Innovation Matters

Special for Connecticut Magazine, January 2009

The battle for jobs is not about tax rates, parking lots or more efficient government. It is about Connecticut becoming known as North America’s best location for high potential entrepreneurs.

Start by attracting the special people who are skilled at starting and building firms capable of fast growth. Build a few exceptional programs that answer key needs for workforce, innovation support and global connectedness.

Entrepreneurs will be impressed if we build a state magnet grade 6 to 12 school system that produces extremely talented science oriented graduates – as good as any in the world. Attract parents to move here for these science academies and they will also expand our immediate pool of world-class workers.

Offer free tuition and summer internships through our state higher Ed institutions for students who take a rigorous STEM curriculum, do well and agree to work in the state for five years after graduation. Pay for training and higher salaries to new math and science teachers in our public schools.

Support innovation by making entrepreneurs happy and comfortable here. For those who qualify, offer space, fellowships, seed funding, expert mentors and a version of “tech clinical trials” at established large firms for new products.  Provide grants to those who can commercialize unused ideas within our largest companies. Always link people and companies to promote emerging Connecticut clusters that are based on established industries such as aerospace, business services and clean energy.

Brand a few locations as “tech transfer zones” designed for new tech firms. Locate them near rail lines for commuting and access to New York and airports, walking distance from a range of housing types and close to our research universities and hospitals.  Consider a “tech hostel” for recently graduated students and affordable incubators for startup companies.

Finish the whole package off with a well designed web 2.0 tech community innovation portal and a “funky” international campaign by the Governor touting us as hungry for innovation.

Ten years from now other states and countries will look at us with envy.

Cool, Spiky and Connected.

If the economy wasn’t reason enough to make us anxious this holiday season, Tom Friedman’s latest opus dedicated to the systemic weakness of humanity, Hot, Flat and Crowded will surely do the trick.  So, it got me to think about the kind of “out of the box” steps we could take to make New England the place to be by 2020.

So let’s turn the future on its head, by being cool, the place for people with choices to be, spiky, better technology and talent than other places and connected, building our infrastructure and schools to be a region that is close to the rest of the world.

For most of this decade New England has been adding great jobs and producing wealth for those at the very top end while stagnating and losing opportunity for most everyone else.  Now, with the country – and maybe the world – losing its footing, what could we do to move us back to our rightful position as the leading region in America?

Can we use our small size yet dense population to reprise our role during the first industrial revolution, as the region of entrepreneurship, innovation, great schools and advanced infrastructure? 

Consider a bitter pill that, taken now, will give us unique strength when things get really messy worldwide in 10 or 20 years. Instead of focusing on our financial problems of the next two years, we should aim at preparing for the coming systemic shocks from environmental, global competition and demographically driven pension and health care problems. 

New England should become a cross between the gleaming infrastructure and free education of northern Europe with the state supported R&D and business development systems of Singapore and South Korea.

So here is the deal (children close your ears): The six New England states – in a coordinated master plan – could create a set of new energy taxes many times higher than at present, creating a common floor, higher than the rest of the nation, for the cost of gasoline, home heating fuel, natural gas, and so on through out the region. 

If we can collect an extra dollar just on gasoline we would great a revenue stream that could fund an authority with over $6 billion in new annual dollars for regional education, better infrastructure, clean energy business R&D and investments in energy savings.

Think what we could do. First, we will raise enough money that needs-based subsidies could address real issues of hardship for people and legacy businesses who can’t pay the taxes. But let’s be real, $4.00 gas and home heating fuel is coming back, so let’s build a region that is battle-tested and ready to compete by getting there first. 

to the new funds would create a superb New England-wide bus, rail (and even a trolley) system, offer energy saving investment loans for businesses and homes, reduce tuition in our community colleges and other schools for students who live here and want to take technology related classes and provide more risk capital for new businesses.

New England would have the money to build a clean energy cluster that could lead the nation. We would not only build better fuel cells better, we would be the living laboratory for the energy-scarce world that is coming. 

I hate to think what is going to happen to New England if we spend 10 years cutting budgets and hoping that our energy costs and infrastructure needs take care of themselves by magic?

Crazy and politically impossible?  Maybe. But don’t we want the world to beat a path to our door? Entrepreneurs, investment capital – like sovereign wealth funds in Asia -- and the talented youth of the world will want to be here. Let’s make the New England brand about quality and preparing for the reality of the future,  because we cannot ever be cheaper than China or Florida and we can be as good as Singapore or Denmark.

We may not like the look of the future, but its coming.

Escaping from one whirlwind into another

In a few hours I will be leaving the suddenly not-so-stable US for what now seems like a remarkably calm and relatively wealthy spot, China.  For the next 18 days we will be touring the major northeastern part of that vast and powerful land. I will be reporting back on what I see and how the reality compares to what we read about on the OPED pages of the Times and Wall Street Journal. I will also get a sense of what people there think about the changing role and perhaps fortunes of America. Somehow we are intertwined by more that the location that much of high tech equipment is made and more and more designed. We count on the Chinese to loan us the trillions that we read about on the front page of the papers. They expect us to keep our wits and keep buying their merchandise. It should be annn interesting two and half weeks. Through the work of Paige Rasid back at the Council's offices I hope you can follow me through this blog, flickr and youtube. The trip will also give us a chance to explore and work with the new ways that all of us are communicating. 

It should be fun. Ask question or comment as we progress.

Matthew, on my way to Newark Liberty Airport