What Teachers Do

I am no fan of Ruth Ann Dailey's politics, and even looking at the world from her perspective I usually find her writing on political and social matters unpersuasive.

But ... and this is a big "but" ... her column on Monday was a moving and elegantly written account of something that captures the best of what teachers are about: changing students' lives, and enabling those students to change others' lives.

The column recounted how a number of the students of a gifted teacher of percussion, including Ruth Ann Dailey's husband, reunited recently to perform together with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (in which RAD's husband, Andrew Reamer, is a principal player).  And with their teacher, Alan Abel, now 82 years old.  Acknowledging him and thanking him in this way was a great and honorable thing to do.

The headline -- "We stand, in awe, on the giants before us" -- did not capture the full beauty of the story, unfortunately, and I assume that it was not chosen by the author.  Yes, as RAD pointed out, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and Alan Abel is a giant in his field.  That aphorism is usually attributed (erroneously) to Newton, but Newton did repeat it, and he repeated it not to honor his forebears but to demean them - or him; precisely, Newton used the phrase as a put-down of his rival, Hooke.  Let me recapture an element of Newton's meaning but put it to positive use here.  Sure, there is awe of Alan Abel, but there is a lot more to recognize and celebrate.

Alan Abel's students were given a gift, by him.  Alan Abel's students received a lifetime of inspiration.  They have done exactly what a gifted teacher would ask them to do.  They paid that gift forward, showing the world (the PSO audience, and now the PG audience) not only what a great teacher he was, but also what greater students and performers they have become as a result of receiving his gifts.  Those who stand on the shoulders of giants stand higher than their forebear; they can see farther, and better.  The students have become the teachers. It is they who now inspire.  A teacher can receive no greater honor from his students, or hers, than to see those students changing the lives of those around them.

The Legal Profession Pivots?

"Pivot" is a hot word these days.  Entrepreneurs need to be able to "pivot" -- refine or revise just about everything that they are pursuing -- in order to survive and eventually succeed.

When and how should lawyers "pivot," on behalf of clients, on behalf of markets and industries, and in their own right?  Lawyers can and should be innovators, too, and even entrepreneurs.

Here is a start.  From Wired comes news of a lawyer startup called, yes, "LawPivot": 

Starting a startup these days is cheap with free software tools, $7 domain names, and robust web hosting for less than $20 a month. But one thing that hasn’t changed: lawyer fees that cost hundreds of dollars per hour.

But now there’s a startup for that problem called LawPivot, that promises to get startups cheaper legal advice and hook them up with good legal advisers from the outset, without emptying their bank accounts.

The problem of expensive startup legal fees came into the spotlight this week. Prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson issued a challenge to startup lawyers to find a way to lower their fees dramatically, after a company he was investing in got a $17,000 legal bill — even though the investment used standard documents..

That’s where LawPivot, funded in part by Google Ventures, comes in, according to co-founder Nitin Gupta, who called Wilson a “true thought leader.”

“He recognizes that disruption needs to be had in legal industry,” Gupta said. “We want to make it fair for companies and lawyers. We feel startups don’t need to pay $500 an hour to meet their legal needs.”

LawPivot’s solution is to create a Q&A site where startups can ask legal questions confidentially and then get recommended lawyers to answer the question, which can lead to the former hiring the latter.

While California-based startups can now ask three free questions a month, LawPivot will soon be charging companies $80 for each question. For lawyers, the benefit is being able to land new clients for themselves or their firms, and to build a reputation — though they don’t get paid to answer a question.

Currently, many startups simply rely on a recommendation from a friend or go with expensive counsel recommended by investors. With LawPivot, startups can see lawyer profiles, and hopefully be able to choose from a few lawyers after getting advice from each.

Just as important, the site aims to get startups to deal with their legal issues early on, rather than putting them off because getting advice is difficult and expensive.

