Creative Class

Richard Harwood sure thinks there is:

I can’t stop hearing about interesting people and organizations in Toronto, Canada. Some of the stuff that has appeared on my radar in the last few months from Toronto include:

• Richard Florida on the creative class
• Jane Jacobs on cities
• Naomi Klein on globalization and brands
• Don Tapscott on Wikinomics
• Rotman Management School on integrative thinking
• The MaRS innovation centre

I’m sure there is lots more that I’ve missed, but the fact that, without looking for them, these things keep cropping up appears to point to a creative and innovative place. Perhaps it’s because Toronto (as I have recently learned), has half of it’s inhabitants from outside Canada, and this diversity drives innovation as I’ve blogged about previously here. What else is it about Toronto, or any place, that makes it an innovative hub?

I just thought I’d capture that there does seem to be a buzz about the place which is hard to put your finger on, but you know it when you see it.

That is precisely the constellation of forces that brought us here.

One of the reasons that we are investigating the campus as an entrepreneurial environment is that in its most ideal form there is huge diversity on campus (i.e., age, race, field of study, nationality, political viewpoints, personal preferences, socio-economic background, etc). This diversity is believed to bring many advantages.

The social and economic benefits of diversity are discussed at length in Richard’s writing and others – I am partial to Jane Jacobs’ ideas in The Economy of Cities.

WSJ writer Hannah Karp’s story, From Bloomingdales to Bloomington, tells of a new diversity at Indiana University’s main Bloomington campus where a large influx of students from the Northeast is changing life on campus. From the story:

In Indiana University’s Assembly Hall last Friday, a remarkably large chorus hailing from private high schools in the Northeast was singing the school’s ode to the “Cream and Crimson” in a pronounced New York accent.

It’s a striking byproduct of one of the most competitive college admissions sessions ever — an influx of East Coast prep-school students in Indiana. Indiana University welcomed about 260 students from the greater New York City area to the limestone lecture halls on its lush, leafy campus last week, up 12.5% from last year. Another 175 came from New Jersey, up 25% from 2007, and 50 hail from Connecticut. While the numbers of students matriculating from in-state and other parts of the country are steadily increasing as well — the school had some 500 more students accept admission offers than it had planned for — the last three years have been marked by unprecedented growth from the Northeast.

The droves of East Coast students descending on Bloomington are ruffling some feathers among the 61% of students who call Indiana home.

Upperclassmen say the tension begins to build from day one of freshman year, as most East Coasters request to live in the same cluster of dorms and send in housing deposits to guarantee their spots long before committing to the school. Jess Berne, a freshman from New York’s suburban Westchester County who had also applied to Penn State and the University of Wisconsin, sent in her housing deposit to Indiana as soon as she was admitted in October, at the school’s recommendation, eight months before she decided to actually enroll. She also requested to room with a fellow New Yorker, Becky Davies, whom she met on Facebook.

The story is interesting/funny (a father of a NY student thinks something is not quite right in Bloomington because people are so friendly) and anecdotal, but leads one to wonder whether diversity works ‘positively’ with open, accepting minds leading the way new understanding and ideas? Or does diversity work because of ‘friction’ and new outputs are the result of worlds colliding?

Are these ‘new imigrants’ to Bloomington having the same effect on campus as Eastern Europeans or Latin Americans have on US cities when they arrive in large numbers? Any thoughts?

One of the reasons I research the entrepreneurial activities that take place in and around universities is that in many ways the campus is an ideal incubator for ideas. The frontier that is the university demands new ideas constantly (or at least should).

It is a safe space where idea generation and radical thinking are highly valued and often times rewarded. This, as we know from Richard’s and other people’s work, is crucial to improved quality of place – in both economic and social terms.

Recent Ithaca College graduate Jared O’Toole has just launched a new startup called MindFrenzy.com that is an outlet for people with new or unformed ideas. The site is targeting college students because, as Jared stated in an email,

“I just graduated college and I wanted to start a website that would help encourage college students to go after their ideas. That’s the main motivation behind MindFrenzy because most ideas in college aren’t really developed yet and kids usually need some kind of positive push before they stray from that job search and start their own thing.”

