The Rise of Innovation Districts

[Arch City]

The Rise of Innovation Districts-A New Geography of Innovation in America
Bruce Katz and Julie Wagner
Brookings Institution
June 9th, 2014


Coffee shops (like Detroit’s Great Lakes Coffee) are now places for entrepreneurs to work and network.
Photo credit: Marvin Shaouni, originally published in Model D.

As the united states slowly emerges from the great recession, a remarkable shift is occurring in the spatial geography of innovation.

For the past 50 years, the landscape of innovation has been dominated by places like silicon valley—suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing and recreation.

A new complementary urban model is now emerging, giving rise to what we and others are calling “innovation districts.” These districts, by our definition, are geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators and accelerators.1 They are also physically compact, transit-accessible, and technically-wired and offer mixed-use housing, office, and retail.

Innovation districts are the manifestation of mega-trends altering the location preferences of people and firms and, in the process, re-conceiving the very link between economy shaping, place making and social networking.

Our most creative institutions, firms and workers crave proximity so that ideas and knowledge can be transferred more quickly and seamlessly. Our “open innovation” economy rewards collaboration, transforming how buildings and entire districts are designed and spatially arrayed. Our diverse population demands more and better choices of where to live, work and play, fueling demand for more walkable neighborhoods where housing, jobs and amenities intermix.

Led by an eclectic group of institutions and leaders, innovation districts are emerging in dozens of cities and metropolitan areas in the United States and abroad and already reflect distinctive typologies and levels of formal planning. Globally, Barcelona, Berlin, London, Medellin, Montreal, Seoul, Stockholm and Toronto contain examples of evolving districts. In the United States, districts are emerging near anchor institutions in the downtowns and midtowns of cities like Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cambridge, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and San Diego. They are developing in Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Portland, Providence, San Francisco and Seattle where underutilized areas (particularly older industrial areas) are being re-imagined and remade. Still others are taking shape in the transformation of traditional exurban science parks like Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham, which are scrambling to keep pace with the preference of their workers and firms for more urbanized, vibrant environments.

Read More

[mhays]

Sometimes it's a branded district (often not very urban...even surface parking sometimes), and other times it's simply innovation-type companies (tech, creatives) grouping in a true urban area.

[M II A II R II K]

5 Reasons Cities Are Getting Better, and Everywhere Else Is Getting Worse

Read More: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...city-asap.html

.....

- 1. Physical assets. Cities, Katz and Wagner write, are filled with all the things that make for a bustling, energetic tech economy: parks, plazas, apartment buildings, public transportation, and city infrastructure that can be turned into a "living lab" to test new technologies. Many cities also have old-line industrial buildings that can easily be turned into trendy tech headquarters. In Boston, for example, the Seaport — once an economic drain on the city — has been repurposed as a tech hub, complete with companies like Zipcar and co-working spaces like General Assembly.

- 2. Economic assets. In cities, you often find built-in advantages for those hoping to take part in the tech economy. Chief among these are so-called "anchor" assets like large research universities, as well as start-up incubators, accelerators, and job-training firms. Innovation districts also have what Katz and Wagner call "neighborhood-building amenities" — coffee shops, restaurants, bars, hotels, and local retail stores, all of which make them more attractive places for people (especially young, creative people) to live and work. A good example of how these assets help create an entrepreneurial climate is St. Louis, whose tech corridor is built around St. Louis University, Washington University Medical School, and several other hospitals where, presumably, cutting-edge research is bleeding over into the zone's other tech companies. (Katz and Wagner call this the "anchor-plus" model.)

- 3. Network effects and cross-pollination. It's not just what lives in cities that makes them attractive spots for tech companies — it's who lives in them. It's no secret that cities with a large population of young, educated people all strongly tied to each other through a central institution like a university tend to do well economically. But Katz and Wagner write that a city that does well at creating weak ties — cultivating not just friendships, but relationships with friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends — is more important than previously thought. "Weak ties provide access to new information, even novel industry information, new contacts, and new information on business leads that are outside of existing networks," they write. Accordingly, cities that hold hackathons, tech breakfasts, and other networking functions are better positioned than those that don't.

- 4. Density as a service. There's another important contributor to the bright future of cities that Katz and Wagner don't mention. Namely, many of the tech start-ups that are bringing on-demand services to large cities have business models that only work in densely populated urban centers. You couldn't run Uber in rural Tennessee because you need a constant supply of people looking for rides and a constant supply of drivers willing to give them. For a delivery service like Google Shopping Express to stand a chance of being profitable, each delivery truck needs to be loaded to the brim and make multiple stops along a route — dropping off one item at a time won't work.

