Once More into the Media Breach

Here is the link to yesterday's City Paper column by Chris Potter (a sidebar, really, to a longer story about the future of print journalism as we knew it in the late 20th century) that quotes me and several well-known local bloggers on what blogging can't do -- and what the Post-Gazette might do.

Some of the themes that Chris picked out from our conversation are themes that Pittsblog readers have seen before:

Most important of those is the need to distinguish between the material that the paper should cover (which is primarily local, and much less national or international) and the intended readership of the publication (which is not local). Historically, the shadows cast by the advertising, circulation, and editorial sides of the paper, respectively, were essentially identical. That's no longer true. The Post-Gazette now has a national and international audience for its local coverage. It could allocate resources accordingly.

Chris picked up on a couple of newer themes, one explicit and one implicit.

The explicit, "nuclear bomb" theme is that newspapers need to reconsider their most fundamental truth: That the editorial side should have nothing to do with the business side (i.e., advertising and circulation), and vice versa. Every other institution in Western society is being forced to reconsider fundamental truths; newspapers are no different. Chris and every other paid journalist would say: Wait! If the editorial side knows what the business side is up to, then the paper will pander to advertisers and lowest-common-denominator readers. We'll see sports on the front page (and sports on page 2, and on the editorial page, and on the business page, etc.). The Post-Gazette will turn into US magazine, with writers writing (badly) about themselves, and celebrities, and society balls, and Survivor contestants from Western Pennsylvania. The paper will ignore or under-report serious news about local politicians and will fail to investigate allegations of corruption in city government.

And in response, I'd say: I already read the Post-Gazette every morning. Tell me how the world would *change.*

The implicit, more subtle but far more important theme is that there is no one-size-fits-all short-term panacea for the crisis in print journalism. There is no magic bullet that will fix what ails the Post-Gazette, and the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Every paper and every region has its own special brew of problems and opportunities.

That's one reason (among many) why I cringe when I see the Post-Gazette failling falling all over itself to chase the Twitter fad. (Chris Briem has another Twitter-related post up today, following his Twitter-related post from the other day.) Today's P-G front page has another uninteresting, old news Twitter feature. People engage in spoofing on the Internet? Who knew!

The biggest local business story of the day is buried in the Business section. United Airlines is taking over USAirways' nonstop West Coast routes -- which sounds like bad news, but which is, in fact, good news. (It would be bad news if USAirways dropped the routes -- and there was no demand to justify another carrier's picking them up.) Journalist Twittering is a distraction because it's about the journalists themselves. While we like great writers and reporters, we like you because you tell us about ourselves, not about you, and because you tell us what we need to know -- not what we think we want to know.

The future of the news, like the history of the news, is about the readers. The forecast for Burghonomics is unsettled, as it has been for a long time. But look West for change, not East, and not into the Internet cloud. The folks that United will ferry back and forth between Pittsburgh and the West Coast are the folks whose attention local media need to cultivate. (Not the folks that Delta is ferrying back and forth between Pittsburgh and Paris.) The wisest cheerleaders in Pittsburgh are cheering for stronger ties between the Burgh, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Save the cheerleader, save the world. Or, you don't need a weatherman ... well, you know how that ends.

Schools and Taxes

Lots of travel means less blogging; meanwhile, I've spent a lot of time on the phone over the last couple of days talking with reporters (read the just-released issue of the City Paper, link to follow; the Columbia Journalism Review wanted to talk about copyright law, Shephard Fairey, and the future of traditional media; and Dutch public broadcasting somehow got the idea that I could help explain Pittsburgh's relative prosperity).

But all of that pales in comparison to this afternoon's news: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has upheld the trial court judgment in the case testing the validity of Allegheny County's real estate assessment system. The county's base year assessment system is unconstitutionally unfair, and something must be done.

Well, then. Political heads will focus on what County Executive Dan Onorato will do. I'd prefer to link the story to state-level proposals to consolidate the many school districts in the Commonwealth. Assessments get set by the county, but most of my tax dollars go to my local school district.

