Today's next wave will harness web 2.0 and ubiquitous computing to transform social networks into Innovation Networks capable of driving innovation and bottom-up regional initiatives.

Zann Gill’s Plan for Kawasaki, information city of the 21st century, anticipated need for this technology, proposing an ecosystem for innovation comprised of sixteen collaboratively autonomous components to enlist participation of different segments of the population, as shown in the diagram above. These sixteen participatory mechanisms were linked in an Innovation Network for Kawasaki, Japan to encourage ongoing collaboration among corporate leaders, universities, governments, private and public organizations, and individuals.

The northern half of the diagram shows civic components. Primary functions of the civic components in the northern half of the diagram, such as the World Collage Bulletin, are social interaction; public inquiry; referendum; assembly; communication and collaboration.

The western half shows components that focus on innovation and private enterprise. Primary functions of the business and enterprise components in the western half of the diagram are to stimulate invention, implement promising innovation, matching resources with entrepreneurial needs to launch international ventures.

The east shows artistic and celebrational components, while the southern half contains components associated with science, technology, and education.

Primary functions of the arts components in the eastern half of the diagram are recreation and sensory stimulus; appreciating nature and the family of humanity; celebration and intercultural festivals; creative inspiration of the arts; and meditation and sacred space.

The Globe Theater and Shrine for World Harmony will be the two major landmarks of Kawasaki’s Agora of the Future. The Shrine for World Harmony is an introspective, ritualistic, and meditative environment, inviting visitors to participate in Japanese tradition.

Educational institutions, from primary school through university, should play a core role, not just in developing analytical skills, but in cultivating imagination, with the aid of components such as the
Children’s Story Exchange to initiate cross-cultural exchange at an early age.

Primary functions of science, technology, and education components in the southern half of the diagram are international intellectual exchange, hypothesis formation and testing, cognitive integration, and scenario construction.

The Globe Theater is proposed as a collaborative problem-solving environment, or collaboratory, providing a powerful tool for civic. business, and university policy-makers to think about global problems using decision support tool through and interactive display of its evolving database. People entering this luminous Eartharium can use its graphic display to visualize our interdependence as never before.

The four core components in the center of the diagram manifest Kawasaki’s leadership in each of these four domains. Following the Kawasaki competition, the Japanese government organization then called MITI (the Ministry of Trade and Industry) proposed to the Japanese government to jointly design a "City of the Future" the so-called Multifunction Polis City of the Future in Australia.

The principles of Innovation Networks apply at a range of scales. The ecological footprint of urban growth impacts global environmental sustainability and demands new innovative planning strategies to address eco-sustainability challenges. Data needs to be integrated, modeled, and shared across disciplines to enable responsible decision-making toward global environmental sustainability.

Researchers worldwide are working in many specialized domains, from population growth to communications, traffic, energy, climate, ecology and emergency preparedness (earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, tsunamis etc.). They are gathering data, modeling and sharing their results, but generally with other domain experts, and without sufficient awareness of how other relevant work across disciplines might impact theirs and how the integration and synthesis of knowledge could impact design, planning, and policy-making toward more sustainable futures.

The eight-step feedback cycle shown in the diagram opposite starts with data gathering and progresses toward knowledge mapping and integration to support complex decision-making challenges.