One of the case studies presented by Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak in their book The New Localism is Pittsburgh, PA, which has merged academic research institutions with business industry and supportive public policy. Pittsburgh has two major research universities within a block of each other, The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Experiences from Carnegie Mellon in the past are fueling the city’s reinvention and powering new industry as research is getting out of the institutions and into new businesses to drive the economic engine of the city.
What Pittsburgh does so well, explained by Katz and Nowak, is merge diverse industries and fields to create new innovation. They write, “A convergence economy emerged: a fusion of academia and industry with electrical and mechanical engineering, computer science, and multiple other fields. When disciplines collide, magic happens.” The idea of a convergence economy is crucial to New Localism. Academic institutions have been learning valuable lessons by creating more crossover between their divisions and fields. Bringing together academics who would otherwise rarely communicate is driving fields that previously had stagnated. With two leading institutions in the city, Pittsburgh has taken this lesson out of the academic fields into private industry.
Academics on their own don’t have a lot of great business sense or experience, but do have a good sense of where innovation is heading and what might be possible with new technology. Combining their expertise and knowledge with people who understand business and have connections with funding agencies can help lead to scale and commercialization of innovations. This cannot happen without something that creates a convergence between disparate entities.
Hospitals today are creating incubator labs to help get new medical advances out of the research lab and into industry. Universities are beginning to merge with private industry to find ways to get innovation out of the academic hallways and journal articles into factories and business. Governments are helping back quasi-governmental networks to share the risk of new innovation and find new ways to fund local developments in technological innovation. Pittsburgh is leading in this field, and cities across the United States are following by finding new ways to engage their academic institutions and industries.
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