Waterloo and Ottawa-Gatineau among top 7 intelligent communities in the world

Just read this article from IT World Canada about Waterloo and Ottawa-Gatineau being two of the top 7 intelligent communities in the world according to the New York-based Intelligent Community Forum (ICF). What are the characteristics of an "intelligent community"?
According to the ICF, they are broadband infrastructure, knowledge workforce, digital inclusion, innovation and finance, marketing and leadership. I did my Bachelors and Masters from University of Waterloo and I can definitely say that Waterloo shows innovation and technology expertise, it for sure resembles Silicon Valley North, which it has been named. Waterloo has great companies like Watcom, and of course, RIM. It has a first class university, namely University of Waterloo, and has the infrastructure and resources to help companies start and grow through UW Innovation, Waterloo's entrepreneurship program. When I was working at PARC over last summer, I could see how Waterloo kind of resembles Silicon Valley (Mountain View, Menlo Park, Sunnyvale, Stanford), with Stanford fueling the innovation and academic research and expertise. Just like Brin and Page that were from Stanford and started Google, Balsalie and Lazaris that were University of Waterloo students started RIM, so definitely are some parallels.

It would be interesting to do a comparison study of the two communities of Waterloo-Ottawa-Toronto and Silicon Valley and see what it is that makes the two same and different, and determine what are the factors involved. I remember Joey de Villa wrote a post about what Toronto needs to be in order to be considered Silicon Valley'ish.

On Technorati: Silicon Valley North, Silicon Valley, Waterloo