What is the Smarter Planet initiative about?
John Kennedy: Smarter Planet is IBM’s vision and point of view on dynamics in the world. It is more than just a point of view on the wider world, the economy and changes happening; it is also a point of view on how businesses, our clients, can use opportunities they have to out perform, and be more competitive, in what we are calling this new smarter world. At the macro level, it starts with the observation that we are living in a time of significant change. The economic dynamics are well understood, but there is another aspect of this, that three things are happening around us, they are all related, and a consequence of each other. The first, as in Thomas Friedman’s book, the world is getting flatter. That is a result of the proliferation of the Internet, the more connected society. As a function of that, the world is becoming smaller. Then there is a third key trend that is accompanying this – the world is also getting smarter. We don’t mean necessarily the millions of people enterin
