Failure to connect
Taiwan presents many opportunities for immensely valuable exchange that are unrealised due to fundamental differences in understanding.
Hundreds of foreign mayors and city executives are sitting in a corporate lecture theatre in northern Taiwan. They’ve spent the last few days at an expo thoroughly impressed by Taiwan’s ‘smart city’ innovations. They can see the enormous value of bringing these back home, but aren’t sure how to do so. Now they’ve been brought out to the headquarters of one of the companies that’s paid for their flights and accommodation. They could not be more primed to be sold to.
An executive walks out and introduces himself. He has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT; his ‘Internet of Things’ division generates billions in annual revenue. He begins his presentation by explaining the company's history. It started in the early 1960s as a grain distributor before diversifying into chlorine gas manufacturing. The founder’s son saw an opportunity to acquire a fabrication company that made the cases for early IBM PCs. They’ve since exited that market, but thanks to the vision of their current chairman and the dedication of their world-class engineers they now make 35% of the world’s networking devices and 0.5% of its chlorine gas1.
“Enough history”, he says. “Let’s watch a quick video”.
The lights dim. The guests sit up in their chairs. The video opens with a Hollywood-quality CGI flyover of Taipei’s digital twin. Pulsing rivers of light crisscross the city. A female voiceover begins at ear-splitting volume, perhaps to highlight the company’s highly impressive audio system. She explains that behind every node on the network sits her company, using the latest in 5GAI-IoT technology. A torrent of buzzwords and jargon spills out over the subsequent five minutes, utterly incomprehensible to the majority of the audience.
The rivers of light are now drawn together into a single point. The camera zooms in, revealing the nexus to be the very HQ everybody is now sitting in. In a thundering crescendo of sound and light, the camera crashes through the front door and into the sun-lit uplands of IoT connectivity.
His audience now thoroughly bewildered, the executive launches into a detailed blow-by-blow of his product line. Their fourth-generation devices had issues with abrasion when deployed in desert mining operations. They responded by developing an updated casing that prevented ingress while limiting the consequential increase in internal temperatures to 15%. Meanwhile, continued development of their main line transmitters has resulted in a power efficiency improvement of 6%, and a 3% weight reduction thanks to shifting to the new composite materials - all while retaining GH58 certification.
This continues for about half an hour. Even the unfailingly polite British delegation resorts to discreetly using their phones to catch up on emails2. Eventually, he sums up, saying: “Whatever you need, talk to us, and we’ll deliver it” to a round of polite applause.
Unfortunately, the audience has no idea what they need, let alone how to ask for it.
Everyone returns home. Six months later, some consultancy company makes the right connection at a conference in Sydney. They talk about the great work Taiwan is doing in smart cities, before unveiling their own smart city package. It’s easy to understand, but is twice the price and provides half the service. It runs on proprietary data standards, meaning the council is unknowingly locking itself into a monopoly provider for any future devices it wants to deploy. Officers will access the data by logging into the provider’s website and downloading a poorly formatted spreadsheet.
Whether due to a separate culture, language, or geopolitical isolation, Taiwan’s professional culture has limited overlap with even the likes of Singapore and South Korea. Taylor Swift may play in Taiwanese supermarkets, but professionals here work a world away from Western conferences, projects, standards, and social media.
In some cases, this is to their detriment. They’ve missed, for example, the last decade or so of public debate in the English-speaking world about the need for zoning reform. Urban planning here remains a niche interest concerned with making minor tweaks and dubious tradeoffs, the consequence is a catastrophic housing crisis only mitigated by accelerating population decline.
On the other hand, as with smart cities, the gap between best practice here and Western governmental standards is sometimes incomprehensible to even the international sales teams of massive Taiwanese tech companies. This is why their pitch revolves around the latest marginal improvements to their product, rather than connecting with the audience by explaining the basic foundations and value of these systems.
What needs to be said is something like:
Delivering Smart Cities
Moving to digital monitoring saves money and enables new capabilities for automation, more informed decisions, and making useful information available to the public.
The key is having all your information available in a single place. All your systems should feed data into this platform so it can be used whenever and however it’s needed. This will only become more important as you scale up. Avoid having a dozen platforms managed by five suppliers that don’t make the data accessible. Do it once, do it right.
Taiwanese software will allow you to deploy sensors interchangeably across your city. Don’t hand a monopoly to your supplier. In two years' time, if you no longer like our prices or we’re not selling something you need, you can go to our competitors and their devices should work seamlessly too.
We know you’re not experts in data or electrical engineering. Leave that to us. Whether you’re monitoring birds, cyclists, or trains, whether you’re working in extreme cold or remote locations, we’ll work with you to design a system that meets your needs at a fraction of the cost you’d otherwise be paying.
This is all assumed to be understood. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Consequently, there’s a huge market opportunity for Taiwanese companies that can compellingly describe the water they’re swimming in. Of course, Western city governments should meet them halfway, because millions are wasted by obsolete systems every day this isn’t done.
As I outlined in ‘Why we need Taiwan’, there’s no shortage of valuable cultural and economic work that could arise from a greater exchange of ideas. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, the language barrier is easily overcome compared to the difficulty of bridging completely different paradigms to establish a shared understanding.
We talked about this recently in the context of Metro design, where the true value of the system comes not from some fancy innovation, but rather the simplicity and consistency of its design and operations. Next time, we’ll see how insular Taiwanese planning policy has brought about a housing and development crisis.
To be clear, this is not a real company but an amalgam of my experiences with about half a dozen different Taiwanese organisations. Writing this essay was a challenge, as Taiwanese friends I showed early drafts to thought I was talking about some company in particular, and it is not my intention to single anyone out. At the same time, I was concerned my Western audience would assume I was writing pure satire. No - this is really how it goes.
I can only presume this sort of marketing approach is highly effective to local audiences. Establishing the history and connections of your company is of extreme importance, as is providing an exhaustive list of relevant projects. One friend told me that corporate presentations here will frequently run to over one hundred information-dense slides for a half-hour meeting. So much ground is covered that speaking to the slides is a specialised skill requiring the ability to speak extremely quickly, even to the point of no longer being intelligible. I cannot imagine how this is a truly optimal strategy, and it seems like a classic case of a ‘local maximum’. For example, only presenting 70 slides will be seen as lazy and uncommitted, but decision-makers are unprepared for a more targeted approach aimed at creating an open discussion. So deviations from the norm are punished, even though the overall approach is flawed.
If you’re interested in reading more about local maxima and these sorts of coordination problems, you might enjoy one of my earliest essays about geopolitics and how cultures and organisations optimise themselves around the physical and cultural landscape. (I apologise for the extremely wonkish title).
