Lawyers for Innovators

When Pittsburgh tech incubator Alpha Lab announced last Spring its "Alpha Law" partnership with local lawyers Cohen & Grigsby, I cheered, here. The region desperately needs more high quality, reasonably-priced legal services for entrepreneurs.  What's more, I said, I hoped that other lawyers would challenge Cohen & Grigsby's lead:

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.

Last week, the sharp-eyed Malia Spencer at the Pittsburgh Business Times wrote that the Lynch Weis law firm is rolling out a menu of low-cost, fixed-fee legal services for entrepreneurs.

In the immortal words of my long-ago Geometry teacher, Mr. Rupinder Sekhon, "we're cooking on the front burner now, baby!"

You can find Cohen & Grigsby here.

You can find Lynch Weis here.

Creating an "Electric" Innovation Ecosystem

At TechCrunch, Mark Suster has a recipe for turning a good regional innovation ecosystem into a great one. Mark blogs regularly at Both Sides of the Table.

Here are the key excerpts. Mark is blogging from LA and speaking to a Seattle audience, so you'll need to substitute Pittsburgh people, concepts, and companies for his references below. And when you do that, you'll hit on some of the things that Pittsburgh has going for it -- and some things (some people?) that Pittsburgh is missing.

So entrepreneurs need to think the same way some VCs do – because markets change, competition changes, innovation & technology cycles move so fast that only by having a few truly outstanding leaders in your company can you sustain any sort of advantage.

And that is precisely my thoughts for Seattle and what I plan to deliver on Thursday night: Which few key community leaders are going to step up and get those neurons properly firing and connected?

My recipe for Seattle or your community:

1. Community Leaders + Organizers
You need a good mixture of both.

2. Passionate Entrepreneurs & Ambassadors
Stating the obvious but you can’t will a region into success. You need to have passionate tech entrepreneurs who want to build businesses locally.

3. Patron Companies
Seattle has something that many communities don’t have. It’s what I call “patron companies” and the local giants are Microsoft & Amazon. When you think about the success that is Silicon Valley, the unfair advantage is not just the huge amounts of available venture capital. When you start a company in the Bay Area you can often get your first biz dev deal done with Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, eBay, Yahoo! or the countless other successful startup firms.

4. Elder Statesmen
This is where I think the action on connecting neurons has to come from. Jeff Bezos (and executive team) have to recognize that it’s in their best interest to see the community thrive and the benefits to Amazon (not to mention Seattle) are far greater than any negatives of employee flow. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and other senior teams from Microsoft need to want to promote local startups. These kinds of connections seldom emerge from middle management who view the immediate threats more than the long-run benefits.

5. Playing to Your Advantages
Every region has its advantages and while not limiting innovation to local themes it seems to make sense to at least consider local advantages. It’s no big surprise that I spend a larger portion of my time in LA working on: disruption of television, performance-based marketing, games & mobile. We have unique skills, teams, experience and regional assets that give us a better chance of success than other regions.

6. Marketing Muscle
It’s great to see an initiative like Seattle 2.0 because every community needs its local tech press to report on companies and run conference. Consider just how much exposure the Austin community gets every year due to SXSW. It’s awesome.

7. Local Angel Community / Recycled Capital
Fred Wilson wrote an eloquent piece on his blog about “recycling capital,” which every regional community should read. The magic that is Silicon Valley is that every tech entrepreneur who has made a bit of money chooses to “recycle” it by investing back into the startup community. There is a long tradition of these and it’s what formed the original angel network groups.

8. Venture Capital
And of course you need a mature venture capital industry. There are several local firms in Seattle like Madrona, Maveron, Ignition and others. But the consistent message I heard was “there’s not enough.” That’s why more VCs ought to be spending time in Seattle. It’s similar to LA in that there are a highly motivated cadre of tech savvy entrepreneurs wanting to create companies and a lack of funding. I’d bet if one is disciplined about investing here you’d see significantly better pricing than chasing deals in the overly competitive Bay Area corridors.

9. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)
The other message I delivered to the room of entrepreneurs & investors at dinner the other night was that you need to think about equity from outside the region the same way that countries think about foreign direct investment. The inflow of capital can be transformative.

But what is often not talked about is that those investments lead to 8-10 board meetings every year of which it would be hoped that the “outside the region” VC would attend 6-8 of them in person. I think a series of brand ambassadors should find out when these VCs will be in town and organize evening events for them the night before so they don’t do a fly-in, fly-out visit.

10. Time
And finally, it’s clear that to really build a regional community you need time. LA and Seattle are in the second (or third) major wave of technology innovation. We have all of the 2nd-time entrepreneurs from Overture, CitySearch, MySpace, etc. on to their next companies and that produced Demand Media, a public company who even with a slight recent reduction in share price is still trading at $1.3 billion.