And it's at the school district level where the inequities in the current system really come home to roost. The consolidation proposal focuses on cost savings, but the real problem is the gross inequities in the quality of educational resources across Pennsylvania's many districts. Districts with high assessment bases can tax themselves modestly, come up with a generous pile of cash, and fund impressive school systems. Districts with low assessment bases can't tax themselves enough to fund anything decent. Districts with high cost programs and heterogeneous assessment bases -- the City of Pittburgh, for example -- have little choice but to tax everyone at a high level. And the quality of the program is uneven at best.

So, with either assessment reform or school district reorganization, watch out for the "Whack-a-Mole" effect: fixing a problem over here will create unanticipated problems over there. When assessment reforms cross wires with school district reorganization, we may end up with Caddyshack, that is, chaos. If the county finds a way to equalize tax burdens, it may indirectly make the school district inequity problem worse. And consolidation makes no sense unless it takes assessment methods into account.

Here is some history of note:

Some of you may have heard of a lawsuit titled Serrano v. Priest, which started in the California state courts way back in the early 1970s. The plaintiffs in that case offered a simple argument: California's method of financing its public schools violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution. California's method then, like Pennsylvania's method now, required that local authorities set property tax rates. Poor communities couldn't raise the same money per student that wealthy communities could raise. The Supreme Court struck that down. In response, the California Legislature centralized collection and distribution of property tax revenues, so that every student in the state was funded (nominally) at the same per-pupil level, regardless of where that student attended school. The total per-pupil revenue of each district was capped. Extra collections from wealthy districts were, in effect, distributed to poor districts.

Around the same time, the Legislature took a stab at property tax reform, enacting legislation requiring that property tax assessments be marked to market value. That effectively eliminated the discretion that local assessors previously had applied to hold down assessments for fixed income homeowners and generally to bias the system in favor of residential property owners and against owners of commercial property.

The product, in the mid-1970s, was a toxic combination: Climbing property values, producing escalating property taxes, linked to a wealth-redistribution requirement. Wealthy and middle class homeowners in California were mad as hell, and they weren't going to take it any more!

If you haven't heard of Serrano v. Priest, you may still have heard of the resulting tax "revolt," Prop. 13 (not "Proposition 13," but "Prop. 13," or "Jarvis-Gann" as it was universally known), the property tax "reform" initiative that left the school financing system in place but transformed the property tax assessment scheme. Under Prop. 13, now part of the California Constitution, real estate can be reassessed only upon a "change of ownership," and assessment increases during the term of ownership are capped at a tiny percentage of the property's value. Local authorities are barred from raising supplemental revenue (school boards could not impose local taxes or sell local bonds) except under conditions that are nearly impossible to meet. (Those conditions have been relaxed just slightly since 1978.) If you watch the movie "Airplane!," and if you watch the credit all the way to the end of the flick, you'll see a man sitting in a taxicab waiting for Robert Hays, the driver and star of the movie, to return from landing the stricken plane. That man is Howard Jarvis. The man who led the California tax revolt is also a minor footnote to a slapstick satire of disaster movies.

Which is, in a way, appropriate. Initially, all assessments were frozen as of 1978 values, which meant that public authorities in California were essentially unable to capture much of the taxable value of the huge increases in property value that the state witnessed over the succeeding 10 years -- though demand for public education and other public services skyrocketed. Many of the dire predictions of Prop. 13 opponents -- that schools and other public services would be starved of revenue -- proved accurate, though the full force of the effect only became clear over a period of years. Some of the damage was concealed and even reversed in the late 1990s as a result of a bubble in tax revenues associated with a bubble of the dot.com economy. But that money is long gone.

Today, the result is that (i) communities that were wealthy then remain largely wealthy today; (ii) because the California system of public education, and particularly its K-12 system, was all but starved of the money that it needed to operate effectively, it operates well today only in wealthier communities that have developed workarounds to the Prop. 13 limits. My view is that California's school finance reform and property tax reform have left the state as a whole worse off than it was before. That's not to say that the old system was a good one, and it's not to say that improvements weren't warranted.