The full Wired report is here.  Wired isn't alone; here is a page of links to other news coverage of LawPivot.

Who knows whether "LawPivot" will succeed.  But its existence points out that the ongoing problems facing startups that need legal advice are not limited to smaller markets like Pittsburgh:

All entrepreneurs, even grad student entrepreneurs, should get some elementary legal advice *before* going too far down the path of developing a new product or service, and ideally a relationship with a good lawyer will continue *during* development.  Get information about basic corporate law, basic corporate finance law, basic tax law, basic employment law, and basic IP.  Lawyers don't like being the "Dr. No" of the business world, but that's often the default when an idea comes in the door, fully fleshed-out but full of legal problems. 

Even if an entrepreneur gets connected with a lawyer early in the development process, all too often the entrepreneur makes it clear that there are no resources to pay a big time hourly-rate based legal bill -- and then the lawyer drops a big invoice on the entrepreneur after the work has been done.  That's the story that prompted LawPivot, and I've certainly heard that story in Pittsburgh.  Note to clients and prospective clients:  Negotiate fee caps and milestones, and get the deal in writing.

Finally, I love the idea that the legal profession itself is starting to be subjected to pro-active disruptive innnovation ("here's a new business model for delivering legal services"), rather than re-active disruptive innovation ("our corporate clients aren't willing to pay high rates for junior lawyers any longer, so we're no longer going to hire or retain junior lawyers"). 

Here is hoping that LawPivot, or something like it, comes to Western PA.

Documenting Pittsburgh Culture

Via CityLab and the Six Percent Place experiment, Eve Picker is documenting attitudes, preferences, and beliefs in and around Garfield, which is the target of the experiment.  Her posts, summarizing the work to date, are well worth reading.

• The design of the interview project
• Who was interviewed
• Interview questions for locals
• Interview questions for incomers
• What incomers like(d)
• What incomers don't like

My takeaway of the whole thing, so far: 

Rust Belt Chic is working, up to a point.  Pittsburgh's accessibility, "authenticity," and cost of living are attracting some young creatives.  (Whether "young creatives" are keys to the region's economic future is a Floridian question that I won't address here.)  But the lack of cultural diversity in Pittsburgh and the region's relatively "closed" character are barriers to success -- personal success, and the region's success -- as they have long been.

Innovation Notes from All Over

Picking through innovation items this morning:

"The Search for Ingredients to Replicate Silicon Valley"  Short answer:  Even if another region wanted to become a kind of Silicon Valley, there is no secret sauce.  One thing not considered in this short piece:  As a Silicon Valley native -- one of the few -- I think that it is likely that a place like the Silicon Valley (and its predecessors -- the SV has been innovative long before it became the SV) works because of the people that it attracts, not only because of something in the technical or investment water.  The SV has been able to cultivate and breed a selection effect.  That keys into something that's quite important for wannabe regions like Pittsburgh:  How do we get the right people into the pool?

"Eight Fallacies of Entrepreneurship"  There are no secrets here:  Entrepreneurship comes in many flavors.  It's not limited to high tech startups.  And it is hard.

"Amartya Sen on Growth and Well-Being"  What does a region want?  Jobs?  Money?  Happiness?  Health?  All of the above.  But the relationships among them are not straightforward.

Our Igloo is Melting

Another day, another loss for backers of Igloo-reuse.

I've written before, somewhat casually, that I come down on the side of the Igloo/Civic Arena coming down, but I don't feel strongly about the point.  I think that the argument that the structure somehow obviously meets historic preservation critieria is overblown; I think that the argument that the political powers that be have the fix in for a no-historic-preservation designation likely has some merit.  That just smells right to me.  The Penguins have been promised the land, and the Penguins are going to get the land.  And no matter what is said today about wise and contextual future development, it is very, very easy to imagine a Cheesecake Factory on that spot.  But most of that is also, in a sense, beside the point. 