The website launched in mid August and has some interesting ideas listed and are looking for feedback from the community. In describing the site Jared stated,

“MindFrenzy is a think-tank geared towards those 2nd, 3rd, and 4th ideas on your notepad. It aims to be a creative community where even the wackiest or out-of-the-box ideas can get feedback in a positive fashion. You never know when a comment will spark something that lets you see how to get that crazy idea and turn it into something more practical.”

I think the idea of “catching” and sharing lots of the “crazy” ideas that are generated on campus is brilliant and I really look forward to seeing where Jared and his Ithaca-born idea will go (Jared pulled himself out of the finance interviewing process in order to pursue this venture).

Do you have a personal MindFrenzy.com? What do you do with the ideas that you (or your organization) don’t decide to go with? Do you keep track of them? Do they ever make it back? How does that work?

One of the keys to building a sustainable, creative economy is leveraging a city or region’s assets and engaging the citizens with those assets. A great piece in today’s WSJ highlights how Pittsburgh, PA and Carnegie Mellon University (where Richard taught/lived for years) has supported its citizens’ efforts to learn about and build robots – including edible robots! Here is the website for Robot 250 (the year-long robot festival).

From the article by Clare Ansberry:

Mickey McManus took five seedless cucumbers, carved them so they looked like fingers and anchored them to a hunk of Edam cheese. To this “hand,” he attached a small electronic device, programmed to respond to sound; when someone laughed or clapped, the fingers flexed. He brought his cucumber robot to a wine-and-cheese party as an appetizer, along with a robotic Rice Krispies Treats man that pivoted whenever the lights dimmed…

The yearlong program, called Robot 250, coincides with the city’s 250th birthday. Teachers fanned out to 13 neighborhoods, providing materials, instruction and troubleshooting. “We wanted to put technology into the hands of as many people as possible,” says Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, who came up with the idea…

People in Pittsburgh have been building robots for decades. Seventy years ago, an engineer at Westinghouse Electric created Elektro the Moto-Man, who could walk and smoke cigarettes and had a 77-word vocabulary. His sidekick, Sparko the Moto-Dog, wagged his tail, sat and barked on command.

Today, there are more than 30 robotic companies in Pittsburgh. They make drowsy-driver warning systems, and robots that help with surgery, unload crates and search for life on distant planets. Alcoa Inc. has a 6-foot-tall robot spokesperson, Al, who hosted a recent Robot Block Party at the Carnegie Science Center.

Part of the Robot 250 event, the block party was billed as the city’s largest and most diverse public gathering of robots. A solar-powered robot mingled with hazmat robots that search for explosives. Robots built by teenagers were on display. Red Rover, a four-wheeled robot that has become a local celebrity in robot circles, made an appearance. Red Rover and his creators are vying for the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon and transmit video, images and data back to Earth.

Pittsburgh has had many struggles over the years, but is continually trying to use its historical strengths to claw its way back to the leading edge of the economy. Many cities and regions could take a cue from Pittsburgh’s efforts to engage its people and their creativity. What is your city doing? Is it working?

George Anders of the WSJ has an interesting piece on how innovation-dependent firms are attempting to extend the longevity innovative capacity in their researchers. According to Anders, Northwestern Prof. Benjamin Jones has found that, “Innovators are productive over a narrowing span of their life cycle.”

The article explains that Jones examined biographical data of 700 Nobel laureates and well known inventors of the past century and found that, in the early 20th century, leading innovators averaged slightly more than 36 years at the time of their greatest innovation.

In more recent decades, innovation from those under the age of 30 (think Brin and Page of Google) has become more common. This is because there have been many ‘booming’ fields over the last few decades that have been wide open to innovation and pioneer exploration.

Occasionally, Mr. Jones says, booming new fields “permit easier access to the frontier, allowing people to make contributions at younger ages.” That could account for the relative youth of Internet innovators, such as Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc Andreessen and Messrs. Page and Brin. But “when the revolution is over,” Mr. Jones finds, “ages rise.”

Unwilling to see researchers at peak productivity for only a small part of their careers, tech companies are fighting back in a variety of ways. At microchip maker Texas Instruments Inc., in Dallas, executives are pairing up recent college graduates and other fresh research hires with experienced mentors, called “craftsmen,” for intensive training and coaching.

