Back to Work - Bill Clinton [76]
I first read about Orlando’s unique cluster in The Next American Economy by William J. Holstein. The book tells a lot of other success stories. MIT’s well-run technology-transfer program, plus a $100,000 Small Business Innovation grant from the SBA, helped start a remarkable new battery company called A123 Systems, which now has more than sixteen hundred employees in the United States and Asia and is building a new battery factory in Michigan to employ hundreds more.
In 1980, Congress authorized universities to transfer technology developed with federal research money to the private sector. Virtually all of them look for opportunities to do so and to make money doing it. A young relative of mine does this work for Texas A&M and is involved in some exciting projects. But MIT’s system is arguably the best in the country. They don’t charge new companies anything up front. Instead, they take stock in the new companies and hope for big returns if their technology proves profitable. It’s a model other universities should be encouraged to adopt.
In Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University is helping the city of steel become the city of advanced robotics, with more than thirty new companies already up and running, many with support from the Defense Department, NASA, and private companies like Boeing.
San Diego now has more winners of Nobel Prizes in the sciences than any other American city as the capital of America’s genomics industry, beginning with the work of the biotech legend Craig Venter and the commitment of the University of California at San Diego to build a world-class supercomputing center. Thanks to the wireless communications pioneer Irwin Jacobs’s company, Qualcomm, San Diego is also home to seven hundred or so wireless communications firms and is now building one of the top wireless health centers in the United States.
There are lots of other stories in Holstein’s book that will encourage you to believe in America’s capacity to create good jobs: how Corning innovated internally to develop Gorilla Glass to replace the easy-to-shatter plastic on cell phones; how Austin, Texas, is mobilizing to create a smart power grid with more solar and wind power in the hands of individual citizens and businesses who can sell what they don’t use back to the grid; how North Carolina is organizing to increase the number of small- and medium-sized businesses that export; how Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Community College has been especially successful in retraining older unemployed workers for good jobs that are available; how Georgia is bringing lost manufacturing jobs back to the United States; and, of course, how Silicon Valley is booming again.
In July 2011, Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan to make New York City “the technology capital of the United States, and the world,” offering land and $100 million in infrastructure upgrades to any university, educational institution, or consortium to build a science and engineering campus on Governors Island, Roosevelt Island, or the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There are already a lot of universities in the city. I hope they’ll offer a joint proposal, plus a plan to transfer their discoveries to start-ups in return for an ownership share, as MIT does. There also needs to be a fund to provide seed capital to start-ups. New York could then rival Silicon Valley and tech communities all over the world as a prosperity cluster.
The Startup Foundation is hosting summits all over America to identify the opportunities in and obstacles to establishing entrepreneurial ecosystems. In New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo has organized a competition for development funds among ten regional economic clusters. It is modeled on the Federal Empowerment Zone program and requires leaders within each region to work together to develop ambitious but achievable development plans.
The federal government should increase support for these and other new innovation centers and encourage all states and large metropolitan