The interesting and relevant dialogue here is between people who argue that the Igloo should be saved because of what the building represents to Pittsburgh's history -- and more important -- to their own personal histories -- and people who argue that the Igloo should be saved and reused because of what the building represents to Pittsburgh's future. 

If I read Rob Pfaffmann right, he is mostly in that second camp, and that's the version of the Save the Igloo campaign that is attractive to me.  It isn't really Save the Igloo.  It's Reuse the Igloo.  Talk about developers waiting in the wings on both sides of the case should be discounted; the Planning Commission and Pittsburgh City Council face a choice between two unknowns:  What is the likelihood that Pittsburgh gets something great out of handing the land over to the Penguins, and what is the likelihood that Pittsburgh gets something great out of handing the land over to the preservationists?  Leaving the building alone isn't an option.  What kind of change does Pittsburgh want?  There are precedents and examples all around us.  Some old buildings were reused, and people cheered.  (Station Square, whose commercial success is still modest and has taken quite a long time to achieve).  Some old buildings came down, and nothing happened, and a lot of people are still angry and skeptical (Syria Mosque).  And Some old buildings came down and new uses went up, and people mostly cheered (Three Rivers Stadium came down; Heinz Field went up; train sheds came down, Gateway Center went up).  Which of these is the Igloo likely to be?  This isn't a lottery, and the odds of each outcome are not the same.  But everyone is playing an angle. 

The fact that the fate of the Igloo appears to grab the public's attention in Pittsburgh to a greater extent than a policy judgment that will affect far more people and have a bigger impact on the prosperity of the region -- looming cuts to Port Authority service (the link is to an op-ed by the ACCD's Ken Zapinski) -- tells us something about the community's cultural center of gravity.  A relatively modest number of Pittsburghers today look at the Igloo and see the glories of their youth (Beatles! Beach Boys! Elton John! Mario!); some see the mythical glories of a younger Pittsburgh.  I'm not in either group, but I hear their passions.  But I also hear the passions of other Pittsburghers, whose priorities are more tangible and whose fate has more to do with whether Pittsburgh's arguable revitalization sticks - or not.  That's the real reason that I don't get worked up about the prospect of the Igloo's being torn down.  A lot of ink has been spilled and bits bitten (what do you do with bits to parallel spilling ink?) about what the Igloo has or has not done to the Hill District.  Did the Igloo isolate a thriving middle class African-American community and contribute to its decline?  Was the Igloo a nonfactor?  Did it anchor a Lower Hill community that would have been worse off without it?  I don't know.  But it's hard to argue that Port Authority cuts -- whether necessary to the survival of the system, or not -- won't hurt the Pittsburgh communities that are least able to bear the burden of reduced access to public transit, and whose prospects matter more to the future of Pittsburgh than whether an aging steel collander is turned into an amphitheatre or a water park or something else.

(The post title is borrowed, with a wink and a nod, from John Kotter's "Our Iceberg is Melting," a little pop management book that is worth reading and thinking about.)

What's Not to Like?

No doubt *not* in response to this Pittsblog post from last December about what's missing in Pittsburgh's current entrepreneurial environment, but absolutely in line with my point:  "Law firm offers help to tech start-ups" from today's PG.  Cohen & Grigsby, and specifically C&G partner David Kalson, will provide some low-cost and free legal services to Alpha Lab incubated companies.  (Truth be told, my post prompted some email notes telling me that this deal was in the works, even then.)

So far as I know, this is a first-of-its-kind partnership in Pittsburgh, and it's a great development.

The announcement at C&G's site doesn't say whether or not the arrangement is exclusive; I hope that it is not.  Pittsburgh not only needs more of this sort of thing, but Pittsburgh -- and the client companies and employees that ultimately benefit from these and related professional services -- also needs some lively competition.

More Open Innovation in Pittsburgh

I'm continuing to think about Open Innovation in Pittsburgh (see this post)  and how to build innovation environments.  There's more to come.  Meanwhile, what about existing Open Innovation?