This system means that new design engineers can become fully effective in three or four years, instead of five to seven, says Taylor Efland, chief technologist for TI’s analog chip business. Analog chips are used in power management, data conversion and amplification.

At Sun Microsystems Inc., teams of younger and older researchers are common. That can help everyone’s productivity, says Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer for the Santa Clara, Calif., computer maker. Younger team members provide energy and optimism; veterans provide a savvier sense of what problems to tackle.

The article goes on to provide more examples from firms dependent on innovation for continued success and their efforts to extend the “innovation life cycle.”

Of course, the piece also sites some examples of “older” innovators that buck Prof. Jones research findings, citing domains where expertise is so specific that it takes a decade or more to truly understand the nature of the problems to be solved and opportunities to be chased.

Does your firm get most of its innovation out of younger or older workers? Does this free or constrain talent?

What about you? Has your innovative capacity increased with age and experience or decreased? For your current field, do you need years of experience before you can innovate?

Earlier this year, Zoltan Acs and I were discussing a possible paper for me to write that investigated the great entrepreneurial activities taking place on college and university campuses.

Over time Zoltan recommended that I look into Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History.

Turner argues that it is the frontier experience, rather than European influence, that led to the development of America’s unique political, social, and economic systems. (A version of American Exceptionalism that de Toqueville, Lipsett, and others discuss)

The more I read of Turner, the more I find his theories fit well with many of the structural economic and social changes the US (and much of the global economy) is currently experiencing. Moreover, many of the attributes that Turner argues were present on the frontier are present on today’s college and university campuses. One example is the diversity of the population that inhabited the frontier. Today’s campuses are incredibly diverse along many lines (age, sex, race, work experience, religion, musical tastes, nationality, field of study, economic status, etc.)

Another attribute that the frontier and the campus have in common is distance from control. On a campus much of the population is far from parents or from former employers, while those who went to the frontier were beyond the reach of governments, churches, families, and tradition.

While reading through the 1921 book edition of Turner’s thesis, I came across this passage:

The pioneer was taught in the school of experience that the crops of one area would not do for a new frontier; that the scythe of the clearing must be replaced by the reaper of the prairies. He was forced to make old tools serve new uses; to shape former habits, institutions and ideas to changed conditions; and to find new means when the old proved inapplicable. He was building a new society as well as breaking new soil; he had the ideal of nonconformity and of change. He rebelled against the conventional.

Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the ideal of personal development, free from social and governmental constraint.

Sounds like a campus? Sounds like the Creative Economy?

I will continue to update you as I flesh out this theory and test some cases, but does this sound like I am on the right track? Is the campus the new frontier for America and much of the developed world? Any thoughts on Turner’s theories?

We often talk about the importance of universities to growth in the Creative Economy. Usually we measure scientists, patents, and other similar variables. But we also need to pay attention to the entrepreneurial culture of a college or university.

How welcoming and supportive is the campus of ‘campus entrepreneurs’ (whether they are undergrads or profs)? Saxenian really highlights this topic at a regional level in her work Regional Advantage, but it is just as important at the campus/university level.

An interesting post by Simona Covel at the WSJ’s Independent Street Blog looks at what Yale is trying to do to stop the exodus of startups that leave Yale’s campus and head for Silicon Valley.

In order to fight this high-tech flight, Yale created the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute a few years ago to provide more support and increase retention of high-growth firms. From Covel’s post:

So far, says YEI director James Boyle, it’s working — at least a little bit. Two of last summer’s crop of six start-ups remain in New Haven. Just as important, Mr. Boyle says, is that the program leaves students and potential students with the impression that Yale is an incubator for student-run businesses, just like Stanford or MIT.

“It has been pivotal in demonstrating to the student body that you can start high-tech companies at Yale — a space where Yale usually isn’t known,” he says.

Does your campus put out the welcome mat for entrepreneurs? Does the administration and faculty support entrepreneurs? Have local and regional policy makers gotten involved?

The new website for our Institute, the Martin Propserity Institute is live today. Thanks to Ian Swain MPI researcher, DJ and internet impressario, to the MPI team and the Mark G and the crew at Naked Creative for all their terrific effort.  We’ll be updating and adding content over time, but the site is up and running. Send us any comments or suggestions

Here’s a link to my recent interview.