BLOG: "Let Knowledge Serve the City" Better

Sam,
All of the cities you mention have one or more major research universities within their borders.

As you know, Portland it the only major metropolitan area of its size or larger without a major research university.

The failed merger of UO and OSU in the 1960s forever haunts Portland (because PSU would have then become the number two research university).

I see little way to fix this at this point. Your initiative, while well intended, doesn't seem to me to have a reasonable target.

PCC and PSU are primarily service institutions, targeted at adult and commuter education. They conduct little or no research that will translate into patents or spark private sector R&D.

Paul,

Respectfully, I refuse to concede your point. We just will have to be more creative about our efforts than cities like Boston and Austin that already have major research universities.

Sam

Sam,
That file you posted is in a pretty obscure format - multi-page TIF.

I took the liberty of converting it to a PDF and posting it at
http://www.saveportland.com/4225_001.pdf

Thanks
JK

Sam,
I think the major emphasis should be on solving this: "their biggest challenge remains turning local research into local products. They said that venture capital is hard to come by locally and that as a result too much local research is turned into products in other cities."

Of course this is another way of saying that Portland has a lousy business climate and that is a good, obvious place to start solving problems.

Most sales people will tell you that it is hard to sell the same thing as 100 other vendors (in this case cities). You need something unique. And I don't mean a prettier street car or a tram. I mean an all out effort to make Portland a no hassle, business friendly city, with top notch education (clean out PPS), police, and fire. You also need to solve traffic congestion with the only proven solution - build lane miles (although ramp metering might be improved on I5 in N.Portland as it is being allowed to degrade to LOS F- more time waiting in line might be rewarded with a LOS E). Let the world know that we are open for business and mean it. Don't pick winners - let business take that risk, not the taxpayer.

Get off their backs, and likely you will not even need to give tax breaks. After all the purpose of tax breaks is to lower the cost of doing business and much of the cost in Portland is petty BS. (I have a tape of reporter from California saying that one city there is using such a strategy to great success.)

The problem with this strategy is that it isn't sexy, of course neither is running a well managed company.

Thanks
JK

Boston, one of America's great cities,
has some 68 or 70 institutions of higher education in the greater Boston area. Most of which, if not all are private. The most recent addition to this list is the F.W. Olin Institution. It offers one of the best engineer education anywhere. That education is also tuition free the last time I checked. Of course there are also Harvard and M.I.T. headquartered across the Charles River in Cambridge. That is a tough order to follow for any area, but one of the most impressive schools for me anyway, is Northeastern. Northeastern isn't a glamor school like Harvard, but they do have a strong work/study program for their students and offer a larger selection of courses at night than P.S.U does. P.S.U. needs to look at offering more evening, night and Saturday courses. It would certainly help the local students, many of whom work days. Trying to get time off from work can be difficult. I've been there and done that. And perhaps it would also help with traffic in the downtown core as well as possible put more people downtown at night to help businesses. The most important thing to do at this time is to offer more evening and night classes as well as Saturdays. Yea I know getting the old professors to give up their tennis times will be difficult, but let's thing of the customers, er students.
Thanks Sam I appreciate the opportunity to sound off.
Michael "The transportation guy" Wilson

On the theory that a bold initiative deserves bold branding, check out a potential logo for your knowledge city concept:

http://generalpicture.typepad.com/pdxknows.png

If you find you can use this, I will gift the copyright to the project.

Good luck.

You get the general picture (tm)

While it may be true that the City of Portland does not have a plan to encourage research and learning, I do not agree that Portland lacks in research, higher education and generally intelligent people. It's been in the news over and over lately, locally and nationally, that Portland is attracting more and more well educated people. And I may be wrong, but why isn't anybody counting OHSU as a research facility. I know several people who work there in the research capacity... Furthermore, we have plenty of higher learning institutions here for our size, among which we can name Reed College, Princeton Review's number one choice this year for Academic rigor. This might be one tactic for tackling the business problem in Portland, but is it really fair to say that Portland is lacking intellectually?
And by the way, what is a lane mile?

Sam,
I'm really glad you are bringing this up, I think it's a very important issue. To many bright people are lost to other cities because of these divisions.

I am in the planning program at PSU and need 400 hours of internship for my degree. The school connection with business doesn't seem to be too bad, but I have noticed that city internships, even unpaid, are difficult to find. I realize the city isn't well off, but I know of people looking for research projects who would probably work for free. There must be a way to utilize them.

Personally, I am interested in transportation planning, but haven't seen any opportunities in your (or any of the other commissioners)department.

So, a good start might be to reach out to students and faculty. I'm happy to set up a meeting if you'd like.

Either way I hope action is actually taken for a change as I have heard this chatter before.

Regards,
Matt

Sam,

I too am in the planning program at PSU. Your collegue, Dan Saltzman, and his staff pulled off a coup getting some highly qualified graduate students to carry out the urban agriculture inventroy for the City. (AKA The Diggable City Workshop project). While our intentions were certainly focused on the academics of the exercise, I don't think anyone on the PSU team was unclear about the mutual benfits that existed in the working arrangement with that office. In taking on the task of producing the GIS inventory, we were essentially functioning as an on the ground/working arm of that office. As a result of the DC project, a number of the team have benefitted from the relationships we estabished working on behalf of the Commissioner and the experiences we gained in the process of working with the various bureaus involved.

