Back in the 1980s I arranged for a delegation of Michigan state government officials and business leaders to travel to Sweden and Germany to check out the workforce development systems. Meanwhile, economic development staffers traveled to northern Italy to learn about the entrepreneurial manufacturing system that had grown up. So I'm a believer in "seeing it to understand it and be inspired by it."
Nowadays I am often asked where to go to see "the best" in urban sustainability and education reform, two of the social innovation niches that our Innovation Network for Communities focuses on. The question is not about seeing an interesting program or project; those are a dime a dozen. It's about seeing an entire system--an ensemble of innovations--at work at large scale and with big impact, and that's much more rare.
I'm not sure there really is a community yet where you can see the future of public education; too much of the change that's occurring is still in an early stage and hasn't evolved to the system level (or been all that successful).
For urban sustainability the go-to place is Denmark. NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman seems to have moved there, so he can write article after article about how that tiny nation established public policies and entrepreneurial businesses the U.S. should emulate. Recently Hugh McDiarmid Jr, the communications director of the Michigan Environmental Council, visited Denmark for four days as part of a Michigan delegation, and came back with a glowing review. (Michigan Environmental Report, Fall 2009, www.environmentalcouncil.org)
Denmark is charging full-speed ahead with a formidable array of government-backed technology innovations that have buoyed its economy, galvanized its citizens and made it a key exporter of renewable power ideas and hardware... Danish citizens grumble frequently about high taxes, but they also see the benefits of their collective investments every day--in strong and safe public transit systems, tremendous export markets, nearly full employment and a standard of living that ranks near the top of European nations.
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Denmark uses renewable energy to power 30% of its electricity needs and recycles 65% of its waste. It expects by 2020 to generate 50% of electricity from wind turbines.
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It accounts for about 1% of the world's exports--14 times higher than its share of the world's population. Much of the export business is in energy innovations. Denmark builds 95% of the world's off-shore wind turbines. Some 22,000 Danes work in wind-energy industries.
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It has launched ProjectZero to make the city of Sonderborg the first large sustainable and CO2 neutral area in Europe by 2029.
But any visit to the future, however impressive it might be, bumps into the question of transferability to a different context: Can we do this back home? The Danish people pay much more for their energy than Americans (or anyone else), e.g., $7.35 for a gallon of gas. Their government is deeply involved in the energy sector--picking winning and losing technologies, making huge investments in R&D; strongly influencing energy prices; providing tx incentives; and so on. Armed with this information, one member of the Michigan delegation asked, "Is this system acceptable to the American people?"
A few months ago a group from Michigan visited the Harlem Children's Zone in New York City, which has gained national attention for assembling innovations aimed at greatly increasing the chances of thousands of low-income minority children in a large urban district to become college students. They raised similar questions about transferability, since the model has depended on a very charismatic leader and tens of millions of dollars from donors.
The future is out there, but you still have to figure out how to "import" it--the ideas/actions you see--into the realities of your own place. | 
