A Pittsblog Status Update

Summer is in full swing, and my travel schedule has gotten correspondingly busy.  Pittsblog posting will be even lighter than normal for a while.

I'm writing this post in Munich, where I come most summers to do some summer teaching and beer drinking.  Munich is an absolutely lovely city, made all the more so by its extraordinarily broad and efficient public transit system:  underground; suburban trains; trams; and buses, all well coordinated with each other. 

There is just about no point in comparing a place like Munich with a place like Pittsburgh.  The two cities could not be more different.  Still, every year I return to Pittsburgh more determined than ever to ride public transit rather than drive.  And every year, I am quickly disappointed by its dwindling public transit options.

Cycling in the Burgh

If you are cycling advocate in Pittsburgh, or know a cycling advocate in Pittsburgh, or have even a passing interest in cycling in Pittsburgh, then you may appreciate this tale of cycling in Washington DC -- an assault on a cyclist, by a motor vehicle driver, and its aftermath.

Reading that story reminded me of the horrific incident recently involving two Pittsburgh cyclists, Bob Noll and Jonathan Finder.  The PG hasn't updated its coverage to indicate either the condition of Dr. Noll, who was terribly injured, or the status of the police investigation.  Does anyone have news to share?  [Updated:  They do, here in the Post-Gazette.]

Despite how dangerous cycling in Pittsburgh can be (narrow, poorly maintained roads not designed to accommodate both cyclists and drivers; lots of angry drivers who do not understand and resent sharing roads with cyclists; and some reckless cyclists, ignoring stop signs and using cell phones will riding), the emergence of a visible and viable cycling movement over the last decade is nothing but a great thing for the city, its people, and its reputation.

I don't cycle on city streets myself.  I grew up riding in the San Francisco Bay Area, on suburban streets, on busy thoroughfares, on bridges, over mountain passes.  Cycling isn't risk-free out there, but I never felt the hostility towards cyclists that sometimes gets expressed in local media in Pittsburgh.  So here, I keep my wheels on the trails.  Many thanks to the many courageous ones -- and the many responsible ones -- who don't.

Bike Pittsburgh, everyone.

Women in Pittsburgh

Yesterday's Regional Insights column in the PG, about women and new business in Pittsburgh, hit one nail on the head. Harold Miller wrote:

The Pittsburgh region ranks dead last among the top 40 regions in the country in the number of women-owned businesses relative to the size of its population. Also, the number of women-owned businesses here has grown more slowly than in most other regions.

(A version of the column also appeared at Harold's blog.)  If the name of the game in Pittsburgh's arguable, ongoing revitalization is *new business creation,* and it is, then these are damning statistics.

Harold sees some cause for optimism: He calls out several of the resources in the region that are available to women who are or who want to be entrepreneurs. Chatham's Center for Women's Entrepreneurship. The Center for Women in Business at Pitt's Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence. The National Association of Women Business Owners. The Women's Business Network.

I absolutely understand the importance of having dedicated resources available for women.  But with all of the cheering in Pittsburgh about entrepreneurship over the last decade, the region's terrible ranking on women as entrepreneurs says something, I think, about what's not working in the region's entrepreneurial climate generally, and at least some of the responsibility has to lie with Pittsburgh's entrepreneurship "middleware."   That is, what's missing from the column is any reference to the big hitters among enterprises devoted to supporting and nurturing local entrepreneurship:  Innovation Works, the Life Sciences Greenhouse, Idea Foundry, funders at Blue Tree Angels, SBDCs at Pitt and Duquesne.

History and culture are difficult things to overcome, and those "big hitters" are as subject to them as any institutions in town.  For decades, Pittsburgh's labor market was notoriously hostile to women in the workforce.  Today, more women than men are employed in Pittsburgh overall.  That's huge, and a huge shift.  The next step is for Pittsburgh's principal entrepreneurship resources to make entrepreneurship as easy as possible for *everyone.*

Did Someone Not Get the Diversification Memo?

From "The Street,"  "Five Places Where the Bubble May Burst".  "The Street took a look at five regions that lean heavily on one industry and at just how much they stand to lose should their bubble be the next to go."  One of those regions, they think, is Pittsburgh:

It's almost a shame a town so hard hit by the industrial decline of the late 1970s and early 1980s has become a perfect storm of bubbles. The University of Pittsburgh is still one of the town's largest employers, the empty manufacturing facilities are being populated by tech startups and arguably the biggest employer in town is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center -- which is, yes, separate from the university from which it takes its name.

The last may be the most volatile of Pittsburgh's three rivers of revenue, as Pittsburgh and other health care heavy towns such as Augusta, Ga., and Boston may not have to wait for the baby boomers to blow through to see their bubble burst. According to health care consulting firm Millman, American families insured through their jobs are racking up an average of $19,393 in health care costs, up 7.3% from last year.

