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The Intelligent Community Forum is a think tank that studies the economic and social development of the 21st Century community.  Whether in industrialized or developing nations, communities are challenged to create prosperity, stability and cultural meaning in a world where jobs, investment and knowledge increasingly depend on advances in communications.  For the 21st Century community, connectivity is a double-edge sword: threatening established ways of life on the one hand, and offering powerful new tools to build prosperous, inclusive and sustainable economies on the other.  ICF seeks to share the best practices of the world's Intelligent Communities in adapting to the demands of the Broadband Economy, in order to help communities everywhere find sustainable renewal and growth.

A winning knowledge management program increases staff productivity, product and service quality, and deliverable consistency by capitalizing on intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Many organizations leap into a knowledge management solution (e.g. document management, data mining, blogging, and community forums) without first considering the purpose or objectives they wish to fulfill or how the organization will adopt and follow best practices for managing its knowledge assets long term.

Futurists and innovators can teach each other lessons to help their ideas succeed. Innovators and futurists ought to have a symbiotic relationship. Often, they do not. The futurist aims to help us understand how trends and events will shape the future, so that we can chart our business and policy courses to bring us to a future that most appeals to us. The innovator, on the other hand, aims to realize a possible future by getting ideas (i.e., possibilities for the future) adopted as practice in our communities. Many would-be innovators ask in frustration, Why do my own good ideas often go by the wayside and other people's bad ideas get adopted? Why do I invest enormous time and resources to systematically generate new ideas, only to see much of my effort go to waste? Leaders in all fields fret and fume over these questions. They want to improve their innovation success rates. Increasing success and reducing wasted effort on the path to innovation are very important goals. Many people believe innovation is the key to economic development, technological progress, competitiveness, and business survival. Policies that enhance a nation's ability to be innovative are constantly in public discussion and are hot topics among politicians and business leaders. Futurists collaborating with innovators can contribute to these goals. I have been investigating these questions for many years and have learned many things that I wish I knew when I was younger. Based on these investigations, my colleague, Robert Dunham, and I wrote a book, The Innovator's Way (MIT Press, 2010, innovators-way.com). I will share here some excerpts from the book as a guide for innovators-and futurists-who are trying to get their ideas adopted.

Knowledge acquisition, its exchange, and communication within innovative technologies are the core research topics at the Knowledge Media Research Center in Tuebingen. Study matters are classic forms of teaching as well as in-class education in higher education and school domains, together with possibilities of learning in informal settings, as in museums, the internet and workspaces. A multidisciplinary team of highly trained scientists from cognitive and educational sciences, human behavioral sciences and social sciences is completed by experts from media technology and computer science. By cooperating closely with public and private institutions and by transferring research results into real world applications, the institute makes a substantial contribution to enable innovative media-based teaching and learning scenarios.

Welcome to the University of Exeter Innovation Centre - where we aim to provide a climate for innovation - creating a world-class, knowledge-based community for Exeter and its region. The Innovation Centre meets the diverse needs of high-growth, knowledge-based enterprise in a creative and professional environment - through the culture of innovation we can enable ambitious organisations to innovate and thrive.

"The disintermediation based on the digital technology has transformed different environments, from banking to media, education and sales. This paper explores a new kind of disintermediation or re-intermediation; also called cyberintermediation. The paper analyses how the revolution of information and communication technologies provides new alternatives of disintermediation in the generation and distribution of knowledge. The authors raise questions such as: To what extent is this phenomenon reshaping the traditional role of the university? Will it cause a crisis in the educational institutions? Will this disintermediation of the education evolve towards the disappearance of institutions like schools and universities? The researchers propose a table that integrates and recombines the knowledge generation and knowledge distribution dimensions with Boyer's key functions of scholarship. Finally, the concept of knowledge broker is introduced to enrich the discussion about reintermediation. Beyond the prophecies, which announce the "death of the university", the authors discuss and suggest new agents, actions and transactions that are useful to think about the educational institution of the new century".

Great things don't happen in a vacuum. But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you: gamestorming. This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. This unique collection of games encourages engagement and creativity while bringing more structure and clarity to the workplace.