But when you start tinkering with assessments and schools, be careful what you wish for.

to twitter where no one has twittered before

The PG's Brian O. has an honest column over the weekend on his views about modern communications, in particular his aversion to Twitter. The only active twitter feed I am aware of coming from a local journalist is Bob Mayo's, but I suspect there are others?

Kudos for honesty and his insight that PG management is encouraging the use of twitter. That in itself represents a sea change in perspective on the state of the world from what has been typical of the PG in the past. I still can't help but remember Tony N's very public confoundedness sending the lawyers after the evil commenters of the Internet. I ranted on that once, but honestly his column speaks for itself. Not to just poke at the PG, I still am a bit speechless at Mike S's column a few months ago in the Trib decrying the impact of blogging. I wish I could just write that off as an outlier, but I know first hand that Mike's thoughts are shared in one form or another by more than a few other local print journalists.


This isn't meant to be as harsh as it comes across, but Brian's piece may have summed up the entire problem the newspaper industry has connecting with potential younger readers. There is news/research out recently that: More Than Half of Voters Used Internet for Election News. Newspapers are for sure not the only industry having a problem relating to younger generations. An image I swiped from a Navy presentation once is really telling. Take a look at a snapshot of The Youth of Tomorrow. If you look at this slide and say 'wow' or even 'interesting' you are in trouble. Many would look at it and be unimpressed with how little new insight it gives. Imagine a presentation in the 1970's telling marketers that TV was becoming a major source of news. The sad truth is there is nothing 'tomorrow' about that slide, it is already the youth of yesterday in several ways. Nonetheless, that slide lays out newspapers' future audience if they want to survive the passing of the rotary phone generation.

But back to twitter which is here whether we like it or not. Might even be already past its prime and the question is what comes next? How important is Twitter? There are some great examples of the power of twitter. More than one journalist owes their freedom to twitter. Hopefully that is not a concern for Brian's beat here in Pittsburgh, but still. There is help. From our friends across the pond: How to: master Twitter, if you're a journalist.

Finally, Brian mentions he himself is of the rotary phone generation sort of. There was a time when even that was a scary new technology. Times change via one of my favorite YouTube clips:

Maybe we can take Brian to a new corner of the Internet world. Think he has ever posted a comment on a blog post? Hint. :-)

More on Pittsburgh's Entrepreneurship Commons

What do I mean by an "Entrepreneurship Commons"? A commenter asked me to elaborate on this earlier post, in which I distinguished between processes and institutions that offer (metaphorically) "retail" economic development services, on the one hand, and infrastructures that support (metaphorically) "wholesale" economic development. I wrote that policymakers should focus on "public and private resources to create infrastructures and environments to which resources (time, talent, money, innovation) can be contributed, in which they can be shared and mixed together, and from which they can be combined to produce new stuff -- knowledge, products, services, enterprises, industries. A university is a kind of commons. The internet is a kind of commons. A library is a kind of commons." (If you want a more detailed, theoretical elaboration of the idea, you can download and read this paper.)

A couple of recent Post-Gazette stories highlight bits and pieces of what I'm talking about.

Over here, the City of Pittsburgh wants to use the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) to funnel some seed money to technology entrepreneurs, using IP rights as collateral. As an IP lawyer, I can say that this last part isn't as easy or as smart as it sounds. As someone with experience representing entrepreneurs, I can say that the first part of the plan needs a lot of work: Who is going to decide who gets the money? How are they going to decide? Who is going to follow up and monitor use of the money? As someone who is interested in building institutions to really grow the regional economy, I can say that this is more "retailing": A prospective borrower (an entrepreneur) comes into the bank (the URA), gets a loan (if all goes well), and goes out into the market economy to hire people and make and sell things. The economy grows, one small company at a time.