The first place I turn is to Pittsburgh hackers.  Whether we're talking about analog hacking or digital hacking, hacking makes openness part of its disciplinary DNA.  Not surprisingly, given all the tech folks around here, Pittsburgh has a pretty lively hacking community.  Take a look at:

Hack Pittsburgh
DevHousePittsburgh (Twitter)
BuildGuildPGH
DorkbotPittsburgh
PGH Geeks (Geek Night)
(I was going to list the Pittsburgh Coding Dojo, but I can't find a live link.)

Are there others?  Have I used outdated links?  Let me know in the comments.

Partly just because the names are so cool, I have to list two hacking communities in the Silicon Valley that epitomize this stuff:  SuperHappyDevHouse, and Hacker Dojo.

From the SuperHappyDevHouse front door:

"The premier monthly hackathon event that combines serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere.

SuperHappyDevHouse is a non-exclusive event intended for creative and curious people interested in technology. We're about knowledge sharing, technology exploration, and ad-hoc collaboration. Come to have fun, build things, learn things, and meet new people. It's called hacker culture, and we're here to encourage it."

Hacker Dojo isn't an event. It's an actual place:

"Hacker Dojo is a community center for hackers and thinkers to meet, discuss, learn, create, build and play."

A lot of this is just hacking for the heck of it.  It's fun, it's cool, and people bring soda and Cheetos and sometimes much, much better stuff to eat, drink, and listen to.  But odds are that you put enough hackers together long enough -- the Dojo, for example, and HackPittsburgh, which has space on the South Side (Pop City wrote about it)-- and products and eventually companies start to emerge.  Does anyone have a really good story or two of a local company that came out of Pittsburgh's hacker culture?

Open Innovation and Regional Economic Development

Hypothesis:  If Pittsburgh knew what Pittsburgh knew, it would be unstoppable.

The amount of research and development talent in Western Pennsylvania -- in universities, government-sponsored research enterprises, and corporate R&D facilities, not to mention small labs, garages, and studios -- is extraordinary.  There are an awful lot of great people in town doing an awful lot of great, innovative work.

But too often, they don't know each other, and for want of collaboration, great innovations go undeveloped or are underdeveloped.  Innovator #1 and Innovator #2 may each have a critical piece of an innovation marriage made in heaven -- but those two people may occupy different innovation spaces altogether.  They may never meet, let alone discover that their ideas overlap in potentially productive ways.

Can the idea of Open Innovation help solve some of this complex coordination problem?  Open Innovation is business jargon; it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.  Management gurus usually say that Open Innovation means a firm looking outside its walls for new ideas.   I'll define it differently:  structured sharing of pooled resources, sharing and collaboration that makes things possible that are bigger and better than what we'd see in a world of one-to-one dealmaking.  A whole that's greater than the sum of its parts.  The idea is connected both to what I wrote about in an older post here called "The Entrepreneurship Commons" and to my academic research on cultural commons.   In short, can Pittsburgh prosper by embracing the idea of sharing innovation, rather than hoarding and exploiting innovation?  I think that it can.  The hard question is how.

There are some modest examples of related things already in place.  My academic colleagues argue that tech transfer offices in universities perform some of this pooling function.  In practice, all too often tech transfer offices are barriers to collaboration rather than facilitators.  At CMU, Project Olympus was founded in part to get around that problem.  Olympus points in the right direction:  a successful collaboratory (a word that I claim no credit for) need not be tied specifically to any one university, or to any one institution.  In my Entrepreneurship Commons post, I wrote about a local example of a sort of innovation fair that the Pittsburgh Tech Council set up to underwrite new ideas for the hockey arena.

I'm thinking about this these days because a colleague pointed me to something called the Innovation Access Network, a project in Boston that's housed at the Massachusetts High Technology Council.  If you or your organization joins the Network, then you can post R&D problems and offer R&D solutions in a password-protected online venue.  Sort of a high-end Craigs' List for innovators.  Here is the FAQ.

