What’s the best way to turn a city into a world class hub for high tech ?

Does a “build it and they will come” overnight approach really work? Or is it a process that can only happen organically over time?

Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s tiny, brash, billionaire mayor (personal 2011 net worth: $20 billion), is taking the first approach. He’s trying to turn the Big Apple into the next by offering up $100 million in city-owned land and infrastructure (for free) to build a two-million-square-foot high tech campus on Roosevelt Island, right in the heart of the city. Cornell University and Israel’s Technion Institute took the bait and are now developing the mega project together.

These New Yorkers aren’t fooling around: the campus’s first students are expected to start classes there by 2017, just five years from now. And Bloomberg is throwing some big numbers around, saying the plan could generate 600 startup companies which would in turn create another 30,000 jobs.

The Russians are on the same wavelength as Bloomberg. A similar venture is going on in sleepy Skolkovo, a town just outside Moscow where the Kremlin is building a sprawling facility to boost innovation in energy, IT, , biotech and atomic technologies. The Kremlin is being secretive about exact plans and dollars spent (the KGB legacy is hard to shake, I guess). But skeptics are wondering how startups spawned there will flourish when government corruption and criminal gangs still interfere so much in the nation’s business community.



Finally, some statistics on the impact of cybercrime in Canada!

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