Prof. Dr. Bruno Lanvin is the President of the IMDs Smart City Observatory and Executive Director for the Global Indices at INSEAD. His research focuses on various indexes, such as the Network Readiness Index, the Global Innovation Index, the Global Talent Competitiveness Index and the Smart City Index. In addition to his thirty years of international experience as an economist in the United Nations and at the World Bank, Dr Bruno Lanvin has been teaching and leading research projects in various universities in the US and Europe (Michigan State University, INSEAD, IMD). Since 2001, Dr Lanvin has co-authored the award-winning book ‘Sixteen Shades of Smart’ and the recently published ‘The Future is Young’.

It is evident, technology can also play an important role in smart cities. In India, until recently, there were many villages where you had to take a bus to get to a town 30 kilometres away. So you had to go to a place called a bus depot and then wait for the transfer, but you didn't know whether you would have to wait five minutes or four hours. The local government in India didn't have the money to increase the frequency of buses, but they introduced a relatively simple and inexpensive innovation: connecting bus stops to each other with wires. When the bus arrived at one stop, the next stop would indicate that the bus had just left that stop, and if that stop was an hour away, you could know you had to wait an hour. If the signal was for a bus that was three stops away, you could take care of other business during that time. So for us, this kind of technology was smart and didn't have to be very sophisticated, but it still improved people's lives. Prof. Lanvin and his colleagues built the smart city index on this foundation.

The professor also introduced the students to the three key factors for successful innovation: funding, people and markets. If any one of these is missing, we are like the French, who, when asked who invented the internet, say they did, but lacked a market. Using the examples of Estonia and Switzerland, he pointed out that it is not only big countries that can be successful in innovation. Switzerland has topped the global innovation index for years and the Estonians are responsible for international successes such as Bolt and Skype. The professor jokingly said that in Estonia they speak Estonian, but it is very close to Finnish. Cultural identity and cooperation with this much larger economy had been working for some time, and Skype had broken down the last barriers to cooperation between people from different countries speaking a similar language, as they had found a common language, which was nothing other than coding.

After the lecture, Prof. Lanvin also took time to sit down with MCC students to discuss the 2022 MCC Smart City Challenge project.

Agenda:

16:30 – 16:35: Introduction of Prof. Bruno Lanvin by Zoltán Cséfalvay

16.35 – 17:10: Keynote of Prof. Bruno Lanvin: Smart City and Innovation