This week I had the privilege of guest-lecturing on tbed issues at Prof. Frederick Lane’s graduate course on Urban Higher Education at CUNY’s Baruch College. It was a pleasure to introduce this group of adult masters students (nearly all currently employed in higher-education institutions in New York City) to the theory and practice of tbed. If any of Prof. Lane’s students are reading this, feel free to email me using the site contact form for any follow up you’d like. Thank you for having me.
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This week saw release of ITAC’s long-awaited report (for which I served as a member of the project advisory board) on New York City’s “hidden” technology sectors. If you’re not interested in the details, you can also download a handsome executive summary.
The report received coverage in The New York Times (registration required) and AM New York. As reflected in the emphasis and tone of some of this coverage, the report is not flawless, because there are tough data problems that confront any such analysis, but it certainly represents a very significant start at a new way to think about the diverse technology sectors that fly under the radar in New York City. I am pleased with how this report turned out, and may add some additional commentary on its reception at a later date.
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My thanks to the Center for an Urban Future for publishing my analysis of the implications of the on-again proposed merger of NYU and Polytechnic University. This piece appeared first as an “Off the CUF” policy brief on the CUF website and is linked to by permission. Crain’s covered it here, The New York Sun here, National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship here, The Brooklyn Paper here, and Metro here. The article appears in a frame after the break.
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More foundations dipping their toes into tbed waters
You may have caught the news that a coalition of 10 Michigan foundations has committed $100 million to an eight-year New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan, an effort to reinvent Detroit’s auto-centric economy through an intensive program of grant-making in science and technology fields.
There’s a lot of local politics involved here: for example, the state attorney general strong-arming Ford Foundation to pay more attention to the region in which it is still incorporated and whence its endowed wealth derives. But what interests me is the frank interest in the role of science and technology in regional economic health by such a large set of staid foundations, including two (Mott and Kellogg) that explicitly disclaimed interest in tbed when I spoke to them for a Battelle project six or seven years ago.
According to the job description posted, the NEI seeks to fund projects including those which: “. . . . improve technology transfer from university and private labs; coordinate and expand local capital networks; . . . launch a promising nonprofit enterprise, such as a new university research center; expand a high-tech enterprise in an inner city. . . ; provide start-up capital to a for-profit enterprise to launch a new high-tech product. . . . ”
Yes, there’s plenty of equal attention to workforce training for targeted populations (the working class and disadvantaged) but this initiative will not be embarrassed to fund university-based S&T projects for their own sake, and even to help spin-off for-profit enterprises get capitalized. Wow.
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