Over there, the Penguins and the Tech Council are showing off the fruits of their collaboration last year. More than 100 new ventures offered goods and services to the team for present use, with an eye to adoption in connection with the new hockey arena. This is an example of an "entrepreneurship commons" (note that "commons" come at lots of different levels: small and large, and commons within commons). Neither the Tech Council nor the Penguins created or funded these new ventures; instead, the Tech Council and the Penguins built an environment (that's important: environments and infrastrucures don't just happen - they get built) where new and existing ventures could come and get visibility and possible deals. There were lots of inputs (new ventures, new products and technologies), pooled in one place. (Both a physical place and a metaphorical marketplace.) There were no specific expectations regarding outputs (bigger ventures? more jobs? better technologies?). But -- voila! -- out of the pool, deals were struck. The Penguins got useful stuff. The participating companies will get revenue and exposure.

And -- to my mind, the best part of the process, though the Post-Gazette didn't pick up on this at all -- the leaders of the participating companies got some time to meet and see one another and to learn about potential complementarities and partnerships. This is something that "retail" economic development almost always misses -- the idea that client 1 and client 2 and client 3 might have something to do with one another. A thoughtful venture capitalist can link portfolio companies; Innovation Works or Idea Foundry or the PLSG can build connections between clients that are doing similar things. But the most interesting connections are often made between the companies themselves; entrepreneurs see the world and their products in ways that investors and mentors may not. The economy grows, batches of companies at a time.

Alpha Lab, hatched at IW, is a great example of local institution that is taking a "commons" approach (in part) to economic development, even if the AL team doesn't necessary think in "commons" terms. The AL space has shared common (or "commons") space for AL companies. There are Open Coffee Club meetings and mashups under AL auspices, all of which are designed to grow and nurture a commons sensibility.

Focusing on an Entrepreneurship Commons means focusing not only on new technologies, new entrepreneurs, and new sources of funding. It means focusing on infrastructures, that is, on physical and conceptual environments in which entrepreneurial resources can be pooled -- so that new and unanticipated things can happen.

The least-developed part of Pittsburgh's Entrepreneurship Commons is the professional services infrastructure, especially the lawyers. There are plenty of lawyers in Pittsburgh who spend all of their time representing entrepreneurs. There are relatively few lawyers in Pittsburgh who spend much time building an legal infrastructure for entrepreneurship. (At our law school, we're working on programs to help fill that need. Watch for more - next Fall.)

What I do I mean by that? I'll elaborate in a later post. But here's a taste. Question: In the Silicon Valley, if you're a grad student who would rather start a tech company than finish a Ph.D., who do you call? Answer: Your next-door neighbor will know -- and he or she will tell you to call one of a relatively small number of very well-known business lawyers. The Valley has a sophisticated and deep entrepreneurial infrastructure, and the lawyers play major roles in shaping it. Question: In Pittsburgh, if you're a grad student who would rather start a tech company than finish a Ph.D., who do you call?

Sometehing a Little Different

Do you rely on Strunk & White? Do you like it? The front page of today's Post-Gazette includes a piece by Mackenzie Carpenter that covers this week's controversy about the merits of that little book. The volume is turning 50 years old, and it is the subject of scathing criticism in this week's edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I'm a fan of the critic and no fan of Strunk & White; I mentioned the controversy on one of my other blogs. The critical quotation that I picked up is this one:

It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write “however” or “than me” or “was” or “which,” but can’t tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.

So I won’t be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.

In other words, Strunk & White gives false and often mistaken comfort to writers who are seeking rules -- any rules! -- regarding what and how to write.

The P-G report omits some important context. Much as I appreciate front-page coverage of this seemingly esoteric but vitally important topic (I'm serious), the details matter.

The lead critic is Geoff Pullum, a senior linguist and currently a professor at the University of Edinburgh. The Post-Gazette story leaves the reader with the impression that he is a stuffy and pedantic British academic; it frames his criticism as coming from "author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and a University of Edinburgh linguistics professor." That's correct. Geoff Pullum is, today, teaching in Scotland. But there is more.

