That is until Cisco and Living PlanIT, a tech start-up, announced that they had signed a letter of intent to collaborate in the creation of a model sustainable city for 150,000 people in Paredes, near Porto in northern Portugal, and to take the resulting technology to market, globally.
We are studying different business models (and their pilot projects) for creating better urban environments (aka "smart cities" or "eco-cities"). Living PlanIT is the first business model we have examined in depth. On June 28 one of us (Bob) attended an event in Paredes where an important deal between Living PlanIT and Cisco was announced. It's important because the imprimatur of Cisco, a leader in networking technology, means that Living PlanIT can now shift into execution mode and try to demonstrate that its co-founders' vision for creating a sustainable smart city can work.
Its co-founders, Steve Lewis and his Malcolm Hutchinson, aren't real estate developers; they're software guys. Both have impressive tech credentials. Steve held senior positions at IBM and Microsoft, and Malcolm was an entrepreneur who founded a software business. In our view, they have developed one of the most ambitious and potentially most viable business models for addressing the challenge and huge commercial opportunity created by the need for sustainable urbanization — which is why (full disclosure) Bob recently agreed to join its board of directors.
Unlike the real estate developers doing places like Masdar in Abu Dhabi, New Songdo City outside Seoul, and Dongtan in Shanghai (basically "green" real estate plays with a "let's build it and hope they come" approach), Living PlanIT's model is to create an ecosystem of large and small company partners that will focus on creating products and services for sustainable urbanization. The people that the partners bring in to produce those products and services will be the anchor occupants of the model city. The hope is that this activity will then attract other businesses and inhabitants.
The new city in Paredes will be the pilot and showcase. If it succeeds, Living PlanIT will then apply this model to build other new cities and retrofit existing ones all over the world.
For those of you who share our commitment to sustainable urbanization, we'd love to know:
- What do you see as the biggest risks to Living PlanIT's business model?
- What other sustainable urbanization experiments are going on out there that you find promising? What can we learn from them?
- What are the major similarities and differences in creating sustainable urban environments between the "new cities" and "urban retrofit" markets?
Robert G. Eccles is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and the author of the new book One Report: Integrated Reporting for a Sustainable Strategy. He is also a director on Living PlanIT's board of directors, all of whom are independent members. Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, where she and studies learning and collaboration in organizations. Her interest in sustainability and design date back to the 1980s, when she worked as chief engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller.
