The Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) recently engaged TIP Strategies to assist in completing a feasibility study to support the development of a bioscience wet laboratory incubator. The project was primarily funded through a grant from the Economic Development Agency with additional financial and community support from the University of Texas, the City of Austin and the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, Fulbright & Jaworski, Grubb & Ellis and regional biotech and healthcare community leaders.

As part of this project, TIP estimated the market demand for wet lab space. We then performed a spatial analysis to identify suitable sites based on the requirements that the facility be located in close proximity to the region’s biotechnology and healthcare assets and distressed census tracts. We also estimated the potential economic impact of the facility. Finally, we produced a report and presentation to support ATI’s campaign to raise capital to fund the facility construction.

Map: Distressed Neighborhoods within 5-miles of Bioscience Assets

Map by Katie List, ATI intern and student at UT Austin’s School of Architecture – Community and Regional Planning. Click to enlarge.

The study is just coming to an end. The proposed facility would provide much-needed support for the bioscience ecosystem in the Austin region. And the proposed site adjacent to other principal biotechnology and healthcare assets will likely become a nexus for Austin’s bioscience sector.

Communities across the country are looking to innovation and local entrepreneurship as a component of long-term economic vitality. Central to any conversation about how the innovation economy works is the role of patents in protecting new ideas and ensuring that inventors (or companies that invest heavily in R&D) are rewarded for their work.

This American Life recently characterized a new threat to innovation: patent trolls.

This American Life: WHEN PATENTS ATTACK!
Originally aired 07.22.2011

Why would a company rent an office in a tiny town in East Texas, put a nameplate on the door, and leave it completely empty for a year? The answer involves a controversial billionaire physicist in Seattle, a 40 pound cookbook, and a war waging right now, all across the software and tech industries.
We take you inside this war, and tell the fascinating story of how an idea enshrined in the US constitution to promote progress and innovation, is now being used to do the opposite.

PROLOGUE.
There’s a derogatory term in Silicon Valley for companies that amass huge troves of patents and make money by threatening lawsuits: “patent trolls.” When Jeff Kelling’s Internet company Fototime was sued – along with more than 130 other companies – for violating someone’s patent, he wondered if it was a troll (which the company denies), and then settled out of court.

ACT ONE.
NPR reporter Laura Sydell and This American Life producer/Planet Money co-host Alex Blumberg tell the story of Intellectual Ventures, which is accused of being the largest of the patent trolls. The investigation takes them to a small town in Texas, where they find a hallway full of empty companies with no employees.

ACT TWO.
Laura and Alex continue their story about Intellectual Ventures and the practice of patent trolling. They learn why the buying and selling of patents is likely to continue being a huge, controversial business that affects the entire tech industry.
Correction: The broadcast version of this story misidentified one of the winning bidders of Nortel’s patents as Nokia instead of Ericsson.

By Sarah Kessler at Mashable:

The “tech world” is really more of a “tech family.” Between digital giants’ appetites for acquisitions and the tendency of their ex-employees to start new companies, it’s easy to see how nearly every blip in the ecosystem is closely related.

We’ve mapped just a few of these family ties between “Xooglers,” the “PayPal Mafia”, “Softies” and the many other tech connectors who have yet to be nicknamed.

Our guess is that if you gathered a handful of tech veterans in a room, you could keep the tech connection game going forever.

In Virginia, the hispanic population is skyrocketing and the white population is dwindling. In the Maryland suburbs, diversity is growing. These stories and many more come from the census data that is displayed in this map. Use it to reveal your own stories. Click on the map and type in your city or zip code below to get started.

These maps are a great way to understand broad trends in the country’s demographics over time. It should be noted, however, that decennial census tract data tends to hide many of the dramatic transformations that have occurred in communities across the country. Look at growth in Arizona, among others. It looks really dramatic, but ignores what happened in and after 2007. Every decennial summary suffers from not having a year over year perspective, but the Great Recession really requires one to take a more nuanced perspective.

The Coloradoan by David L. May

The city of Fort Collins is updating its economic plan. Based on a report shared at the City Council’s Work Session last Tuesday, it’s off to a good start.

The city is operating under an economic plan adopted in 2005. It was largely written by the city’s departing Chief Financial Officer Mike Freeman with input from the city’s original Economic Vitality & Sustainability Action Group, or EVSAG. The plan has served the community well and will be a good foundation for the new plan.

In economic terms, six years ago is ancient history with all that has happened to the American economy recently. Updating the plan with the best available current information is important.

To that end, the city issued a Request for Proposals to hire a firm with the experience and expertise to guide the city in the process of developing a new economic plan.

They awarded the contract to TIP Strategies, an Austin-based consulting firm. Acc-ording to one of their principals, TIP stands for talent, innovation and place.

