Resources for Cities

• How to reinvent a city: Mayors’ lessons from the Smarter Cities Challenge- A white paper that summarizes advice from city leaders who worked with IBM
• IBM Smarter Cities Challenge- A reference site of 100 cities worldwide organized by issue areas including: Administration, Citizen Engagement, Economic Development, Education & Workforce, Environment, Public Safety, Social Services, Transportation and Urban Planning
• IBM SmartCloud Enterprise
• IBM Institute of Electronic Government
• The Smarter City Interactive Experience
• Case Studies: IBM Smarter Planet Leadership Series  
• Smarter Cities for Smarter Growth
• The Center for the Business of Government

Martin Duggan of IBM speaks at the Congress of Cities 2012 on the Early Adopter Program for Outcomes Management Software

Corporate Citizenship

The primary focus of IBM Corporate Citizenship and Community Affairs activities is building a smarter planet through initiatives that address specific societal issues, such as the environment, community economic development, education, health, literacy, language and culture. We employ the most valuable resources from IBM, our technology and talent, in order to create innovative programs in these areas to assist local communities and those around the world. A few examples are:

• Our Corporate Service Corps program annually deploys teams of selected high- potential employees to emerging regions to work with government, nonprofit and non-governmental organizations on critical local projects. Teams have completed projects in Ghana, Romania, Tanzania, the Philippines and Vietnam around water quality, disaster preparedness and project management.
• Our World Community Grid initiative utilizes grid computing technology to harness the tremendous power of idle computers to perform specific computations related to critical research around complex biological, environmental and health-related issues. The current projects include Help Fight Childhood Cancer, Clean Energy, and Nutritious Rice for the World, FightAIDS@Home, Help Conquer Cancer, AfricanClimate@Home, and a genomics initiative and research on Dengue Fever.
• Another example of our citizenship activities is our employee volunteer initiative, entitled On Demand Community. Since 2003, over 145,000 employees and retirees have registered and performed over 10 million hours of volunteer service around the world. This program equips our employee and retiree volunteers with a distinct set of on demand tools based on the successful technology solutions created exclusively by IBM for schools, community agencies and not-for-profits.

To learn more about our IBM corporate responsibility efforts, please visit Innovations in Corporate Responsibility. For more information on IBM Corporate Citizenship and Community Affairs please visit: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ibmgives/

More about the company: Cities are the focal points for the transformation from the traditional "bricks-and-mortar" drivers of economic growth to an economy based on "brains and creativity." Competitive differentiation today is more likely to be based on the ability of the workforce to create and absorb skills and innovation than on traditional drivers such as available resources or manufacturing prowess. In the immediate future cities will play a much larger role in talent-based economic development.

The IBM extensive portfolio of solutions and implementation assets - continually refined in engagements with clients around the world -- can help cities compete in this new economic environment. Our government industry framework can help apply advanced information technology, analytics and systems thinking to develop a more citizen-centric approach to services. In doing so, cities can better attract, create, enable and retain their citizens' skills, knowledge and innovation while driving transformative change, improving organizational accountability, and reducing risk. 

IBM adds value, leveraging the unparalleled resources of the entire IBM Corporation, including IBM Research, the Center for the Business of Government, the Institute for Electronic Government and a global network of strategic relationships.