This website is owned and managed by David Hochman as an independent consultant on technology-based (sometimes called technology-led or innovation-led) economic development (tbed).
The site contains informational pages about me as shown above, links to certain of my projects as shown in the side column, and also occasional blog-like posts in inverse chronological order below. Only the most recent posts show on the front page, but you can search the entire site (or the Web) via the Google bar at left toward the bottom.
If you are interested in learning about tbed, consider the short reading list at my on-line tbed bookstore. If you buy a book here you are dealing with Amazon, but I get a commission. I don’t choose (and don’t necessarily endorse) the ads below that are served by Google’s mysterious algorithms.
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With all the recent interest in metropolitan regions as a unit of economic competitiveness (most prominently in the White House’s Regional Clusters of Innovation Initiative, but also its intellectual antecedents at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program and the Science Progress project of the Center for American Progress), some readers might find interesting a database on metropolitan geographies that I have built from U.S. Census data. I am making it available free of charge here.
The database includes no demographic variables: it is purely a way to gain familiarity with how Census classifies the U.S. geography into metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions. I built it because I realized I would need something like it in order to refresh my tbed program database (a project I will take on later this year), and I could find no sufficiently comprehensive and easy-to-use tool on the Census website. This is basically a sandbox of taxonomies to play in, to gain some quick insight into the way metropolitan regions are put together in the U.S.
More on New metropolitan geography database available
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If you’ve ever wondered why some city governments elaborate their own greenhouse-gas-reduction strategies – when it might seem odd to spend scarce resources fighting a global problem in exchange for such minor potential improvements in local environmental quality – then you may find much useful insight from Joan Fitzgerald’s Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development
An urban planner at Northeastern University, Fitzgerald traces the reasoning that leads cities to conclude that they can extract economic- and job-development benefits by positioning themselves as leaders in the new “green” industry sectors. These are the industries that draw their economic relevance from the reality of long-term trends in energy pricing and from the moral commitment of sufficiently well-off populations to lead more sustainable lives.
This book systematically explores the crossover between four aspects of sustainability – renewable energy, energy efficiency, waste management, and transportation – and three economic-development strategies that Fitzgerald calls “linking” (connecting populations to new employment opportunities based); “transformational” (taking hard-hit local manufacturing industries into new markets); and “leapfrogging” (building entirely new technology clusters).
More on Book review: Emerald Cities
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My response to the White House RFI on commercialization of university technologies
Recently, probably partly in response to the flap over Bayh-Dole launched by the Kauffman Foundation, the White House issued an RFI (Request for Information) on the commercialization of university-based research.
Many institutional offices around the nation have put effort into their replies, and since they will take care to promote their own efforts and programs, I decided to write my own response, treating the RFI more as an RFC (Request for Comment) so I could write a discursive treatment rather than a mere catalog of programs I find meritorious.
You can read my response to the RFI in pdf form here or in text form after the break. Please feel free to comment below, or to send me email.
More on My response to the White House RFI on commercialization of university technologies
Tags: Bayh-Dole, Commercialization, OSTP
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