His full post is here.

More on Removing Barriers

Some follow-up thoughts regarding barriers to innovation and entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh.  See this post for a first cut.

The Obama Administration came to town the other day on its "Startup America" listening tour, titled "Reducing Barriers."  The PG carried a pre-event report. Pop City published the only post-event summary that I could find online. 

Those reports highlighted three areas of concern -- at least, areas of concern that the federal government might do something about.  As Pop City wrote them up (the * notes):

* Improve access to funding by better facilitating translational research funding to help commercialize federally-funded research, reauthorize the SBIR program and use existing Small Business Assoc. to commit $2 billion of SBIC matching contributions to catalyze new early-stage investment.

[Colleagues of mine who were there took down these additional suggestions regarding SBIR/STTR:

• Reauthorize the SBIR/STTR programs
• Provide seed funding for early, not only late stage, companies (through seed grants and SBIR/STTR)
• Have SBA eliminate fees and increase loan guarantees, and evaluate its loan program requirements
• Work towards uniformity in language (i.e. definition of micro/small business) across different federal agencies]

 * Improve the patent system ensuring a steady stream of innovative products. The U.S. Patent Office is committed to hiring 1500 examiners this year to facilitate the patent process, said Teresa Rae, deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

* Establish a federal immigration policy that facilitates significant international talent attraction, integration and retention and is more progressive on visas.  The "StartUp Visa Act" is the beacon here.

* Create a tax credit for angel investors.

[My colleagues' detail:

• 22 states have a tax credit offered for angel investors and individual high net worth individuals, make PA the 23rd state to do this
• Offer other tax incentives for investing in high risk early stage companies (currently, 60% of all VC funds are invested in Boston and Silicon Valley)

[My colleagues' additional notes, not included in the Pop City list:

• Create more flexibility in using federal grants (currently, most federal research grants cannot be use for translational research and commercialization, only for pure research)
• Liberalize university tech transfer policies; IP CAN be assigned from universities to companies
• Universities that incentivize innovation (MIT, Stanford, Oxford (UK), and others) assign IP to IP holding companies that can make money, then send percentage of profits on licenses directly to fund Tech Transfer offices (TTOs).
• Focus federal funding on this region.]

[And one more idea recorded by my colleagues:

• Create a clearinghouse for information relevant to all start-ups (ranging from mom and pop shops to high tech companies) on how to navigate federal, state, and local programs and process, as well as rules and regulations. Doing this by industry would be most helpful.

OK.  Well, no.  There are some good ideas and some misleading ideas.  

On visa reform for immigrants who want to bring talent and capital to innovation industries in the US:  this would be a good thing.

On streamlining support for small businesses:  this would also be a good thing.  Too many federal agencies deal with small businesses of different sizes, with different requirements, and different definitions.

On patent law:  patent reform may be a good thing for a number of reasons, but there is little evidence that problems in the patent system are hampering US competitiveness, or US innovation, or -- and this is the part that matters most at the regional level -- regional development.  The core problem in the patent area is not that American researchers and R&D units don't produce innovative products.   The core problem is too many so-called "innovations" are subjected to patenting.  That clogs the patent system, slows it down, and makes it expensive -- unduly slow and unduly expensive for the inventors who have produced genuinely innovative things (including innovative processes) and who can and will really benefit from patent protection.

On tax credits and other tax incentives for investors in high-risk companies (some sort of tax advantage for "angels" and others exists in 22 states):  This is a terrible idea.  It's a race to the bottom; it hands near-term real tax benefits to high-net-worth individuals -- who among all of the people in todays' economy who might benefit from tax breaks are least likely to need them -- in exchange for the possibility, maybe, someday, of future financial benefits to the broader economy; and it sends exactly the wrong message about opportunity and reward to the region as a whole.  VC funds are concentrated on the coasts for a variety of reasons.  Tax relief for angels is not one of them.  California's tech economy is mostly thriving -- despite a high state income tax, a screwed-up state property tax system, and a public sector (particularly schools) that is in desperate straits, financial and otherwise.

On federal funding:  The Pittsburgh region already receives hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding annually.  Close to $1 billion of federal money flows into Pitt and CMU alone, each and every year.  There are a lot of challenges and barriers associated with figuring out how to make useful products out of some of the basic science funded that way, but lack of research funding is not one of them.  Lack of clarity in federal policy regarding tech transfer offices is not one of them.  I have heard complaints for years from Western Pennsylvania lawyers, investors, researchers, and entrepreneurs that TTO policies and practices at Pitt, and to some degree, at CMU, are burdensome and bureaucratic.  If there are problems in the research-to-commercialization pipeline, they aren't federal problems.  They are local problems.

On an information clearinghouse:  That's a great idea.  Why wait for the federal government to build it?  Crowd-sourcing works wonders for material like this.  Anyone ever heard of Wikipedia?  How about a wiki of innovation and small business support information?

