Creative Class

In University and the Creative Economy, Richard Florida and colleagues build an economic development case around a region’s ability to capitalize on innovative technologies and research being produced at universities. Silicon Valley and Research Triangle are exemplary models. What if a region does not have this ability? Appropriately, they suggest a region work on developing the capacity to absorb university output through campus-industry partnerships. Otherwise, valuable intellectual property goes elsewhere. Or, worse off, and probably more common, it disappears into a black hole of uncommercialized ideas and patents.

Now, for regions that have universities but neither the current ability to absorb, nor the means to create a working capacity, is there an additional solution? Is it time for the universities to build their own infrastructure to absorb and commercialize their own creativity? Maybe this is the crossroads where higher education and economic development policy can tango?

How about new policies that substantially invest in universities absorbing their own innovative output when a region is not equipped? Incentivize the universities to transform economy by building infrastructure to commercialize the talent and academic ingenuity they harness. Maybe University Hospitals is a viable model in health care, but expand into other industry development aligned with a university’s output. Maybe we can learn from Chinese university-run businesses. Let’s equip universities, as my grandma used to say, with the whole “kit and caboodle” so a region can benefit.

What’s the risk in doing so?

Because enrollment is trending upward across the country, especially with community colleges seeing double-digit growth in many states, this news becomes fodder to perpetuate a belief that “higher education benefits in a recession.” Is that the real story?

Even in states that have made higher ed a priority, funding for public colleges and universities is inevitably cut or, in the best case scenario, held flat during a serious economic downturn. And, certainly, there are no new public dollars to invest in a recession. How is this a benefit to higher ed? Furthermore, private institutions have seen their endowments drop over 20 percent on average. Harvard saw a whopping 30 percent decline in its endowment, which translates to a loss of tens of billions of dollars. Benefit?

So, what’s the story then? “People benefit from higher education in a recession.” Higher ed is the central place people turn to in an effort to invest in their life, personally and professionally, and transform their future. Fortunately, colleges make adjustments to preserve academic integrity during a recession, accommodating the numerous people who are making the investment in their education at this time.

Do you think this particular enrollment boom is a decade in the making and indicates a massive transition from a manufacturing job-based economy to a creative economy?

I’ve been thinking about social support networks lately and so pieces in recent books have stood out. Humans are social animals who are able to organize ourselves or act individually, but the family and small group networking connections are still more important than generally acknowledged. The implications for a creative economy is that how companies and cities are organized can be as important as what they do or make in their success.

These examples are mostly medical, partly because that’s where a lot of research goes on, but the implications for society are universal.

• The first chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers talks about the town of Roseto, PA which was founded by Italians from Roseto, Italy in the 1890s. Doctors noticed that the residents were unusually healthy. But investigations showed little difference in diet, personal habits, the natural environment, etc. What they did find was that the social and friendship networks were unusually strong. This mutual support resulted in less heart disease and other maladies.

• This reminded me of Dr. Dean Ornish’s work with treating heart disease with diet, exercise, meditation, yoga, and social/family support. When his success in not only stopping but reversing heart disease was reported, the medical establishment said, “Yes, we know that if our patients shifted to a low-fat diet, exercised, and reduced stress it would reduce heart attacks. But people won’t follow our orders so we just schedule bypasses.” The difference was the social and family involvement, which got people to change their behaviors.

• In The Age of the Unthinkable, Ramos tells about AIDS patients in Tugela Ferry, South Africa who had extraordinary levels of medication compliance because rather than doctors just saying “take these pills” they explained the science and involved family members. People stuck to the regimen despite the extreme side effects, while groups who were just told to follow doctors orders would stop medication when they felt better.

• A growing evidence-based practice in residential drug treatment is the “Therapeutic Community,” where peers are involved in each others’ recovery. It has better results than just staff-led treatment.

• Then this article in the Portland Tribune tells about a program to have severely mentally ill people work real jobs rather than “sheltered workshops.” The job stress that was assumed to be too much for them to handle turns out to actually help them get better.

From quality circles to army platoons to extended families, people working together are healthier, more productive and more creative. How can this knowledge be used to build the creative economy?

The creative, knowledge economy is based – at least in part – upon the abilities of individuals and teams to leverage their collective information and ideas into new innovations.

