Baltimore's innovation culture clash

Becoming a place of innovation doesn't come easy to an industrial legacy city such as Baltimore where a high percentage of residents have been born here and never moved away and where having a job for life was a point of special pride. The culture of the industrial city is the tangible product, the permanence that comes from solid production and the skills from knowing the trade.

Public funding cannot replace private funding (Graphic: Hopkins study)

The start-up crowd with their fast moving crowd-sourced companies, their shortcuts to production through a rapid series of prototypes and proof of concept experiments, their pitches, incubators, accelerators and angel funders and the sometimes high valuation without visible assets is very suspicious to the established culture. The conflict results in what becomes more and more a signature problem for Baltimore: Sticking to your own group. The corner bar crowd over a Bud Light somewhere in one neighborhood and the latte sipping young entrepreneurs in their co-working spaces or hubs in another.

Innovation Week was an attempt of overcoming some of these divisions and showcase what innovators have to offer. Wednesday innovators in life sciences assembled at the brandnew UM School of Pharmacy and shared their inventions addressing foot drop, bedsores, melanomas and immune oncology, all very tangible practical issues with large implications on patient welfare, health cost and science. The Dean of the Pharmacy School attended and participated and so did Jane Shaab, Senior Vice President at the UM bio-park, but overall it appeared that the innovation geeks remained among themselves, moderated by Stephen Babcock, editor of Technical.ly, an online publication informing about Baltimore's tech scene.

Small business lending amounts: Baltimore at the bottom

How much the divide can be a problem was described by Miriam Boer who recently moved her company to New York City. Pressed to talk about her move and what works better in the Big Apple, she said that it was easier to navigate the New York tech eco-system and that when meeting people which she needs to operate her company, she could start her discussion from a much more "forward position" without having to explain the basics every time from scratch. Her business, Sonify Sciences is in the process of developing a device that treats melanoma and other skin cancers using low-intensity ultrasound. She holds three patents.

Baltimore #12 tech city in the nation?

The point is that start-up businesses are in many respects like any other business, they interact with lenders, landlords and suppliers about the same practical matters that every other business has to navigate. Except, start-ups represent a different culture and a higher risk. If the banks and vendors don't trust the business because they don't understand it, they are much less likely to engage.

A new study by the Hopkins 21st Century City Initiative shows that in Baltimore capital from the so called angel investors comes by a wide margin from outside the State of Maryland.

Equity investments in Baltimore’s startups and small businesses have grown significantly over the past decade and especially the past two years when venture capital and other forms of equity investment exceeded $200 million annually, compared to $50 million invested per year nine years ago. Despite this impressive growth, most equity investments are on the
smaller side, less than $1 million; and nearly 60 percent of venture capital investors are based outside of Baltimore and Maryland, making
growing firms highly dependent on outside capital as they grow. (Hopkins study)

In a recent editorial Christopher Muldor compared Baltimore (unfavorably) with the the Bronx and observed that Baltimore suffers from what he termed "blocked mobility ". He wrote:

When economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren analyzed the nation’s 100 largest counties to determine the opportunity they provided for economic mobility, Baltimore placed dead last. It should be recalled that in 1910 Baltimore pioneered a housing segregation law that was extreme even by the standards of the Jim Crow era. The results of the Chetty-Hendren study, coming a century after the 1910 law, are indicative of entrenched cultural patterns. Baltimore’s Achilles heel may well be its longstanding caste-like stratification along racial, economic and social lines. (Editorial)

In his book from Rustbelt to Brainbelt  Antoine van Agtmael provides examples from Eindhoven in Holland (Philips) and Akron, Ohio (tires), where legacy industries of the industrial period had an epiphany and sponsered innovation and new technologies as a survival strategy. Baltimore's legacy industries have left and are not even available anymore for such renewal (except Lockheed Martin) leaving the field largely to the research universities and their graduates, self-made entrepreneurs and new industries such as Under Armour. Nevertheless, Baltimore has managed to gain some stature in the start-up and tech world ranking in one of those lists #12 nationally.

Life science students presenting simple methods for
testing body fluids in remote locations

The DNA and culture of the industrial legacy city, or to stay in the lingo, the software and the hardware of Baltimore should not only be an obstacle but also offer advantages to innovation and technology. For one thing, unlike Silicon Valley, Orange County or the Research Triangle, Baltimore is already a real city and offers the urbanity that those other places desperately try to create. Yes, our transit isn't like Portland or Seattle, but way better than Irvine, Raleigh-Durham or much of Silicon Valley, besides, here one needs to travel much shorter distances to get somewhere. Culturally, the somewhat stodgy qualities of the industrial workforce include a good work ethic and relatively high skill levels that in spite of all differences can bring value to any enterprise.

As hard as some oldtimers who were shaped by the blue-stack city may find it, innovation and the new accelerated and much less precise methods of crowd-based decision making and try and error loops is the only way forward. Mayor Pugh is on the right track with getting Baltimore to be one of the Bloomberg cities which benefit directly from the new culture of interdisciplinary collaboration, information sharing and the courage to fail.

better education is the key to employment

Bloomberg Philanthropies has assembled an unparalleled group of leading practitioners to provide a program of support for cities. These expert partners help Mayors and city leaders through customized approaches designed to expand cities’ use of data and evidence.

Blocked mobility can be the result of inequities based on race, culture or class. But it is also the result of a dangerous mindset which unwisely sticks to the ways how things used to be. No matter how one wants to see the world, the future won't be like the past and efforts to adjust to the rapidly changing realities need to be seen as desirable and necessary. Those who have made the pivot as innovation entrepreneurs, often with considerable personal risk, should not be disparaged as nerds, or worse, as class enemies. As the promoters of the West Baltimore Innovation Village understand, the small business world presents an opportunity to bridge past inequities. Without these young entrepreneurs Baltimore's future will be considerably less bright.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

My lecture about the future of Baltimore will take place as part of AIA's Architecture Month on October 18 at 6pm at the MICAH Lazarus Center on 131 West North Ave.
The event is free but you need to register here