A Smart City needs to be a connected city, but a “Smarter” city knows how and when to connect. Hong Kong is far from being connected. Now is time to connect our Smart Citizens with Smart Global Experts, and contribute to grounding our Smart City. Through a series of half-day talks each month, Invotech with our supporting partners brings the world of innovation and technology to Hong Kong and exposes Hong Kong to the world. Invotech has invited visionaries and practitioners to ground our discussions on making Hong Kong a ‘real’ Digital Hub, if not for the One Belt One Road, at least for the Greater Bay Area.

Master facilitators of the Series are Prof. Gregg Li and Fletcher Ng. The April workshop is about digital transformation for Hong Kong’s industries.

Join us, to co-learn, co-play, co-explore, collaborate, and co-create. Let’s make Hong Kong into a more competitive city, and let’s have fun upgrading the quality of living while we become smarter.

Prioritising Hong Kong’s smart city ambitions is essential for the city to drive its next stage of development. Reinventing this city as a digital hub could help achieve this – transforming it into a place that is faster, more aware of itself, and with a higher quality of life and more opportunities for its citizens. Should HK aim to lead in R&D of selected technologies or be a vibrant hub of businesses by leveraging technologies? There are advocates on both sides. There are obvious strengths for HK to be a digital trading hub, especially given China’s One Belt One Road and the Pearl River Delta Region initiative?

This talk will come from an angle of economic development for a prospective smart city like Hong Kong by looking at the market of Digital Flows-- a framework recently advanced by McKinsey as well as the prolific writer Thomas Friedman. Both Hong Kong and China have performed superbly in this framework and recorded enormous economic gains. World trends in the 21st century such as the emergence of developing countries and the rise of their middle class and urbanization point to cities and megacities being the norm. Rapid advent and easy access to information & communication technologies (ICT) make up for the soft infrastructure toward “smart cities”. But many paths abound for cities to be “smart”. Now that we have a blueprint for Hong Kong, how best can we walk this path?

The Digital Flows market is an expansion from the trade of goods and services that HK is already successful in. One road ahead for HK is to continue to build the lead in the Digital Flows market as a major hub for both regional and international flows. This market is suitable for applications-oriented businesses and therefore suitable for entrepreneurial small & media enterprises that can leverage the amply available ICT. This road is certainly viable as an alternative to the conventional science & technology-based ecosystem model.

For more details, please visit https://mailchi.mp/0e6f2007af9b/smarter-hong-kong-2018-series-2634103