- 5. Special status. Strangely, I didn't come away from Katz and Wagner's report thinking that New York City is beating cities like St. Louis and Boston when it comes to innovation, despite its massively bigger population. That's because another important ingredient in innovation is recognition. Katz and Wagner couch this point in jargon — "innovation districts ultimately need to be treated as a unified asset class that recognizes the synergistic effect of disparate investments that strengthen and reinforce each other’s value" — but what they're saying, realistically, is that a tech community that is treated by its home city as a special, treasured thing is more likely to succeed than one that isn't. In St. Louis and Detroit, tech companies are seen as a godsend. In New York, they're just one more industry. And although New York is trying to rebrand itself as a tech city, the size of other industries in the city (e.g. Wall Street) means that techies will likely always be small fish in a big pond.

.....

[Double L]

To me, every pedestrian friendly area meets the criteria for "innovation districts" because they all provide a lot of opportunities to "network" with the people around you.

[mhays]

Some districts seem to pop up without intent. For Seattle I'll contrast Pioneer Square with South Lake Union, two opposite fringes of Downtown.

South Lake Union is a fairly cohesive effort to form a cohesive, semi-branded area. It was originally intended to be mostly medical research / biotech, and it does have maybe 15-20 buildings (say 4,000,000 sf) devoted to that, mostly for a few major organizations. But then biotech didn't explode as predicted, and Amazon happened along at the right time, building millions of square feet of their own in SLU, plus more at the near end of the CBD. It's a booming area, but it's more about major organizations.

Pioneer Square was simply a historic district augmented by a little bit of new office space, more about rug shops, homeless, artist lofts, and stadium crowds and less an office and residential district. But it's at the nexus of local transit. It always had a base of tech and creative companies, but it really took off during the downturn. This was aided by office space coming online including a new building intended for one corporation that they chose to make leasable instead, plus the decision to revert the Smith Tower back to office rather than make it residential, some new lowrises across from Safeco Field, some other renovations and general turnover at existing historic buildings, and the relatively new office buildings at Union Station including space Amazon vacated.

South Lake Union is ideal for a big organization. But if you want a startup culture, at least on the tech side (vs. biotech), it's probably more about Pioneer Square.

[202_Cyclist]

These Brookings events are usually web-archived if anyone wants to watch this session.

[TarHeelJ]

I guess they overlooked this one because the city is smaller, but it's pretty large-scale with many historic rehabs and backed by a major university: http://www.wakeforestinnovationquarter.com/

[bucks native]

source: http://technical.ly/philly/2014/06/0...ion-districts/

Brookings report: How University City fits among U.S. ‘innovation districts’
Philadelphia, the report said, has "leveraged its world-renowned assets in teaching, research and medicine to become a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship."


The University City Science Center was featured in the report. (Photo courtesy of University City Science Center)

Instead of following the model of Silicon Valley’s isolated office parks, cities around the world are building “innovation districts,” where founders, researchers and students can live, work and play, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. The innovation district in Philadelphia’s University City, anchored by Penn, Drexel and the University City Science Center, is one that Brookings Institution highlighted in its report.



source: Brookings Report

[bucks native]

source: http://technical.ly/philly/2014/06/16/pact-luncheon/

How institutional innovation hubs are learning from coworking spaces

At PACT's annual luncheon, high-ranking executives from Comcast, Independence Blue Cross, the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and the City of Philadelphia’s Commerce Department talked about building where their workforce lives.

“This is going to make us more competitive for attracting the kind of people we need to hire,” said Marc Siry, a vice president of strategic development at Comcast, on the telecommunications giant’s plans to build a second, $1.2 billion Center City skyscraper.

[Arch City]

Wexford Science & Technology is planning to build a $140-million research, lab, office and residential TOD complex in St. Louis' CORTEX innovation district.

Plans are for up to 700,000 square feet of space including a massive garage. Plans are being worked out.

In addition, the new MetroLink station, which recently received a $10.3-million TIGER grant, will sit near CORTEX Phase III.

An RFP for a mid-rise residential structure also has gone out.

Read more here.

[brickell]

So we had conference centers in the 90s, biotech in the 00 and now "Innovation" centers?

