Smarter Planet

“Building a smarter planet is realistic precisely because it is so refreshingly non-ideological. Yes, debates will continue to rage on many contentious issues in our society. … But no matter which viewpoint one shares—or which ultimately prevails in any given society or industry—the system that results will need to be smarter—more transparent, more efficient, more accessible, more equitable, more resilient.”

“When we talk about a Smarter Planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscious and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So, you could look at the planet as an information creation and transmission system—and the universe was hearing its information, but we weren’t. But increasingly now we can. Early days, baby steps days—but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us.”

“We shouldn’t undertake projects simply for the sake of creating economic activity. Rather than just stimulate, we should transform. Let’s seize this opportunity to create more and better jobs, cultivate valuable skills, and not simply repair but prepare our economy for the 21st century. The best news of all is that investing in innovation will cost less and yield faster results than investing in renovation.”

“The constituency we most appeal to has been the forward-thinker in everyone. … This is the basis of our Smarter Planet strategy. We are specifically and deliberately working to validate and stoke the optimism of forward-thinkers. We are saying to them—because we really believe it ourselves: ‘Your hopes for your industry, your city, your environment, your community are now within your grasp. This isn’t a metaphor. We can actually build a smarter planet.’”

“If you think there are a billion transistors to every human alive today, that gives you a feel of where technology’s got to. Everything’s connected. That technology allows us to get sensing out of almost anything in the built world. We’ve probably got enough technology today to sense every single grain of rice if we wanted to.”