Geoff Pullum is not some cranky Brit parked in a remote (though highly distinguished) university. He knows far more about English - American English - than you or I do. For more than 25 years (1981 to 2007) Geoff Pullum was a faculty member at the University of California - Santa Cruz. He's an American citizen. And he writes frequently and widely about day-to-day usage of the English language in American contexts, as a contributor to the number one blog on language and linguistics, Language Log.

Writers of all stripes -- bloggers, novelists, professional journalists, and academics -- should add LL to their daily reading list.

In My Right Mind

It appears that this line from a post earlier today -- "Did anyone go home afterward not thinking that maybe - just, maybe - this is the year?" -- caused some Pittsblog readers to question my intellectual and emotional well-being. This is the year for what, some might ask, and I deliberately left that question hanging.

But I have here my very own blog-alyzer, a device that is dead-on balls accurate (it's an industry term) in judging the level-headedness of any blog post about baseball in Pittburgh. That device reports, and I quote:

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
...
Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

I'll be at PNC Park tomorrow night. See you there.

A Diasporan Checks In

Pittsburgh Diasporans turn up in the oddest places. Today, for example, one writes to the columnist at the Post-Gazette who deals in affairs of the heart under the hed, "Cat's Call":

DEAR CAT: I was born in Pennsylvania, left when I was 18, joined the Navy, and now live in Hemet, Calif. I have been a huge Steelers fan since the 1970s. I have a Steelers tattoo and eventually my Harley Davidson will be painted with a Steelers theme. It took a year and a half to convince my wife to paint our house black and gold, but now the neighbors are complaining about the color.

Mostly the wives are complaining, the husbands say I'm lucky to have a wife that understands my passion for the Steelers.To stop all the neighborhood talk, my wife now wants to paint our house a bland color like every other house on the block. How do I politely tell neighbors to shut up about
my choice of colors?

-- CITIZEN OF STEELER NATION

Clearly, this is someone who needs to get a life. As in: Remember your Pittsburgh roots! To her enormous credit, Cat tells him to do just that:

Some neighbors might find that decorative "accent" a bit garish, but it's your house and you're free to decorate it however you wish. You don't have to tell them to shut up, in fact you don't have to say anything.

Cat's Call: If it makes you and your wife happy, that's all that matters.

Sixburgh. Coming to a California suburb today.

Immigration Factoid

Pittsburgh facts and stats aren't usually my thing, but I can't resist pointing to yesterday's New York Times feature on American tech companies and the challenges they face in building an international workforce. The interesting piece of the story -- and the piece that's relevant here -- is a graphic that apparently isn't available (yet?) online. It's a map of the US, studded with bubbles that signify the number of H1-B visa applications by county in 2008. There is a very big bubble in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area, and big bubbles in the New York/New Jersey and Northern Virginia/DC regions. No surprise there.

Among Rust Belt regions, Oakland County, Michigan (Detroit) and Allegheny County show up with the largest bubbles, and the numbers are surprising. In 2008, Oakland County had 16,639 H1-B applicants. The largest applicant (the Times graphic includes the largest applicant for each county listed) was Syntel.

That contrasts with 9,262 applications in King County, Washington, where the largest applicant was (no surprise here) Microsoft.

Allegheny County? 9,122 H1-B applicants in 2008. And the largest applicant? Fujitsu Consulting, which back in 2006 acquired a local company, Rapidigm.

H1-B visa statistics may understate both the scope of the international presence in local IT, and the demand for a greater presence. There are a number of successful IT firms in Pittsburgh that were founded and are owned by natives of other countries who have settled permanently in the US. Some very large companies in Pittsburgh grow their IT staffs with consultants rather than employees, putting the visa onus on some other firm. And, of course there is the H1-B cap itself, which has been the subject of ongoing conversations between the Pittsburgh technology community and our hard-working public servants in Washington, DC. Raise or remove the cap, and the numbers of foreign-born tech professionals in Pittsburgh is likely to grow.

