Creative Class

As a graduate of the U of Michigan, I can only try to forget what an awful football season we have just endured. However, a recent WSJ article reminded me that the Big 10 football conference and all major conferences are being outperformed by the teams of the Southeastern Conference (SEC).

The WSJ asks “What the rise of Southern Football Says About America,” in an interesting piece by Darren Everson. And while there is no overt mention of Detroit’s Auto Industry and the South’s Auto Industry in the article, the ongoing bailout saga kept popping into my head as I read the article. A snippet:

In recent years, the South has undergone rapid growth. Twenty-seven of the 50 fastest-growing metropolitan regions in the country in 2007 were in the South, while personal-income growth in the region outpaced the national average over the past decade. These changes have added muscle to the South’s historic passion for college football. While they rank low in many measures like per-capita income and educational achievement, states like Alabama and Mississippi rank close to the top in the percentage of high-school students who play football. And among states that have more than 10 native sons playing in the National Football League, the top six producers by percentage of population are Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida and Georgia.

I began to wonder, is there some connection between the success of SEC football teams and the rise of the Southern Auto Industry?

Are Big 10 teams stuck with ‘Fordist’ football models while SEC coaches and administrators make use of ‘continuous improvement’ and other concepts in order to strengthen their programs? Are SEC leaders better at innovating with recruiting, play calling, and conditioning? (Remember, Gatorade was created at the U of Florida.)

The article points out a few potential theories for why the SEC has grown into such a football powerhouse, including pride of place that Southerners exhibit in their states, tight relations between SEC schools and Southern politicians, and academic standards in the SEC that differ from other conferences such as the Big 10 and PAC 10.

While there is likely no connection between successful SEC football and the successful Southern auto industry, it highlights the spiky nature of the creative economy - from auto production and college football administration to content creation and biotech. I believe that is what the rise of Southern football tells us about America.

BTW, I will remind all SEC fans that Michigan (and its old school coach Lloyd Carr) did beat Florida (and new school coach Urban Meyers) handily during last January’s Capital One Bowl Game.

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?

A new report out by The Conference Board of Canada states that the culture sector directly contributes about $46B CDN or just under 4 percent to Canada’s overall GDP in 2007. The economic impact on the economy is much broader - $85B CDN in 2007, or just over 7 percent of total real GDP. Taking a look at employment, almost 4 percent of total national employment in 2003 can be traced back to arts and culture industries.

Indeed, those are big numbers, eh? How meaningful is the creative economy in your country or hometown? How big (or small) of an employment driver is it?

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?