[Arch City]

St Louis Spirit: Cortex Urban Research Park Bucks Tech Campus Trend
Silicon Valley Watcher
Posted by Tom Foremski - October 28, 2014

Dennis Lower, President of the Cortex Innovation District among blueprints and maps. (CortexSTL.com)

Dennis Lower has spent nearly three decades building research parks around the US and he's at the peak of his talents and at the forefront of a very important trend: building research parks in urban settings. The goal is to build resilient communities that generate jobs from a highly skilled workforce and the spinoffs of startups.

He's responsible for the Cortex Innovation District founded in 2002, a huge area most of which is a building site with half-finished and nearly finished buildings sprouting up between buildings already staffed with researchers.

Urban districts are incredibly inventive and creative -- it's a result of the cross-pollination of experiences and cultures found in areas with high population densities.

Read More




Internet pipes about to be laid -- the researchers need super-fast connectivity.

[Eightball]

Originally Posted by brickell

So we had conference centers in the 90s, biotech in the 00 and now "Innovation" centers?

correct

[mhays]

As usual, the ones that rise naturally in cities that are already tech-heavy will do better than the branded economic development projects. The latter can succeed too, but so far it's smaller scale.

This typically means existing districts that are already in the middle of things, but have a lot of room to grow. Sometimes it's about underused existing buildings like Silicon Alley. Sometimes it's a downtown fringe neighborhood with a lot of developable sites like SoMa or South Lake Union.

Reason #1 is that recruitment is easiest in a great urban district. "Authentic urban" is a buzz term in business location as well as the residential market. That means built over time, truly dense, walkable to tens of thousands of apartments, transit-convenient to most of the region, dozens of places to get lunch/coffee/beer, hotels, and everything else.

That includes biotech as well as computer/internet tech, though biotech is tied more closely to the big research university.

[dc_denizen]

Interesting:

How Toronto's MaRS centre became a hot-button election issue

link

MaRS has always been the government’s well-intentioned contribution to accelerating innovation that comes out of the research corridor in Toronto,” said Brian Bloom, president of Bloom Burton & Co., an investment banking firm that specializes in health-care companies. “Many of us in the investment community have often thought it’s a very large investment, not necessarily into the companies, but into a large infrastructure of buildings and people.”

The leaked documents, which the Tories say they received from a whistle-blower, combined with The Globe and Mail’s review of Ontario’s public sector salary disclosure, MaRS’s financial statements and its charitable tax filings, reveal an organization that has come to rely on public funding more and more as it has grown.

MaRS Discovery District, the official name of the charitable organization that oversees a web of MaRS-related entities, grew from 10 full-time employees in 2005, the year the centre opened, to 97 last year, 37 of whom made more than $100,000, including Dr. Treurnicht, who earned $532,501 plus $12,260.16 in benefits.

Some of the money for those salaries comes from profits from the main MaRS building, which is at capacity and returns profits to support MaRS’s programming.

But much of that leasing revenue comes from government itself: Nearly 60 per cent of the square footage of phase I is occupied by publicly funded academic and research entities and MaRS programming offices, according to a leasing status chart in a confidential report to the Treasury Board for a May 13 meeting which was cancelled because of the election.

[Gantz]

I don't know why the authors are so skeptical on NYC, a city that was able to attract a lot of tech talents and companies pretty much from scratch, to rival some of the secondary traditional tech places like Boston, Seattle, and LA. Surely in absolute numbers (and maybe even in percentage terms) NYC had the most growth in this area.

[Tuckerman]

http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/b...uare-foot.html

Georgia tech announced the conversion of a former Office Depot to an innovation lab.

[mello]

Looks like the Loo is coming up. How much damage to its rep are the coming riots going to do when Darren Smith isn't convicted of any wrong doing?

Originally Posted by brickell

So we had conference centers in the 90s, biotech in the 00 and now "Innovation" centers?

is your point that these things were touted as game changers? even if they're not game changers, they're still a benefit to cities—much like innovation centers will be.

[brickell]

Originally Posted by IWant2BeInSTL

is your point that these things were touted as game changers? even if they're not game changers, they're still a benefit to cities—much like innovation centers will be.

It's not so much that they will be successful or not. Some, maybe many likely will. Some will not. But it seems like the "thing" now for cities to invest in. There will be ridiculous amounts of money thrown at these innovation centers/districts/consultants. Some of it will be worthy investments. Some of it won't. We'll see how it shakes out.