Building Internet infrastructure on Florida's Internet coast: The role of social capital
Paul Hart and Nilesh Saraf, Florida Atlantic University, USA
Abstract
In the late 1990s, a small group of entrepreneurs, a College of Business dean from a local university, and representatives from a handful of key economic development organizations across a tri-county region initiated an effort to brand (the east coast of) South Florida as the InternetCoast. The intent of the initiative, born on the crest of the dot.com wave, was to attract information technology, and then later all high tech, businesses to South Florida along with key supporting entities, most notably venture capitalists from the northeast and west coast of the U.S. The early and enthusiastic momentum attracted regional interest at an exponential rate. Attendance at quarterly meetings of individuals from regional businesses and other stakeholders grew dramatically with a very short period of time. Business leaders from the region traveled widely representing the region’s entrepreneurial interests at trade shows and other types of business gatherings worldwide.
Arguably, the most concrete achievement of the InternetCoast initiative, thus far, has been the construction of a first-tier Network Access Point (NAP) in downtown Miami. The state-of-the-art facility, designed and constructed by an international team of architects and engineers, represents the outcome of a rapid effort to forge alliances within and across business and political stakeholders. The effort focused on a key component of the Internet Infrastructure that would spur Internet-based economic development in the region.
The NAP was intended to attract Internet content providers who would provide web information and services to Latin American markets. The strategic importance of the tier-one NAP in Miami was based on its location and the pricing structure for proving Internet content. A map of underwater international telecommunication lines shows that a significant amount of cabling has been laid from Central and South America (and to a lesser extent from West Africa and Europe) to a stretch of the southeast Florida coast from Vero Beach to the southern edge of Dade county. This existing underwater infrastructure provided a strategic geographical opportunity that was matched by the pricing structure established for providing Internet content. The existing structure requires content providers to pay for the delivery of downstream packets based on distance from tertiary, secondary, and primary NAPs. The further the distance, the greater the cost to the provider. Locating a tier-one NAP in a region of the country that serves as one of the conventional key portals to Latin American markets offered the possibility of making the region a key electronic portal to those markets and thereby nurturing diversified economic growth in the region.
This paper is a case study of the NAP project focusing the development of the social capital required to make the NAP initiative a reality. From a social capital perspective, arguably the most notable achievement of the InternetCoast initiative was the cooperation among key players in each of the three counties in the region. From north to south (with their primary municipalities), they are Palm Beach County (West Palm Beach), Broward County (Fort Lauderdale), and Dade County (Miami). Historically, the economic development agencies in each of these counties competed for national and international attention. However, as intended by the founding members of the InternetCoast initiative and articulated by the one of them who was an effective “preacher” of the message, the intent of the initiative was to brand the region and required previously competing interests from each county to fall into line.
We propose to use the interpretive lens of social capital. Thus, by highlighting the effort to develop the NAP, the case study would show how the social capital built across county lines was important for convincing outside players (political and business leaders outside of the region) to “buy in” to the NAP project.
The outcome of the NAP project also reflects both the cooperative and conflicting influences that shape and are shaped by social capital in the region. Therefore, at this stage of this project, we also expect that interesting insights may be gained by observing the dynamics between public and private social capital, of how these two types of social capital facilitated the implementation and success of the NAP initiative and in turn how social capital was shaped in this network of various stakeholders. By this, we hope to understand how the underlining tensions across the three South Florida counties influenced the project, healing and in some cases exacerbating rifts.
In addition, the case shall also demonstrate how, branding the region as InternetCoast and implementing a NAP, enhances the stock of social capital in this region that sustains business activity despite economic shocks from external sources.
About the authors
Paul Hart (hart@fau.edu), Florida Atlantic University
Paul Hart is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Information Technology and Operations Management at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He is also the Assistant Director of the InternetCoast Institute at FAU. He received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. His research interests include the impact of computer networks on organizational boundaries and relations between customer and supplier firms; the role of trust in online transactions, web page design and impression management; computer network use and co-location requirements in engineering design environments; communication genres and video teleconferencing, and information privacy. He has published in a number of academic journals including Organization Science, Journal of MIS, Management Communications Quarterly and ACM Transactions on Information Systems.
Nilesh Saraf (nsaraf@fau.edu), Florida Atlantic University
Nilesh Saraf is an Assistant Professor in the Information Technology and Operations Management department at the College of Business, Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He received his Ph.D. from the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. His research is focused on exploring the role of IT infrastructure in business-to-business relationships. His interest also lies in applying social network method in combination with an economics perspective, to understand firm strategies in IT industries as also the outcomes of inter-organizational networks. He has presented at the Americas Conference on Information Systems and the Academy of Management Conference.