Bring Electric Cars to Pittsburgh

My friend Chris Paine made a great documentary film back in 2006, "Who Killed the Electric Car?"  Now Chris, like the electric car itself, is back.  There's a sequel in the works:  "Revenge of the Electric Car."  The film will be released this year.  Want to see it in Pittsburgh?  Tell the filmmakers.  Among many other great things, they're making great use of social media to get the word out.

The Cupcake Crumbles and the Donuts Rise

Last Friday was the last day of business for Dozen's Downtown shop. Let us pause for a moment of silence. May the Cupcake Class find other amusements.

I know that some occasional Pittsblog readers are not amused by my less-than-completely-serious posts on cupcake matters; if you're in that camp, you may stop reading here. But Napoleon allegedly said that an army marches on its stomach, and I think that you can learn a lot about the culture of a place by studying its eating habits.  Plus it's fun.  This is a blog, not an economics journal.

It's notable that the Dozen that closed the doors of one location last Friday is not the Dozen that opened that shop.  The opening Dozen was Dozen Cupcakes; the closing Dozen is Dozen Bake Shop.  That's more than a matter of terminology or semantics.  Cupcakes are no longer Dozen's vision and mission.  Dozen saw the icing on the wall some time ago.  Pittsburgh's cupcake eyes were bigger than its stomach. 

Equally important, Pittsburgh's tastes in food have gotten vastly more heterogeneous than they were even a few years ago.  Après le cupcake, Pittsburgh's deluge, I wrote some time back, meaning that a cupcake crash was coming, and the challenge for cupcake entrepreneurs was and is to pivot and keep growing.  Pivot where?

Go low, and aim high.

At both ends of the food-and-culture spectrum, the donut is back, both in the original, humble form that speaks to Pittsburgh's working class roots and in new-agey, high-priced hipster form.  Better-Maid Donut Co. in Elliott appeals to traditionalists; two-dollar doughnuts have popped up in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan and are undoubtedly on their way to the Burgh.  Dunkin' Donuts will have some 'splainin' to do.

High-end donuts in Pittsburgh?  I think that they're on their way in, even as $4 cupcakes are losing their edge.  The New York Times, arbiter of all things that progressive upper and upper-middle class Pittsburghers should aspire to, has declared that Pittsburgh's local food renaissance is ready for prime time.  Instead of après le cupcake le deluge, it's après Primanti Brothers le deluge. 

The diversification of Pittsburgh's food culture isn't so significant in itself, though demand for higher-end cuisine signifies something about the health of the local economy, at least in certain neighborhoods and among certain populations. 

What's more interesting is how the diversification of Pittsburgh's food culture likely signifies the diversification of Pittsburgh's master narrative.  Once the city and region were defined at least metaphorically and often literally by stories of steelworkers and steelmakers, by  those who worked in the mills and those who financed the mills.  Working class and upper class, or donut eaters and cake eaters, to be brutally and somewhat unfairly reductionist about Pittsburgh's past.  In linear form that narrative goes like this:  Steel made Pittsburgh.  Steel crashed in the 1980s.  Pittsburgh crashed with it.  Pittsburgh has slowly managed to pull itself up, replacing steel with innovation, whatever that is.  (That is a partly non-ironic comment.)  I've written before that Pittsburgh's master revitalization narrative is incomplete, even if the pre-crash part of the narrative (steel made Pittsburgh; steel crashed; Pittsburgh crashed) is pretty persuasive.  But incompleteness isn't necessarily a sign of weakness.   A new 21st century Pittsburgh narrative is emerging.  The peaceful co-existence of donuts and cupcakes in a literal and metaphorical baked goods ecology is testimony, I submit, of the maturation of an increasingly complex community.

The Qur'an at the Warhol

I don't get out much, but I did get to the Warhol Museum last night for a preview of a new special exhibition:  "The Word of God: Sandow Birk's American Qur'an."

From the museum's website:

For five years Sandow Birk has been creating his epic body of work American Qur’an. In this ongoing series, Birk employs traditional Islamic calligraphy and painting techniques to illustrate the entire 114 Suras of the Qur'an. Using ink, gouache and a hand-lettered “font” based on graffiti tagging, he illuminates the verses with relevant scenes from contemporary American life. A selection of these Suras will be on view.  This exhibition is the first in an ongoing series titled TheWord of God, which will examine major religious texts through the lens of contemporary art.