As Matt suggests above, I would highly encourage your staff to follow suit and reach out to the planning school at PSU to tap the talent that exists there. They are highly motivated, intelligent and in the case of their Workshop requirements, coming to your service at a reasonably priced market rate - read free...

www.diggablecity.org

Kevin Balmer
Urban and Regional Planning
Portland State University

Sam,
Right on!
Think what we could do if we took the $1Billion or so the region plans to blow for the new Columbia Crossing and used it instead to endow 100 professorships!
Education & knowledge are the key to the economic well being of this City and region. We've manage to get by in part by attracting talent from elsewhere with that very elusive "quality of life," but there is a limit to how far we can get with that. Note: "Q of L" does show up on every organization's bottom line in the form of lower employee compensation costs!
Even retaining Portland's manufacturing sector requires more investment in education; only skilled operators and clever engineers will keep value added products coming that can complete in the global marketplace.
I wish we had as many committees, task forces and commissions addressing the need for more and better education...pre K through post Doc...as we have fussing about our overblown transportation and freight needs.
Last I checked, neither Nike nor adidas shipped one shoe out of Portland.
Lenny Anderson, transportation consultant & former offset press operator and research techologist with Bosie Cascade R&D

Sam,

I'm not sure which of my points you are unwilling to concede.

It can't be that we lack a research institution (outside of OHSU of course). This has been identified for decades as a reason we lag behind our peer cities.

It's not enough to simply advocate a "knowledge strategy"--the pieces to the puzzle have to be there. As someone involved in higher education, I'm not happy that they aren't there, but the absence is glaring.

(Anne, your facts are wrong. Yes, OHSU and OGI are research institutions. But the most apt comparison is the economic engine provided by U Washington to the Seattle area. Refer back to the Oregonian series a few months ago that compared the research monies attracted by U Dub--it exceeds *all* of the monies attracted by *all* institutions in the whole state of Oregon. Unfortunately, Oregon has, for decades, underfunded higher education, and we continue to do so. If you look at national rankings, I think U of O barely cracks the top 100 state institutions, and that is our premier state research university.

As an undergraduate institution, Reed produces very few patents and have no professional schools and obviously no graduate programs. It's a fine school-hey, I teach there-but I don't kid myself. We primarily train students who go on to get their PhD's at institutions in other states.

PCC will not produce

Sam,
What do you think about the current state of contract negotiations for academic staff at PSU? Our PSU profs are earning salaries in the BOTTOM 10% in the country for university professors - Portland will never be able to attract and keep the kind of talent it needs to become a "Knowledge City" as long as that's the case.
-jimmy

I don't get the connection between research univerisites and lane-miles. Maybe Boston has them in their 14-billion dollar big dig project, I don't know.

However, OHSU is a research university - and a pretty well funded one, at that.

I was involved in an urban design class at PSU's urban planning program that involved the long-term planning director of PSU, as well as one of the city of Portland's top urban planners. Unfortunately, I cannot remember their names - however, one important thing that was said is that within the next 20 years, PSU and OHSU will definitely become unified into one institution.

Personally, I would hate for it to happen right now, as I'm sure the architecture program in which I am enrolled in would probably get axed, but it's desperately needed, both financially and practically speaking. I can't believe how close the two schools are, either.

Justin,

I think you are right on PSU and OHSU, even though PSU is resisting (and you can see why--there are lots of examples of friction between major medical centers and attached universities--the medical centers are so important and bring in so much money that they often dominate the institution).

The unfortunate thing that will never get fixed is having two flagship state universities located a) within an hour of one another and b) two hours away from the state's largest population center.

If UO and OSU would ever merge (INCOMING!!!) it would transform PSU.

Just read Tom Friedman's The Earth is Flat during a vacation to China. A great way to get a perspective on where the world is heading and where the US (and Portland) are lagging. Your concern and solution are right on. Wealth in the future will no accrue to "the owners of the means of production" as it did in the past because "producers" will constantly be competing among each other to be the low cost producer (and thus stay in business). The US (and Portland) can't compete in that arena and shouldn't want to. The key to future wealth will be thinking up new things that someone else will make. Hence wealth will accrue to patent holders, brand names, etc. That is an area where Portland CAN compete because we still offer an attractive physical environment and increasingly attractive cultural one. We need to better integrate our two research institutions (OHSU and OGI) into "plan" we also need to tie into other RD&D institutions in Portland including DOE's Pacific NW Lab, BPA, The Army Corps, etc to build on the region's expertise in energy. Capital can and should come from a "civic" VC firm that used lottery proceeds, and perhpad investments by city/county/ etc. employees in it via their 401 K program. This fund should support local based innovators and require they remain here for some period. Despite Portland's rep for being bad to business, small business formation is very high, so this kind of assistence should lead to a significant increase in new businesses and start up jobs. If we could facilitate global outreach through the Port and other institutions these small firms could be linked to overseas manufacturers as easlily in Portland as they are in NYC, LA, and other areas where Oregon start ups end up migrating so they can expand production. The promise is there, is the political leadership and will? Maybe.

Mike,

Nice post. It sounds like here is some more potential here than I realized. Some coordination between the public, private, and quasi-public institutions is something that the City could definitely facilitate.