You don’t have to spend too much time getting to know me before you learn that I grew up in the 60s and 70s in Pittsburgh. Then, Pittsburgh was a gritty mill town. My favorite field trip was to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which I remember as a stately black stone building. In recent years, the building was sandblasted to its original creamy white. Makes me wonder how much soot went through our lungs in those days.
By the mid-seventies, most of the steel workers were laid off. Steel from Japan was much cheaper. The mills along the rivers stopped belching their smoke and, finally, they were torn down. The air improved, but the economy didn’t. Pittsburgh was an industrial town in need of a renaissance. And, like so many cities across the globe, technology would be the renewal.
That was nearly 20 years ago, and Pittsburgh still struggles to be relevant in the global tech economy, and this despite the city’s claim to two world-class universities – Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh – and proximity to dozens of other top private and public colleges (including my own Allegheny College just an hour’s drive up Interstate 79). Pittsburgh has plenty of engineering talent and an entrepreneurial spirit. But its distance from major technology centers hampers the city’s would-be startups from accessing the financial and mentor capital that accelerates business development in other parts of the country. In fact, for all the smarts in the Steel City, I can think of only a small handful of companies with Pittsburgh roots, most recently mSpoke, which launched at DEMOfall 07 and Sim Ops Studio which I wrote about last month.
In one small but important way, that may begin to change. Innovation Works, a State of Pennsylvania program that makes investment in promising startups, has launched AlphaLab, a program and incubator space to catalyze next-generation software, interactive game design and Internet-related businesses. Read the rest of this entry »
