WHAT WE DO

Carrnab partners with cities, regions, and/or their private, academic and non-profit sectors to formulate and develop ecosystems that enable locales to participate in the globally emerging ‘convergence’ economy.

Carrnab accomplishes this through an array of offerings and services to: 

• create, structure, and implement a framework for a locale or region for convergence; 
• establish a physical site for the co-location of various and disparate sectors that share the same enabling technology within an integrated and multi-phase, mixed-use, campus development known as a Smart Technology Convergence Hub (“Convergence Hub’); and,
• develop business models and financial plans that shows the cost and revenue structures, sources of costs and revenues, revenue streams aligned with customer segments, and ROI models that will allow the clients to ensure positive outcomes of the investments they are making in these initiatives.

Services Offered

To realize this framework and the Convergence Hub development, Carrnab couples its own economic, community, and employment development skills and networks with those of its global strategic partners to foster convergence economies for locales and regions by:

• developing a framework that identifies and highlights a locale’s unique opportunity for a competitive and self-sustaining convergence economy;
• recruiting local, national, and global strategic partners to provide the needed technological, solutions, and financial resources in co-funding/investment arrangements to create both the enabling systems, as well as the physical spaces needed for participants in the locale’s convergence ecosystem; 
• linking and promoting the locale’s convergence economy with other locales that have similar, or complementary, ecosystems for ongoing opportunities to grow their convergence economy base at the local, national, and global levels; and,
• providing ongoing benchmarking, and needs assessment to ensure that their convergence economy remains at the global forefront.

CARRNAB’S CURRENT CONVERGENCE FOCUS

Carrnab and its strategic partners currently are employing the convergence concept by focusing on a specific set on Enabling Technology, conversion catalyst industry and related other industries utilizing the Enabling Technology. This offering is:

Enabling Technologies: digital and big-data

Catalyst Industry for Convergence: entertainment & media (E&M)

Other industries and uses of digital and big-data:

• fintech;
• digital health, education, and tourism promotion; 
• defense in terms of simulations, visualization, and scenario gaming for simulated war fighter training in contested environments;
• space (government and civilian), Smart Cities/Intelligent Transportation Systems and sustainability/climate change in terms of simulations and visualizations;
• already established and emerging products of AI, and R&D for next gen AI technologies; 
• emerging quantum computing and quantum capabilities; and, 
• data centers and associated sources of required energy to service the needs of the digital economy and big data groups.

Carrnab’s Convergence Regional Reach

Carrnab is utilizing the digital/big-data enabling technology and E&M industry as the convergence catalyst for emerging projects for multiple locales and regions, including in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Ghana. These targeted locales and regions all possess, and are enhancing, multiple convergence building blocks in the required digital/big-data technologies, and digital/big data industries outlined previously.

THE CONVERGENCE ECONOMY

What is the Convergence Economy?

The convergence economy is the next iteration of the economic development and job creation principle of innovation and economic competitiveness based on cluster development. Where standard cluster development, based on the principle of agglomeration, focuses on the co-location of firms in the same industry, convergence captures the larger opportunity of co-location of multiple industries that share, as a technological umbrella, a series of enabling technologies and associated solutions. This provides the opportunity for a locale’s economy to take advantage of this umbrella of technologies and solutions as the basis for constant innovation through cross-application, cross-fertilization, and further, new technology and solutions development across multiple industries to drive economic development.

Building Blocks Needed for a Convergence Economy

To be a candidate for convergence, a locale or region should possess many of the nine necessary building blocks as identified by Carrnab. Of those nine building blocks, the following four building blocks are essential for a locale or region to develop a convergence economy:

1. an enabling technology or suite of enabling technologies;
2. an existing industry that initially can be used as the catalyst industry to foster convergence between and among the other industries utilizing the enabling technology; 
3. existing and developing clusters of different industries that all utilize the enabling technologies; and,
4. existing or intention to develop business and financial models that enable the “monetization and benefits realization” of services through the interactions of the various participants.

Some of convergence benefits to a locale or region include: 

• ongoing innovation; 
• inward investment; 
• new enterprise development; 
• education, training, and skills upgrading;
• significant job creation (both degreed and trades); and, 
• infrastructure investment and enhancement.