and optionality into strategic planning, with leaders practicing the traits of courage, agility, resiliency and empowerment.
In practice, cities and towns are the specialized product of decades of complex social and economic interactions. Using the platform analogy, every municipality supplies its own unique chassis, hardware and operating system which local leadership brings to life via the apps they build.
Take it from one of the great business strategists, Harvard’s Michael Porter: “The worst mistake in strategy … is to compete with your competitors on the same thing. You want to find a different kind of value that you can deliver to a different set of customers. Strategy is fundamentally about how you’re going to deliver unique value.”
What it means to live in the ideal place is invariably an eye-of-the-beholder subject. But forward-thinking municipal leaders have design and digital tools at their disposal to create truly attractive social and economic cases appealing to those who want what their place offers. Their platform—and the apps they build with them—is unique. This is the home run: easy to stay, hard to leave and produces multiple sources of revenue—not a bad little place!
