The top of that list

Surely at or nearly the top of that list would be the tightening merger between globalisation and the latest information innovation revolution.

The IT revolution is giving individuals more

The IT revolution is giving individuals more and more cheap tools of technology, collaboration and creativity - thanks to hand-held computers, social networks and "the cloud", which stores powerful applications that anyone can download.

The best of these ecosystems will be cities and towns that combine a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community and the fastest broadband connections on earth. These will be the job factories of the future.

But we need many more of these. As the world gets wired at the same time through the Web and social networks, and as more and more sensors run machines that are talking to other machines across the Internet, we are witnessing the emergence of "Big Data".

"We're all aware of the in broad outline two billion people now on the Internet - in every part of the planet, thanks to the explosion of mobile innovation," IBM's chairman, Samuel Palmisano, said in a speech last September.

Trillion interconnected

"However there are as well upwards of a trillion interconnected and intelligent objects and organisms - what some call the Internet of Things. All of this is generating vast stores of information.

The more information and trends you are able to mine and analyse, and the more talented human capital, bandwidth and computing power you apply to that data, the more research you'll get.

Big bandwidth, he added, would enable these same doctors doing high-risk surgery to practise the life-saving procedures in advance over network-enabled simulators, leading to better results, new kinds of surgical innovations and new forms of medical education.

By year-end , he adds, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second.

Therefore, the critical questions for America today have to be how we deploy more ultra-high-speed networks and applications in university towns to invent more high-value-added services and manufactured goods and how we educate more workers to do these jobs - the only way we can maintain a middle class.