Nearly 100 senior executives who develop and invest in public and private infrastructure gathered at the Ponte Vedra Club in Jacksonville for the recently held IoT6 Exchange conference on smart infrastructure and IoT. The event enabled them to share recent experiences in designing, developing and deploying the next generation of smart infrastructure systems.
Chris Rezendes, CBO at Context Labs and Spherical Analytics, served on the Advisory Board for the event, sat on the opening night keynote panel and delivered the post-lunch keynote speech on Wednesday afternoon (March 28th).
The key topics covered by the keynote panel included:
- Balancing privacy and service levels in public and private infrastructure rollouts
- Understanding the market value of data for private infrastructure developers interested in exploring "aftermarket exploitation opportunities" for their data.
- Bridging the many divides between subject matter experts, experienced operators and data scientists to maximize the potential for value creation within these infrastructure systems
In his talk on smart infrastructure Chris Rezendes shared past stories from the field when working with city/regional and state initiatives, academic and research institutional managers, investors, risk partners and other partners. His topics included:
- The need to integrate cyber-physical risk and climate risk management strategies into plans/tactics
- The need to prepare to share selected datasets with a growing amount of risk and finance partners, as well as internal and external operations and management partners
- The need to enhance the financial performance AND social impact results of public sector, non-profit and not-for-profit organizations to better position them to capture funding for these smart infrastructure programs
Spherical Analytics’ Message to Infrastructure Developers, Investors, Operators
One of the most valuable and unique aspects of the event was coined the "1:1 bazaar", where Chris and other advisors held "office hours" and met with many of the attendees to delve deep into their ideas, questions and possible collaborations.
Among the high-priority grand challenges that the groups discussed were:
- Climate risk
- Cyber-physical security risk
- Population health impact
- Economic development/redevelopment in relation to smart infrastructure
- Education and training demands, both immediate and long term
Deal flow was strong at this event as attendees were experienced operators who used their bandwidth to engage in live deal flow with new partners and discuss BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs and Timeline).
In addition to this level of engagement, another takeaway from the event is that it is becoming clearer that smart infrastructure opportunities below the city level (estate, campus, neighborhood) and above the city level (regional) might offer more opportunities sooner than city-based market segments.