Ambassador David H. Thorne Opens the Digital Economy Forum at the Palazzo della Biennale in Venice
The U.S. Ambassador Thorne
The U.S. Ambassador at the Digital Economy Forum
Palazzo della Biennale, Venice
May 11, 2011
Benvenuti al Digital Economy Forum. Sono lieto di vedervi qui oggi, e vorrei cogliere l’occasione per ringraziare i numerosi e generosi sponsor americani, italiani ed europei che, con il loro contributo, hanno reso possibile la realizzazione di questo importante evento. Il loro sostegno e la loro collaborazione dimostrano l’importanza che essi conferiscono all’economia digitale per la crescita delle delle loro aziende e per l’Italia stessa.
Over the past several months, many people have wondered why the U.S. Embassy would organize a two-day Forum to help Italian businesses discuss how the digital world can help them grow. The answer is simple. There is no hidden agenda. I believe that the digital economy is important to America’s future and Italy’s future alike for economic growth, for job creation, and for our continued ability to compete globally. Italy is a strong friend and economic partner to the U.S., and we wanted to bring together experts and entrepreneurs from America and Europe to exchange ideas about how our businesses can take advantage of digital technologies to grow and innovate.
Digital technologies enable companies to be faster and better, and creating a more robust digital ecosystem in Italy is good for Italian businesses and ours as well. The digital economy is well suited to the small and medium enterprises that form the backbone of Italy’s economy. The Internet enables them to extend their market reach and increase revenue streams, while cloud computing can help companies reduce costs and enhance their technical capacity.
In the past two years, the use of online social networks in Italy has exploded, showing that Italians clearly have a desire to be online. But in terms of investment in the digital economy, I believe Italy has yet to fully embrace the potential of this new economic ecosystem. This affects every industry, as IT investment has become critical to competitiveness throughout the economy. Italy has great digital potential, but that potential needs to be encouraged in order to increase growth for existing companies and provide fertile ground for digital start-ups to take root.
Just as importantly, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was in Rome last week, and the U.S. State Department are working to promote greater Internet access and open information flow on the Internet worldwide. Information and collaboration are key drivers of innovation, and the Internet enables both of those. At the same time, we recognize the need to address privacy concerns and to protect intellectual property rights.
Personally, I am very interested in this sector and have been involved in Internet ventures that have fundamentally changed the way news is reported and how political campaigns are executed. I have partaken of the rise and fall of the dot.coms and follow very closely the start-up world.
This Forum is the U.S. Embassy’s way of engaging Americans, Italians, and other Europeans in a dialogue about how all of us can remain strong economies. It is the beginning of what I hope will be a continuing conversation between us, all of you here, and private industry.
Now I would like to focus a little on the opportunities and challenges that the digital world provides. Unlike some of you in this room, I remember the days of rotary telephones and can recall the advent of the personal computer and working on my Apple II Now we breathe the Internet, and soon we will be living in the “cloud.” Some claim that the rate of change we have witnessed in the past century will be dwarfed by the velocity of change to come. In his new book, Why the West Rules For Now, noted scholar Ian Morris argues that the in the next century, we will realize four times the amount of change that humankind witnessed in its first 150,000 years. I’m not sure I can keep up with the pace of change now! In the past decade our vocabularies have expanded to include smart systems, wiki, crowdsourcing, augmented reality, net neutrality, digital lockers and new words like tweeting, skyping, googling, blogging, and now micro blogging.
There is no doubt that we in the United States and Europe have benefited from these advances in information and communications technologies. Study after study continues to show the correlation between greater Internet access and network readiness and growth in GDP and jobs. According to a World Bank report, a 10 percent increase in broadband access in developed countries corresponds to a 1.2 percent increase in GDP per capita. In Europe, faster broadband deployment has the potential to generate one million jobs and 850 billion euros in growth by 2015. According to Gartner, cloud computing alone (including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS and the first one to tell me what those stand for wins a prize!) will be worth almost $150 billion by 2014.
Countries outside of the industrial world are also realizing these benefits. Emerging countries, often unburdened by old infrastructures and regulatory frameworks, have leapfrogged fixed Internet connections and are going to directly to mobile Internet connections and usage. In Africa, there are already an estimated 84 million mobile phones with some internet connectivity.
Emerging countries are hungry for opportunity and hungry for growth. As these countries realize the economic benefits from the digital economy, we can expect that their rate of growth will only continue to increase. This year, the GDP in China is expected to grow by almost 10 percent, in India by 8 percent, in Brazil by more than 4 percent, in the United States by just over 3 percent and in Italy by 1 percent. America’s and Italy’s economies are still strong enough to remain competitive in the midst of emerging economies’ growth, but for how long? Will their economies one day overtake ours? How do we continue to grow when we can no longer compete on price and labor productivity?
The answer is innovation. A robust digital economy is fundamental to that innovation. Digital technologies have already transformed our business processes and delivery of services. They allow large groups of people, who have never met, to communicate and collaborate, on diverse projects, such as car design and organizing relief aid during natural disasters. The digital world has allowed doctors to provide health care remotely, farmers to track the whereabouts of their cows, people to share cars, and cities to monitor the performance of electricity grids, sewage systems and bridges. Online games are even being used to harness a collective creativity in finding solutions to real problems including developing new drugs for hard-to-treat diseases. In a few minutes, you’ll hear more about some of the technologies that are transforming the ways in which we interact with each other and our surroundings.
These advances in communications and data technologies also bring complex challenges. Today, our governments and societies are grappling with how to approach governance of the online world and the issues it raises, such as regulation of international communication and commerce, data protection, intellectual property rights, freedom of speech, net neutrality, cybersecurity, and privacy. As technology continues to evolve rapidly, new challenges will be created. We will need to be creative, flexible, and cognizant of the impact of any regulation on our future capacity to innovate, communicate, and sustain economic growth. We will make mistakes along the way as we develop new regulatory frameworks, and we will have to adjust.
Innovation and growth. Over the next day and a half, we will be discussing how our companies can achieve those two things. You will hear a variety of ideas and perspectives from digital experts and entrepreneurs. I encourage you all to engage with these fantastic speakers and to network with each other.
As Machiavelli once wrote:
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to initiate a new order of things.”
Whether that new order of things develops in Italy will depend in large part on you and your peers. Buon lavoro a tutti.
And now I would like to invite Paolo Baratta, President of the Biennale to say a few words.