A Baseball Town

As a most American city, Pittsburgh is passionate about that most American of sports. It's still a baseball town underneath it all. Give the people a team that can win, and watch our fragile morale soar. Kudos to Pirates manager John Russell for letting Zach Duke pitch the top of the 9th inning this afternoon, when I and much of the rest of the Opening Day crowd assumed that Duke's splendid day was done at the end of 8. With two outs in the top of the 9th, my wife turned to me to ask why more than 30,000 fans were booing the pitcher. No, I explained; they're chanting "Duuuuuke." Did anyone go home afterward not thinking that maybe -- just, maybe -- this is the year?

A slip in the ratings

Forbes.com is out with its Most Livable Cities list again, and two-time Grand Champeen Pittsburgh has slipped to No. 10. Here are the 15 Most Livable Cities, with some comments from a former New Englander and 15-year (nearly) Pittsburgher:

15. Little Rock, Ark.
14. Peabody, Mass.
13. Madison, Wis.
12. Harrisburg, Pa. (Did NOT see that coming.)
11. Denver, Colo.
10. Pittsburgh, Pa. (Still a strong contender on the quality of its culture and low crime and unemployment.)
9. Worcester, Mass. (Really? Have you been to Worcester, Mass.? Kind of a shocker it could beat da 'Burgh. Fifteen years ago, it was considered a bit of an armpit; it now seems to have worked its way up to a pleasantly fit and uncallused elbow. It's much smaller than Pittsburgh, but it also gets good marks for culture, has very low crime and an outstandingly low unemployment rate. So: armpit with jobs = elbow.)
8. Baltimore, Md. (The Pittsburgh of the East Coast: about the same size, also does well in the realms of culture and unemployment rate, has a much higher cost of living but offsets that with strong income growth, something we don't score well on in Pittsburgh.)
7. Cambridge, Mass. (A perennial heavy hitter in quality of life. Always won hands down when I lived in New Haven, which couldn't compete at all. Great culture, low crime, but the cost of living pretty much demands a degree from Harvard, and not in social work.)
6. Oklahoma City, Okla.
5. Tulsa, Okla. (Interesting. Arkansas and Oklahoma are real players in this game.)
4. Stamford, Conn. (This is technically listed as the Stamford/Bridgeport/Norwalk MSA, but I don't think any sane person would list Bridgeport as the fourth Most Livable City. Clearly, it is riding Stamford's and Norwalk's coattails, and quite heavily too. Stamford is small and has a punishing cost of living, but it offers good cultural amenities and, despite Bridgeport's contribution, very low crime.)
3. Des Moines. (Yes. We've been trounced by Des Moines. More analysis of that in a moment.)
2. Bethesda, Md. (Another city with great culture, low crime, low unemployment and income growth that offsets its steep cost of living.)
1. Portland, Me.

Portland is a small city whose long and frigid winters have not kept it from having HUGE income growth, very low unemployment, low crime and favorable marks for culture. I also remember reading recently that it is one of the best cities in the country for childless singles in their 30s and 40s. Again, I must point out that bad weather is not helpful, but: Madison, Denver, Baltimore, Stamford, Bethesda, Portland and three cities in Massachusetts. Life is tough. Buy mittens.

As for Des Moines, like Pittsburgh a perennial punchline and synonymous elsewhere with "dull" or "nowheresville," I looked closely at Forbes' numbers to see why someplace in Iowa could be judged more livable than the 'Burgh.

Pittsburgh scores better on cost of living (yes, it's cheaper here than in Des Moines) and culture, and scores MUCH better on crime rate. But where Des Moines leaves us behind is in slightly lower unemployment and MUCH higher income growth.

So what my typically slapdash and unscientific analysis of Forbes' questionable methodology suggests is something I think we already knew: We've got so many of our ducks in a row, as a city. All we need to really flourish is jobs -- that actually pay.

