Techonomy Detroit

Techonomy Detroit takes place tomorrow. It is Techonomy's first one day event designed to look at how technology can help address the US's most challenging problems and featuring a keynote address by the founder of Twitter and Square, Jack Dorsey. I really enjoyed this Forbes article answering why Techonomy decided upon Detroit as the host city, "We created Techonomy Detroit because we see a set of urgent issues for this city and the country that all of us need to better understand."

But we at Techonomy—and our speakers—believe we are in an era of technology breakthroughs that can enable any community to make rapid progress—if it embraces them. These tools can absolutely be applied in Detroit, or anywhere, to make a dramatic difference—faster than most recognize. That’s the message we hope to convey this coming Wednesday at the conference at Wayne State University. We see promising advances in education, health care, manufacturing, business structure and management, finance, entrepreneurship, urban planning, and yes even in transportation, Detroit’s historic strength.

While working in Africa, I was inspired by the amount of innovation using new technologies to address the continent's most urgent problems, particularly the problems of those at the bottom of the pyramid. It's disappointing to not see that as much in the states. Maybe it's happening here more than I think but probably not. The author makes a good point that even within the platforms and dialogues of our political parties there's a worrying lack of focus on technology and its capacity to rapidly solve problems. I'm happy to find a conference highlighting this; especially in Detroit, where the nation's most complex problems so clearly reveal themselves.