On what wasn't said, apparently:

The federal government doesn't have much of a role to play in dealing with the two biggest barriers to regional economic development.

One barrier is state law labor and employment law.  Pennsylvania still follows the common law rule that treats noncompetes as legal, so long as they are "reasonable" in length, geographic scope, and range of employment.  California law, as many people know, treats noncompetes as presumptively illegal in all but a small handful of cases, and several other states have employment law rules on noncompetes that are nearly as liberal as California's.  PA should change its law, perhaps not all the way to the California end of the spectrum, but to make noncompetes far narrower in scope, and limited primarily to truly high value employees with truly specialized training and knowledge whose development really matters to employers.  (In recent years, I've heard of noncompetes being used and enforced against hair stylists and truck dispatchers.  That's ridiculous.)   In most areas of the economy, the change would improve labor mobility -- which would help small businesses get off the ground.  If you want to start a business, you need money, and you need employees.  PA law should make both of them easier to get.

A second barrier is complacency.  As I move around the region's economy  to describe my law school's new "Innovation Practice Institute," I hear a lot of excitement and enthusiasm building around the idea that lawyers can be trained to enable innovation, and to partner with innovators and entrepreneurs, rather than act as (expensive) brakes and barriers.  At least I hear that frequently among researchers, innovators, and entrepreneurs.  Sometimes, I hear it among lawyers and among economic development consultants.  In some other quarters, I hear quiet comments:  What's wrong with Pittsburgh's innovation ecology -- just the way it works right now?  Aren't there lots of lawyers doing this stuff?  Isn't there lots of assistance for innnovators?  Lots of opportunities to showcase their ideas for prospective investors and partners?  Doesn't Pittsburgh already have, in a manner of speaking, the best of all possible (innovation) worlds?

From my point of view, the question answers itself.  But the solution lies in ourselves, not in our government.  Perhaps the best thing that the federal government can do -- often, not always -- is get out of the way, so that we can get out of our own way.

A final note for this long post:

Pittsburgh is an amazingly innovative place.  There is no shortage of innovation here, no shortage of ideas, and no shortage of innovators.  What Pittsburgh needs more of is the will to move innovation *quickly* into the commercialization pipeline.

More on that later.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

New Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at Pitt Law School

My employer, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has taken its first concrete steps toward meaningful participation in the entrepreneurship economy in the Pittsburgh region. Pitt Law is now the home of something called the "Innovation Practice Institute," or IPI, a center for programming for our law students and eventually (I think) for practicing lawyers.

As I understand it, the goal of the IPI is to train new lawyers (and re-train existing ones, possibly) with an eye to the different needs and new dynamics of the emerging company marketplace, particularly in Pittsburgh. There will also be substantial attention given to educating lawyers in the new economics of the legal profession.

The director of the IPI is Pitt Law alum and local entrepreneur Max Miller. Initial funding has been provided by the Innovation Economy program at the Heinz Endowments.

I'm posting this note today because the IPI now has a live website, which you can find here. The website also identifies the IPI's initial, impressive roster of partners.

Innovation and Robert Morris University

The huzzahs for tech/higher ed collaboration in Pittsburgh usually emerge from Oakland, home of the rocket scientists at Pitt and CMU. But as most Pittsburghers know, there are many other high caliber colleges and universities in the region. Duquesne, for example, often feels slighted in tech development conversations.

So I was especially intrigued the other day to receive a press release from Robert Morris University that starts off as follows:

Robert Morris University’s Center for Applied Research in Engineering and Science (RMU-CARES) has received two grants from Pittsburgh-based Innovation Works to fund the development of a new manufacturing process and the creation of a device to aid in the care of homebound individuals.

The first grant, for $50,000, is to design and build a robotic work cell for Penna Flame Inc., a Zelienople company that provides flame hardening, a process that renders the surface of machine parts more resistant to wear. Currently, Penna Flame utilizes a manual process in which each tooth of a gear is individually heated with a 2200-degree Fahrenheit flame. As with other manual processes, problems arise with operator fatigue and consistency and quality. The manual operation will be eliminated and replaced by an automated one using industrial robots.

The second grant, for $25,000, will be utilized to design and build three prototypes of a unique device dubbed The Memory Minder. Triggered by a sensor, the device will provide recorded messages in response to the needs of the individual user. The Memory Minder delivers customized messages set by a caretaker, nurse, family
member or the user. The device can deliver several timed messages throughout the day with personalized messages from familiar voices that are critical to an individual’s care.

I hope that I'll be hearing more about RMU's partnering with Innovation Works. The press release came to my in box from longtime Burghosphere contributor and new RMU Director of Public Relations Jonathan Potts, he of The Conversation and the Dead Tree Blog.