Analysis of PA's Early Stage Capital

"The Pennsylvania Startup, Venture Capital and Angel Investor Scene - A Deeper Dive"

In anticipation of our participation at Wharton’s Venture Capital Symposium last week, we decided to mine the ChubbyBrain platform and database to do a deeper dive of Pennsylvania and its startup, venture capital, angel investment and university entrepreneurship community. The numbers and figures you’ll see presented below examine only the composition of live startups and their backers (VCs, angels as well as university programs).

Full analysis here.

Not Born Here

[A]ccording to new research co-authored by a Brigham Young University business professor, better decisions come from teams that include a "socially distinct newcomer." That's psychology-speak for someone who is different enough to bump other team members out of their comfort zones. ...

"One of the most-cited benefits of diversity is the infusion of new ideas and perspectives," said study co-author Katie Liljenquist, assistant professor of organizational leadership at BYU's Marriott School of Management. "And while that very often is true, we found the mere presence of a newcomer who is socially distinct can really shake up the group dynamic. That leads to discomfort, but also to a better process that ultimately yields superior outcomes."

The key factor is simply whether newcomers are distinct in some way from the other group members. ...

"[This research] is groundbreaking in that it highlights that the benefits of disparate knowledge in a team can be unleashed when newcomers actually share opinions of knowledge with old-timers but are socially different," Thomas-Hunt says. "It is the tension between social dissimilarity and opinion similarity that prompts heightened effectiveness in diverse teams."

Read about the whole thing here.

The Entrepreneurship Commons

Last Friday I gave a talk at the WVU College of Law in Morgantown, which was hosting a conference on entrepreneurship. The Benedum Foundation has given WVU a small grant to start a law clinic to support local entrepreneurs, and WVU invited me and a bunch of other law professors to come down and talk about what law and entrepreneurship might mean.

My own comments focused on what I call the "entrepreneurship commons." The phrase "commons" is a little bit of jargon that's based on the research that I'm working on these days. Jargon aside, the underlying point is pretty simple: In a lot of settings, policymakers should focus on structuring both public and private resources to create infrastructures and environments to which resources (time, talent, money, innovation) can be contributed, in which they can be shared and mixed together, and from which they can be combined to produce new stuff -- knowledge, products, services, enterprises, industries. A university is a kind of commons. The internet is a kind of commons. A library is a kind of commons.

No two commons are exactly alike. Commons aren't necessary public, and they aren't necessarily private. In fact, their uniqueness and their blended public/private character is exactly what makes them interesting, challenging, and useful.

Building an entrepreneurship commons - spaces for shared resource investment, combination, and production -- is far more important to the economic future of rebuilding cities like Pittsburgh (and Morgantown, though on a much smaller scale) than growing new companies and technologies one client or patent at a time. This is the distinction that I've blogged about before between "retail" economic development (remember, everyone, that's a metaphor!) and "wholesale" economic development. What our law school is trying to develop right now -- a program on entrepreneurship law that grows the ranks of practicing lawyers who understand entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship -- is "wholesaling." We're trying to grow Pittsburgh's entrepreneurship commons.

Pittsburgh to Detroit: Bake This!

The national media have shared a lot of recent opinions regarding what Detroit -- a failing city -- might learn from Pittsburgh -- a formerly failing city.

The answer is plain, and it comes as a surprise to many that well-respected media (the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and NPR among them) have missed the boat.

Bake. More. Cupcakes.

The Cupcake Class saved Pittsburgh, and the Cupcake Class is the cure for Detroit's ills. The lesson of Pittsburgh's rise from the ashes is that conspicuous consumption in the 21st century must be taken literally, not metaphorically.

The transition from an economy focused on producing durable goods to an economy focused on producing baked goods is neither simple nor cost-less. Workers trained to operate sophisticated robots will need to be retrained to operate frosting guns. Dealerships built to sell hundreds of Hummers will have to re-purposed as high-end patisseries. Elementary schools will need to adjust their policies and again permit parents to bring baked treats to class for birthday celebrations. Mayors who bet on Super Bowls will need to throw down the baker's gauntlet: You can't lick this. And the Detroit Lions will have to shed their reputation as the cupcakes of the NFL.

Bake away.