The nature of DC's federally-related "business" is coordination, not doing

On Monday, the Washington Post ran a story, "Why a Silicon Valley venture fund thinks Baltimore can be an East Coast tech hub," about how Baltimore's Port Covington development is landing DataTribe, a leading cybersecurity business incubator, as an anchor tenant.  Alongside the incubator is its relationship with a major venture capital firm, Allegis Capital, which has a specialty in the cyber security sector also.

The article makes the point that this will put the Baltimore area -- which also is closer to Fort Meade, where the National Security Agency is based -- ahead of the DC area in terms of reaping the benefits from this business sector in terms of business development and employment.

The article ends with a discussion of the study of the cyber security sector in the DC area, how there are 800 companies involved, but few are based in DC proper.  From the article:

A 2017 study of D.C.-area cybersecurity businesses by Amplifier Ventures and the Kogod School of Business at American University found more than 800 companies engaged in cybersecurity work but noted that about 95 percent of them are focused on government services. The study noted a “profound lack” of cybersecurity companies building cybersecurity products for the commercial business world.

But the District has largely failed to harness those assets. With a few notable exceptions — such as a D.C.-based encryption start-up called Virtru that has raised $76.8 million from investors — there are few sizable cybersecurity companies working within the District.

“D.C.’s infrastructure is really good for government and government services, but that’s not what we’re building here,” Ackerman said. “If you go out to Silicon Valley, it could not be any more different than what you find in downtown Washington, D.C.”

This reminds me of something that I wrote more than 6 years ago, when the Gray Administration suggested that DC could reap the benefits of the IT and software required to implement "Obamacare."

I made the point that it isn't about letting the contracts to do it--which is what the Department of Health and Human Services (in this case the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is based in Baltimore County)--it's about having the expertise in software development around health care, having highly rated computer science and engineering programs at local universities, etc.

It's tough for DC proper to develop strength in IT and software development outside of "coordination of business activities" because the actual doing of whatever form of exchange is underway, tends to occur elsewhere.

Federal laboratories versus federal agencies. By contrast, the federal government supports many research laboratories mostly across the country, but some in the DC area.  These agencies tend to be much more successful in developing new technologies, although frequently they are more focused on discovery and hand off implementation to others.

DC area examples include primarilyr the National Institutes of Health in Montgomery County, but also an agriculture research facility in Beltsville, Maryland and the National Institute for Science and Technology also in Montgomery County.

-- "A follow up example with regard to Metropolitan Revolutions: the National Science Foundation moving to Alexandria," 2013

New York City. NYC's not having the equivalent kind of software and data science expertise comparable to that of Boston-Cambridge in Harvard and MIT, the Silicon Valley in Stanford University, and the Austin area with the University of Texas is what led then Mayor Bloomberg to put out an RFP to create such an institution in NYC to anchor these sectors ("New York's Silicon Alley Is (Still) No Match for Silicon Valley," Businessweek/).

The winner was a joint venture of Cornell University and Israel's Technion Institute of Technology ("Cornell Tech officially opens campus on New York City's Roosevelt Island," Inside Higher Education).
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Incubators are the primary tool, but aren't always enough. Most cities are content to act in developing IT/software business activities by creating or supporting incubators although in DC that hasn't totally worked out ("The Sad Story of How a DC Tech Incubator Fell Apart," Washingtonian).

But the same goes for large scale Maker Spaces more generally (TechShop's Crystal City makerspace closes as company shuts down," Technical.ly).  Others have failed in Brooklyn and Philadelphia.

Higher education efforts.  Some higher education efforts, but not on the scale of New York City, are focused on bolstering higher education efforts, recognizing how universities in Boston's Route 128 corridor and in the Silicon Valley for technology, and in Cambridge for biotechnology, have been key (see Saxenian's discussion of IT and clustering in Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128).

One interesting effort is in San Antonio, where the University of Texas San Antonio is building a downtown campus, not just for the College of Business, but also a new School of Data Science ("UTSA plans downtown growth on city and county land," San Antonio Express-News). From the article:

The parcels belonging to the city will become the locations of the university’s $33 million National Security Collaboration Center and $57 million School of Data Science. The UT System Board of Regents committed $70 million from the state’s Permanent University Fund at its Sept. 6 meeting for both projects.