The exhibition tour is organized by Forma Projects: 21, Venice, California.

Highly, highly recommended.

The IPI in the PBT

Yes, that's the Pitt Law Innovation Practice Institute being profiled in today's Pittsburgh Business Times.

The good news:  I'm generally in the "any PR is good PR" camp, especially at the early stages of a new venture, so I like the visibility.  Thanks to the PBT for taking an interest.

The bad news:  The story is behind a paywall, so I haven't seen it or read it. 

The story is here.

The Innovation Practice Institute: The Vision

This is the next in a series of occasional posts about my day job and what, through that job, I hope to have in store for Pittsburgh.  The first post, here, described the Innovation Practice Institute at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where I am now the Faculty Director.

I'll continue to work from the broad to the specific.  Today:  What's the vision? 

The vision is that the legal profession in the Pittsburgh region can do more -- a lot more -- to add value to the area's innovation-based economy, and to a much greater extent than it does today.

Right now, in popular or general business understanding, law and lawyers are -- mostly -- the "necessary evil" of innovation and entrepreneurship.  Experienced and sophisticated businesspeople (innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, managers) know that's not true; a productive working relationship with lawyers who understand the needs of innovators and entrepreneurs and the dynamics of an innovation-basesd economy is critical to the success of a new company and to the vibrancy of the economy as a whole.

Why?  Well-trained lawyers are perfectly situated to appreciate and help their clients navigate the interrelationships of the overlapping regulatory and business frameworks that innovators and entrepreneurs need to deal with -- intellectual property law, corporate law, securities law, tax law, immigration law, employment law, commercial law, and (increasingly) complex regulatory environments (FDA, telecomm, and so on).

In addition, in mature innovation economies, lawyers often play essential roles in "brokering" relationships among innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, real estate developers, key managers, underwriters, accountants, and so on.  When I was practicing law in the Silicon Valley, the paradigmatic Stanford or Berkeley grad student who wanted to start a company would get referred to one of a number of well-known "dealmaking" corporate lawyers, who would broker introductions to the many other professionals who could help move the student's idea from concept to operating business.

In Pittsburgh today, there are relatively few lawyers who are really highly skilled at the first function (interdisciplinary business counseling for innovators and entrepreneurs), and fewer still who fill the second role (deal-brokering).  That's not to say that neither of these things happen.  There are lawyers in Pittsburgh who "get" entrepreneurship and innovation -- but their numbers are small, they haven't coalesced into a well-recognized community of practice, and only recently have the most skilled of them offered discounted or cheap services to the most entry-level/early stage startups.  And there is a lot of deal-brokering in Pittsburgh -- performed, on the whole, by successful shops like Innovation Works and the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse.  But the deal-brokering shops will tell you -- they've told me -- that their long-term goal is to succeed their way (mostly) out of business.  A big enough and successful enough innovation environment doesn't need as much "incubating" as Pittsburgh gets today.  A big and successful innovation environment can support and prosper in a market without the kinds of subsidies that help enterprises like IW and PLSG.

Achieving that kind of innovation marketplace is a long way off, and it may never happen at all.  In the meantime, the IPI hopes to partner with IW and PLSG and other, similar or related organizations, to help our Pitt Law students get the kind of real-world experience during and soon after their legal education that 21st century innovation lawyers need to succeed.  (What's good for the regional economy should be good for the innovation-oriented students at our law school, and vice versa.)  That means innovation inside the standard, traditional law school curriculum.  We also hope to help identify and convene a visible community of innovation practitioners.  That means programming designed to reach out to Pittsburgh's many, related innovation communities and to help them learn about the role of law and lawyers in achieving success.   And in time, we want to include and offer research on innovation and entrepreneurship, which means not only collaborating with other universities and schools in Pittsburgh who have strong, existing interests in innovation and entrepreneurship but also partnering with innovators and innovation researchers outside of Pittsburgh -- bringing them to Pittsburgh, for example -- so that the several parts of Pittsburgh today can learn what Pittsburgh knows (in other words:  the IPI can be a kind of hub for information and policy development in the innovation space, which is currently pretty fragmented), and so that Pittsburgh can build on the best of what other regions know, too.

