I am pleased to announce announce three new business and professional affiliations:
- I have joined the board of directors of ITAC, the Industrial & Technology Assistance Corp. ITAC is a long-standing nonprofit consultancy aimed at helping small and mid-sized manufacturing and technology companies grow and thrive as contributors to a vital NYC economy. It is a node on the federal Manufacturing Extension Partnership network and a Regional Technology Development Center funded by the State of New York. This puts it at the heart of several rapidly accelerating trends such as cleantech and the “maker” movement. The president of ITAC is Sara Garretson, one of the City’s clearest and deepest thinkers about technology-based economic development.
- I am now affiliated as an independent consultant with Public Works Partners, a new management consultancy formed as a merger of two practices with which I have previously worked. Public Works Partners does projects in strategic planning, program design and implementation, process redesign, performance improvement, and financial management for government agencies, institutions of higher education, community-based non-profits, and business corporations. Its principals are (alphabetically) Mark Foggin, Celeste Frye and Scott Zucker, three exceptionally energetic, focused and effective consultants with long experience in and around NYC government and the private sector.
- While I am not primarily a business-development consultant, I do occasionally mentor and advise startups that I find unusually interesting. One such firm I am now advising is Calcbench, a new venture that aims to derive and vend valuable insights from “open data” on public companies made available in XBRL format from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The data challenge is significant, and the backgrounds of principals Pranav Ghai and Alex Rapp — both with deep technical talents and practical experience in the financial sector — strike me as perfectly suited to the task. I have been honored to refer them directly and indirectly to sources of potential financing and partnership, and to render some inside commentary. Keep your eye on these folks, and if you’re interested in finance, sign up at Calcbench for what is (not for long) a free account.
Public Works Partners and Calcbench both maintain blogs (here and here), ITAC can sign you up for emails here, and all three have Twitter accounts (here, here and here).
Tagged as:
Cleantech,
Consulting,
Maker,
NYC,
Open Data,
XBRL
An interesting report on New York City’s powerful wave of digital-technology startups has issued from the Center for an Urban Future (a non-partisan think tank where I’m a long-time advisor and occasional author, though not involved in this report).
The report “New Tech City” does a solid job capturing the way Internet-enabled startups (supercharged these days by mobile technology) have begun to cluster and thrive in a way they did not back in the dot-com 1990s. As the report correctly notes, the secret sauce has been a new enthusiasm by City government and civic leadership for facilitating healthy symbiosis between digital entrepreneurs and the several sectors where the City already boasts world-dominating business clusters. Mainly, that means the media/publishing/advertising sectors, finance (toujours finance), and what might be called the creative/cultural/educational complex. These happen to be clusters that both exhibit clear vulnerability to disruption and wield enormous purchasing power.
[continue reading…]
Tagged as:
CUF,
Engineering,
NYC
Three years ago, when the merger between NYU and Polytechnic University was just under way, I wrote a well received opinion piece arguing that aggressive development of New York City’s university-based engineering research programs might prove key to its ambitions to become a center of technology-based business development. I even argued that competition in this arena (between NYU-Poly and Columbia) would be salutary. Apparently, someone was listening, but not exactly in the way I expected!
Some months ago, New York City issued a “request for expressions of interest,” seeking to identify academic institutions anywhere in the world that might want to develop what the City called an “applied science and engineering research campus.” Today, the City announced that it had received 18 expressions of interest, and clearly had met its goal of stimulating worldwide interest. Represented in the pool were a number of strong U.S. institutions (some being usual suspects, and others a bit of surprise) and also institutions in Canada, France, Finland, India, Israel, Korea, Switzerland, and the U.K. Pretty impressive!
The obvious question is why even try and bring in outside institutions — as good as they might be — rather than get behind the growth ambitions of the three largest in-city engineering research programs? Why start from scratch when you can build on gathering strength? Engineering is engineering, and it can be done well or badly, with strong commitment to industrial partnership or not, but there’s nothing magic about Stanford, Cornell, Purdue, or Carnegie Mellon. It’s about size, scale, momentum, and institutional leadership, and the home teams will always be larger than the NYC “satellites” of institutions based elsewhere. So why the competition? No one has been able to give me a good answer, so what follows is purely my own speculation. Feel free to contradict me in the comments.
[continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Engineering,
NYC