The Innovation Access Network is an imperfect thing (aren't they all?), and it raises all kinds of questions.  There is a price of admission, which is pretty steep.  Why so steep?  What are the default IP/NDA rules for "seekers" and "requesters"?  (The language has a Harry Potter-esque feel.)  What are the starting points for negotiating future deals / partnerships, and does the host (the MHTC) take a slice?  How should individual, for-profit institutional, not-for-profit institutional, and government interests be handled differently?  These are not the only legal issues, and the legal issues are only parts of the equation.  The social structures are probably more important.  What kinds of trust relationships and other supplemental institutions are needed in order to make a pooling arrangement successful?  (How about another bit of business jargon:  Can Open Innovation succeed in an economy dominated by a zero-sum mindset?  If a positive-sum mindset is required, does the region have enough positive thinking juice to sustain an OI model?)  The Innovation Access Network is hardly the only example of Open Innovation practices.  Proctor & Gamble's "Connect and Develop" program is the most successful model that I have encountered.  But the Innovation Access Network is the only one that I know that tries to tailor a formal sharing model to the interests of regional economic development.  A regional model has challenges -- and opportunities -- that are distinctive.  Boston, for example, not only has this Open Innovation initiative but has also launched a live/work innovation cluster as it redevelops part of the South Boston neighborhood.  Take a look at this website for Boston's Innovation District.  How should the economics of innovation be linked not only to the sociology of innovation but also to the geography of innovation?

So:  How might Pittsburgh improve on this?  How might Pittsburgh build its own Open Innovation institution(s)?  That's a project that I and(or) the Pitt Law Innovation Practice Institute would like to help with.

Pitt's IPI Hosts a Public Lecture on IP and Virtual Worlds

In recent posts here and here, I've started to sketch out the mission of Pitt Law's new Innovation Practice Institute.  It's time to turn to some details.  These will come out more or less in the order that they happen or the order in which they strike me as timely and interesting, rather than in order of importance.

First up:  Some public programming.  The IPI is taking over sponsorship of an existing lecture series at the law school, what in recent years has been called "The Distinguished Intellectual Property Lecture" because the speakers have been big-name intellectual property law professors or "figures" (or both).  That tradition may continue, but the focus of the lecture will shift a bit:  we'll try to connect the speaker and the topic to something concrete in Pittsburgh's innovation space.

So, the upcoming "Distinguished Intellectual Property Lecture" will take place on Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 4 pm at Pitt's law school.  It's free and open to the public.

The speaker is Professor Dan Burk, Chancellor's Professor of Law at University of California - Irvine and a senior figure in IP and cyberspace law scholarship worldwide.  He's the co-author of a recent book titled "The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It" from the University of Chicago Press.

At Pitt, his talk is titled "Virtual Worlds, Virtual Property."  Here's the summary:  Online computer games have become an important part of the Internet society, attracting millions of players and creating virtual economies larger than those of many actual nations. Game developers are increasingly turning to copyright and other intellectual property laws to police behavior in these virtual worlds. On March 24, Prof. Burk will discuss the emerging relationship of copyright to computer games and the texts that surround them."  It's a timely topic from the standpoint of Pittsburgh's software, app, and game developer communities, and it's a timely topic from the standpoint of some important recent legal developments, particularly the ruling of the Ninth Circuit in MDY v. Blizzard, having to do with the legality of botting in World of Warcraft.  (You can read a long-ish summary of that case and its implications at my other blog.)

The Pitt Law lecture isn't just for lawyers.  If you are a lawyer, however, we're offering 1 hour of PA CLE credit for the bargain price of $25.  Register for that at www.law.pitt.edu/events.  After the talk, Prof. Burk will be part of a free reception for everyone, at the law school.


See you there.