[For on the thinking that is going into the IPI, read this post about lawyers and "the entrepreneurship commons.]

Not So Livable

A unit of the Economist magazine just put Pittsburgh at #1 among "most livable" US cities.

Before anyone gets too excited about that, remember that Detroit finished #7, ahead of less livable cities such as Boston, Seattle, and Minneapolis.

Still, whatever others and their datasets may think of Pittsburgh, the city and region are being restored to a certain equilibrium.  The Craze of the Cupcake Class may have crested, at least if this paean to the humble donut represents what Pittsburgh cares about today.

The Innovation Practice Institute Reboots

Enough about you, Pittsburgh. What about me?

As of January 1, 2011, over at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where I've been on the faculty since 1998, I shifted gears a little bit: I became the Faculty Director of a little enterprise called the Innovation Practice Institute. I've been blogging and kibitzing around the innovation space in Pittsburgh for many years. Finally, I have something semi-official to do with it. And with this post, I'm going to kick off a series of occasional notes that describes what the Institute, or the IPI, as we call it, is about.

The IPI was founded in 2009 with seed funding from the Heinz Endowments' Innovation Economy program. The basic game plan was -- and remains -- to equip new lawyers with the knowledge and skills that they need to effectively serve the region's innovators. Our hope is that focusing sustained attention on the legal community that deals with innovation will broaden and deepen the pool of legal talent in the region, leading to a better, cheaper, and more robust infrastructure of professional services here.

Some of that has to do simply with intellectual property law, but a lot of it does not. There's a lot more to the law and policy of innovation than IP rights, and the IPI is going to take up all of that, and specifically the ways in which different bodies of law and different areas of law practice interact to support an innovation economy: IP law, corporate law, securities law, tax law, employment law, immigration law, and bankruptcy law, among other things. The IPI is naturally interested in a lot of high tech-y, IT-y stuff, but we won't be limited to that. "Innovation" encompasses a broad range of products and services, and it encompasses the need for the new in not-for-profit and government spaces as well as in the commercial sector.

The most optimistic view of all of this is that our approach to law and lawyers is good for innovators and their collaborators across a wide range of enterprises, from garage inventors to start-up entrepreneurs to grad students to universities to innovators in large-scale for-profit enterprises. It should be good for those who want to invest in these ventures and for those who want to work for and with them. And it should be good for the lawyers themselves, because the job market for new JD graduates these days is crammed with people who haven't been trained to participate in the kind of fast moving, dynamic, cross-disciplinary economy that we all now inhabit.

Pittsblog readers may remember that last Fall, I posted a note about a job posting that solicited applicants for a new Executive Director of the IPI. We filled that position with my new colleague Justine Kasznica, who has been working with entrepreneurs in Pittsburgh and who has, in the few weeks since she came on board, seized the energy and buzz that had taken hold around the IPI under the leadership of its initial Director, Max Miller, and pushed it to a new level. The IPI is a vision of how the legal community can add value to innovation in Pittsburgh, but it is also going to engage concretely -- with students, with local lawyers, with innovators, with innovation-oriented institutions and organizations, and with researchers and scholars. That's the big picture, anyway. In future posts I'll try to break down what it might mean in more concrete terms. And as some of those concrete things start to roll out -- look for some of them this Spring -- I'll flag them here.

Ready. Fire. Aim.

Great new article about the entrepreneurial mindset over at Inc. magazine.

A taste:

[M]aster entrepreneurs rely on what [study author Saras Sarasvathy] calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don't start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies. By contrast, corporate executives—those in the study group were also enormously successful in their chosen field—use causal reasoning. They set a goal and diligently seek the best ways to achieve it. Early indications suggest the rookie company founders are spread all across the effectual-to-causal scale. But those who grew up around family businesses will more likely swing effectual, while those with M.B.A.'s display a causal bent. Not surprisingly, angels and seasoned VCs think much more like expert entrepreneurs than do novice investors.