But, how do ideas and information get shared? Does information flow along traditional corporate hierarchical and team division lines? Apparently not, according to research reviewed and summarized by Harvey Schachter in the Globe and Mail last week:

From his summary:

Organizational network analysis charts resemble a spider’s web, with endless crisscrossing strands that show who collaborates with whom….Often, the most important individuals are lower down in the organization, known to colleagues for their knowledge or the speed with which they respond to queries, while formal bosses prove to be bottlenecks, unreachable or not considered of much use in everyday work…

The most valuable knowledge workers, therefore, need to know who has information that they need – and, they themselves need to be a source of key information for others (which could simply be, who knows what).

The most successful senior managers would also know how to leverage this internal network of problem-solving and innovation-creating ability. This might mean knowing how to divide staff into teams such that there is not too much duplication of internal knowledge networks among team members.

Many workplace design firms now also try to design space to encourage organizational networking and internal idea sharing. This is one reason private, assigned offices are becoming less common in some industries as four walls and a door can discourage interaction.

How does information and knowledge flow where you work?

Yesterday, The New York Times had one of the most frightening articles I have ever read.

In what I think is one of the most perverse misuses of our creative talent that I have ever heard, President Obama is launching a massive Reagan-like Cybersecurity Cold War that has the military-industrial complex salivating. This is expected to soak up the trained computer scientists from Silicon Valley and put them into super-secret R&D.

Instead of creating value for the global economy, they will now be sequestered in high-security laboratories where the knowledge they create will only slowly, if ever, leak out to the commercial world. Mind you, this initiative is being pushed while Harvard and many other universities are considering firing tenured faculty. If a massive military cybersecurity program is the change that the current administration believes is going to assist the U.S. economy in overcoming the worst crisis of the last 75 years, then the future for us and our creative class is likely to be grim indeed.

It is my belief that openness, information exchange, and creating value for the consumer has been the hallmark of U.S. success and what made us a beacon for brilliant people from around the world. By taking some of best and brightest and sequestering them in laboratories shrouded in secrecy, we are taking a deliberate step in the wrong direction.

Can a creative economy be built on directing resources in such directions?

There have been a series of articles lately about the relative values of “intelligence,” creative thinking, and sustained effort. Two of the pieces are from David Brooks, who is becoming my favorite columnist because of his wide-ranging subjects.

It occurred to me that this relates directly to Richard’s goal of making every job creative. I don’t have answers, but this raises questions like, “What do we need to be teaching?” and “What do we need to be doing as a society?” to birth the creative economy. It may be something entirely different than the organizing that helped make manufacturing jobs pay middle class wages.

Brooks wrote about the Harlem Children’s Zone charter school, which offers stability and high expectations. Harvard economist Roland Fryer studied the school and…

They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.

In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying – literally and figuratively.”

In another recent column, Brooks talks about genius or extraordinarily high achievers. He says that the scientific view is moving from the idea that people are born with great talent to the idea that they earn it (maybe they’re born with the ability to practice).

In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had – the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

The issue of the value of I.Q. struck me because of a good friend who had an I.Q. of 170. She took three languages and college classes in high school, and cruised through Berkeley while working and raising two kids. Not only smart but social, good people skills. She died broke last year, never having translated that potential into success. Interestingly, in our group of hippies, she was the Ayn Rand devotee. What she may have lacked was concentration.

The relative value of intelligence and effort is borne out in all sorts of quotes and examples we see and forget:

• “If you have a 150 I.Q., sell 30 points to someone else. You need to be smart, but not a genius.” Warren Buffet on investing at this year’s annual Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.
• “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” –Thomas Edison
• “Golf is a game of luck. The harder I work, the luckier I get.” — Ben Hogan (legendary golfer)
• In Positively Fifth Street, a book about the world series of poker, James McManus says that to get good at Texas Hold ‘Em you need to play 10,000 hands (or hours, I forget).

In the current New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has an article called “How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules.” It moves from junior high basketball to warfare to computer modeling, but the main idea is that creatively changing the game gives an advantage to the underdog who is willing to work harder, and includes this gem:

“We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability because relentless effort is in fact something rarer that the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination” (a basketball reference.)

So how do we change the game in the new economy?

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?