In fewer than nine years, the cost of health care has more than doubled. Hospital spending, which is only 48% of total health care spending, accounts for 60% of the increase. If you consider this kind of growth unsustainable, join the club.

The nation's still sharply divided over President Barack Obama's health care law and none of this posturing has cut so much as a cent from costs, and communities that lean heavily on their hospitals will bear the brunt of it. Pittsburgh knows this too well already; a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hospital in its Braddock neighborhood was closed just last year.

There are just too many misleading things going on in that passage to know exactly where to begin.  How about this?  "Meds" in the Pittsburgh region provided around five percent of the region's jobs in 1980.  Today, "meds" account for around fifteen percent of Pittsburgh's jobs.  Bubblicious?  You decide.  At the least, Pittsburgh has achieved a certain kind of "renaissance" if some people now think that the region is a poster child for success built on eds-and-meds exuberance.

Innovation Demographics

A long time ago, I wrote:

Indian entrepreneurs and software developers have been attracted to the Silicon Valley for all the usual Californian reasons. The heart of the Valley is a social and economic culture that values imagination, expertise, and energy--Seize the Day!--over history and skin color. No one sits around Palo Alto whining that there isn't enough to do downtown and waiting for someone to do something. There isn't a lot to do in downtown Palo Alto (I grew up there, my family still lives there, I go back at least once a year), but everyone and his mother is brainstorming new ideas, raising money, hiring friends, and launching new businesses. Many of them fail. Even most of them. But they get up and start again.

Lesson: Pittsburgh will have a hard time attracting more of these sorts of immigrants without doing more to change its historical resistance to social and economic entrepreneurship.

And so it comes to pass that the Indian population in the Pittsburgh region has nearly doubled over the last 10 years.

Chris B., as usual, has much more detail, including pointers to material from a month ago that I missed because I was out of town.

Dying City Revived

No, not Pittsburgh.  Grand Rapids, Michigan:



Explanations here

and here.

Pit Crews in Pittsburgh

Read through Atul Gawande's recent commencement address to the most recent graduates of Harvard Medical School and ponder, as I have been trying to do, how it maps onto problems in innovation and creativity generally.  Pittsburgh as much as any city loves its heroes, in sports, arts, and business, and it often looks to them for heroic ideas and heroic solutions.  But there is another side of Pittsburgh -- the side that values collaboration and team play -- that may be even more important to the region's future.

A taste from Gawande:

I do not believe society should be forced to choose between whether our children get a great education or their teachers get great medical care. But only we can create the local medical systems that make both possible. You who graduate today will join these systems as they are born, propel them, work on the policies that accelerate them, and create the innovations they need. Making systems work in health care—shifting from corralling cowboys to producing pit crews—is the great task of your and my generation of clinicians and scientists.

You are the generation on the precipice of a transformation medicine has no choice but to undergo, the riders in the front car of the roller coaster clack-clack-clacking its way up to the drop. The revolution that remade how other fields handle complexity is coming to health care, and I think you sense it. I see this in the burst of students obtaining extra degrees in fields like public health, business administration, public policy, information technology, education, economics, engineering. Of some two hundred students graduating today, more than thirty-five are getting such degrees, intuiting that ordinary medical training wouldn’t prepare you for the world to come. Two years ago, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement started its Open School, offering free online courses in systems skills such as outcome measurement, quality improvement, implementation, and leadership. They hoped a few hundred medical students would enroll. Forty-five thousand did. You’ve recognized faster than any of us that the way we train, practice, and innovate has to change. Even the laboratory science must change—toward generating treatments and diagnostics that do not stand in isolation but fit in as reliable components of an integrated, economical, and effective package of care for the needs patients have.

The problems of making health care work are large. The complexities are overwhelming governments, economies, and societies around the world. We have every indication, however, that where people in medicine combine their talents and efforts to design organized service to patients and local communities, extraordinary change can result.

Recently, you might be interested to know, I met an actual cowboy. He described to me how cowboys do their job today, herding thousands of cattle. They have tightly organized teams, with everyone assigned specific positions and communicating with each other constantly. They have protocols and checklists for bad weather, emergencies, the inoculations they must dispense. Even the cowboys, it turns out, function like pit crews now. It may be time for us to join them.

Innovation at The Warhol

There is a superb profile of Eric Shiner, acting Director of The Warhol Museum, in today's Post-Gazette.  Kudos to Mary Thomas, who wrote it, to Rebecca Droke, who shot a marvelous photo of Eric, and to Eric himself, for his characteristically thoughtful and inspirational words.

The art worlds of Pittsburgh -- note the plural -- have a tremendous amount of activity underway and even more potential, especially in the art-meets-modern-commerce spaces pioneered by Andy Warhol and being extended at places like the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU.  These are places and spaces where innovation and creativity is emerging in new and amazing ways.

See also earlier profiels of Eric Shiner at Pop City and in the Carnegie Museums' house magazine.