If stimulus and shovel-ready are the words of the year, and if this means we’re ready to invest billions, shouldn’t we know what we’ll get for all this money?

Sure, we’re told what we’re building in terms of facilities and infrastructure. Yet we can’t possibly see where this will take us, any more than we could have imagined the full potential of Interstate highways more than 50 years ago.

We should be prepared for benefits, consequences and things we cannot yet envision.

With the highway projects of the 50s, the known benefits were that roads stretching across America would improve travel. Yet there was no way to know how these roads would transform our lives, our communities, and the ways we do business.

Suddenly, we could actually drive from New York to Los Angeles. Manufacturers could truck goods to points of sales cross-country, meaning regional suppliers could go national. Mass merchandising rose to a new level.

At the same time, highways opened corridors to suburbs, creating sprawl that drained cities of population, and gave rise to increasingly disconnected communities.

Whatever the unwanted affects, would we ever have not wanted to reap all of the benefits associated with building our Interstate highways?

Today’s challenge in building broadband networks is to prepare for new opportunities, while also anticipating the potential pitfalls and how to avoid them.

While we can’t foresee the things we don’t yet know, we do know life is different – right now, today – in places with advanced broadband networks, such as in Seoul, South Korea. In Seoul, if you want to renew your driver’s license, you do it from home via an Internet connection that works through your television. Even in the U.S., which is behind other broadband-developed nations, there are pockets of advanced innovation where people can do things such as consult doctors via the Internet at affordable prices.

We see examples in places such as Miami, where there is a telemedicine initiative that would provide primary healthcare via interactive video conferencing to children in Miami-Dade County’s 392 public schools. Or in Lexington, Ky., host of the 2010 World Equestrian Games, where everything from security to ticketing will notch up to a new level as a result of high-speed communications, made possible through expanded broadband networks.

At the Knight Center of Digital Excellence, we believe that one of the great opportunities resulting from broadband networks will be the reconnecting of communities. We believe the time is right to once again redefine our notion of community, and how we can connect in new ways, through new technologies, to improve education, healthcare, public safety and business opportunities.

The case for innovation is not so much in knowing exactly where we’ll end up, but in knowing that if we’re not moving forward we’re falling behind. There is no choice, really, but to move forward with confidence and courage.