I asked myself: “What could we (as a community) do to help create jobs, improve the economy and generally make the world a little bit better?” I asked my friends and colleagues. I spoke with business leaders and academics. I even interviewed a few politicians and professional public servants and we created The Digital Leadership Academy™.
The Digital Leadership Academy™ is an international membership organization dedicated to fostering global digital leadership through advances in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It identifies and promotes technological advances across disciplines and across professional and geographic boundaries, and builds connections between institutions and individuals. Its mission is to inspire and promote creative applications of STEM disciplines in all industries by convening meetings of the world’s most accomplished digital leaders from business, academia and public service.
It’s a first step, and you can learn more about it at www.digitalleadershipacademy.org
This is brand new and, like so many start-ups, it’s going to need a lot of help – your help. We have some extraordinary inaugural members, and we will be publishing a list on the website soon. We are planning to have new members elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and continuing achievements. But, these are early days, so if you want to get involved, just let me know and we’ll find a job for you to do.
To help build awareness, The Digital Leadership Academy™ will bestow the 2012 Digital Leadership Awards™, which will honor senior executives, artists, educators, government officials and public servants who have demonstrated outstanding achievement in the conception, creation and execution of digital initiatives. With any luck, this will become an annual event.
This year The 2012 Digital Leadership Awards™ will take place on October 11th at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in NYC during the Media Technology Summit 2012. If you know a great digital leader or someone who has significantly contributed to the success of an exemplary digital initiative, please nominate them.
STEM is not well defined here in the United States and it is sometimes difficult to get everyone to agree on what it encompasses – this is actually good news. When you broadly define STEM education and initiatives, you properly position yourself to help lead your personal community of interest into the future.
To paraphrase Ray Kurzweil, we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate) because the pace of technological change is exponential.
According to Brian David Johnson, Intel’s Futurist, by 2015, there will be 3 billion people will be online worldwide; by 2020, Intel projects that number will increase to 4 billion. And, to top it off, according to Cisco Systems, by 2015, there will be over 15 billion connected devices worldwide.
What does it all mean?
In this case, Metcalfe’s Law is both instructive and predictive. It states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. You can express this observed law as n(n − 1)/2. Even if this formula overstates the mathematical relationship between the number of connected devices and value, you can rest assured that more connections will result in extraordinary behavioral change. And, as I often say, technology is meaningless unless it changes the way we behave.
As we become more dependent on our digital devices and our networks, we will see a dramatic increase in opportunity for those who understand how to harness the technology. This will lead to a better economy and more jobs. Also, empowered with this knowledge, we each have the potential to make the world a little bit better. That is the overarching goal of The Digital Leadership Academy™. I hope that you will get involved because, as Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”