Businessman Graham Weston, meanwhile, has pledged $15 million toward the School of Data Science, his largest one-time personal donation to a single project and the university’s largest-ever cash gift, Eighmy said. ...

Companies have been forced to leave San Antonio because they couldn’t recruit qualified local employees, said Weston, who has been devoted to building a technology hub in San Antonio and rehabilitating downtown.

Programs like UTSA’s are crucial for that development because they strengthen the pipeline from college to the workforce, he said. ...

The city, county and university leaders also pointed to a downtown transformation in Phoenix after Arizona State University created a new campus downtown. It drew more than 10,000 students, reinvigorated a sleepy downtown and contributed to sales tax revenue growth. ...

UTSA has been working to make the downtown campus more optimal for students to complete their coursework without having to go to the main campus about 20 miles northwest, just inside Loop 1604. This year’s incoming students in the university’s colleges of public policy and architecture, construction and planning can fulfill degree requirements entirely downtown, university officials have said.

San Antonio's Brooks City Base.  Elsewhere in San Antonio is the effort to reshape the decommissioned Brooks Air Force Base as a science and technology center ("Brooks City Base enlists development partner, kicks off plans for 75-acre industrial park," San Antonio Business Journal), including a new medical school and other health science schools of the University of Incarnate Word.  They just landed a US headquarters for a European firm which will bring more than 1,000 jobs ("San Antonio getting U.S. headquarters for European company, bringing 1,400 jobs," San Antonio Express-News).

Another is how the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering in Greensboro, North Carolina is a joint venture between the University of North Carolina campus and North Carolina A&T, and the school anchors a research park ("Scientists at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering look for future technological marvels," Winston-Salem Journal).

Baltimore does have the advantage of proximity to Fort Meade.  Even so, it ought to look at expanding the curriculum at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, which currently is focused on the medical sciences, into the computing science and engineering arena as well, to bolster and extend its current recent success.

Note that Northern Virginia's different in terms of its place in the military/cyber economy because they've had more direct IT/software connections with different military units including the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency ("Montgomery County's real economic development problem: it's not part of the military economy," 2011) and the military's need for high speed IT connections.

Note that more than 20 years ago, Virginia developed the Center for Innovative Technology in the Dulles Corridor as a way to extend its place in the cyber economy ("Dulles trapezoid could be anchor for development," Washington Post), given that it was much stronger in other places (Boston-Cambridge, Silicon Valley, Austin/Texas) elsewhere in the United States.

CIT.

Even so, Loudoun County is pretty far from the center of the region and CIT seems to not be enough to lure Amazon's HQ2 that far out as it appears that Crystal City in Arlington County is much better positioned ("Amazon HQ2 Watch: Northern Virginia Checks the Most Boxes," New York Times).

Interesting with Crystal City is the "naturally occurring research park" on the Wilson Boulevard corridor, although it is anchored by the National Science Foundation, which is moving to Alexandria.

I have written in the past that DC has the building blocks for this kind of development, but that the talent and resources of the city's resident universities are dis-coordinated and unrealized.

-- "Better leveraging higher education institutions in cities and counties: Greensboro; Spokane; Mesa; Phoenix; Montgomery County, Maryland; Washington, DC," 2016
-- "Naturally occurring innovation districts | Technology districts and the tech sector," 2014

This is another example.

DC does have assets.  Note that DC has higher education assets that can be leveraged--medical schools at Georgetown, GWU, and Howard University; schools of engineering at Howard, Catholic University, and GWU (although most of that school is at a satellite suburban campus in Virginia) , a library science school at Catholic--many such schools such at at UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan have been transformed into combo library, information science, data science, programs in nursing and health fields at many of the schools, etc.

Meanwhile, for a couple decades, Catholic University has talked about creating a research park adjacent to their campus.

This piece discusses how to create such an initiative around biotechnology:

-- "Ordinary versus Extraordinary Planning around the rebuilding of the United Medical Center in Southeast Washington DC | Part Two: Creating a graduate health and biotechnology research initiative on the St. Elizabeths campus," 2018