The engagement has three primary phases: Discovery, Opportunity and Implementa-tion. As you may assume, the discovery phase involves the consultants collecting and beginning to analyze data and information about the community.

Last week, TIP Strategies provided council with a preliminary report of their findings as part of the discovery phase.

The report is extensive and packed with data. You can find a copy of it at the city’s website www.fcgov.com.

Look under July 12 City Council Work Session Agenda. Among the findings:

» The Fort Collins population is aging but the impact here will be less dramatic compared to the rest of the nation.

» The largest number of in-migrating new residents come from Boulder County. Weld County is the biggest recipient of out-migrating residents.

» Fort Collins is a net importer of labor.

» Fort Collins median household income is below the Larimer County and state averages but comparable to the national average.

» The median home value of $250,000 is 30 percent higher than the national average.

» The Fort Collins unemployment rate is lower than the state and national averages but has doubled since 2008.

» Government is the largest employment sector in the MSA, or Metropolitan Statistical Area.

» Compared to the nation, Fort Collins has higher employment concentrations in sectors including breweries, engine equipment and analytical laboratory instruments.

» Available jobs do not meet the skill level of residents. Forty-one percent of the population has earned at least a bachelor’s degree but only 25 percent of the jobs require a four-year degree or higher. This is consistent with other data that indicates that Fort Collins ranks 10th in the nation in underemployment.

A lot of work remains to be done but if the next two phases are as strong as the first the one, Fort Collins will have an intelligent and sophisticated plan worthy of the community.

Plan adoption is scheduled for January, so stay informed by attending the open house this fall and following the council discussion and adoption process.

Hats off to the City Council for funding the study and to the staff for managing the project in such a professional manner.

Consultant says market niche promises new jobs; local leaders are skeptical

The Columbian by Aaron Corvin

Clark County’s health care sector has been one of the region’s solid job generators despite the gloomy economy.

But if the county wants to be a leader in the next wave of health care innovation — and to snag the jobs that go with it — it needs to become a hub of “health information management,” according to the draft Clark County Economic Development Plan produced by Austin, Texas-based consulting firm TIP Strategies Inc. The plan — commissioned by the Columbia River Economic Development Council for $80,000 — recommends the county develop a niche industry in which tech-minded people develop portable electronic medical records, produce security systems to protect them from cyber-thieves and otherwise advance the role of information technology in health care.

Yet local health care industry leaders say TIP Strategies’ focus on the intersection of health care and information technology might just be behind the times.

Jonathan Avery, chief administrative officer for Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center, said a $110 million project to shift the entire Legacy system to a single shared electronic medical record system is already slated to be ready by the end of September. Several other hospitals in the region have either already made such moves or are headed in that direction, Avery said.

Legacy’s new system — provided by Wisconsin-based Epic Systems Corp. — will improve the tracking and use of patient data, Avery said. While Legacy has employed some “third-party consultants from the local market” to help with certain aspects of the project, the project “hasn’t really created new technology jobs,” he said.

An opportunity

There’s no doubt that health care is a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy Clark County economy.

The industry was up 300 jobs in May over the same period a year ago. And it “looks to be back on a growth path after taking a year or so off,” said Scott Bailey, regional labor economist for the state Employment Security Department.

Moreover, the TIP Strategies plan projects that the nation’s hospitals will add more than 470,000 jobs by the end of the decade. “Most job growth in health care services will be evenly spread across the country,” according to TIP Strategies.

Then there is PeaceHealth’s merger with Southwest Washington Medical Center (now called PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center), and PeaceHealth’s decision to move its headquarters to Vancouver. TIP Strategies says the merger “provides an opportunity to develop the Health Information Management sub-sector in the county.”

To that end, TIP Strategies says, regional institutions, including the CREDC and Washington State University Vancouver, should work to create an information technology hub in Clark County and to recruit high-tech health care companies to the county.

PeaceHealth leaders have said they plan to implement a single, efficient electronic records system for both hospital groups, spreading the cost across the entire combined organization.

Peter Adler, the nonprofit’s senior vice president and chief strategy officer, said it also plans to work with WSUV and Clark College to develop training programs for health care workers with the idea that they would go on to find jobs in the region.

As you build a critical mass of health care providers, Adler said, “constellations of support services” do tend to crop up, potentially creating new jobs.

Diverse possibilities

PeaceHealth’s move to Vancouver creates one opportunity, while federal health care reform — which is pushing health systems to adopt efficient digital records and information systems — creates another, said Jon Roberts, principal of TIP Strategies who oversaw development of the firm’s Clark County plan.

Roberts said health information management is a nascent industry that goes beyond hospitals’ shifts to new electronic medical records systems. As family medical practices and specialty clinics need more information technology, demand will grow for software coders and online security, he said. The range of job possibilities in health care information is “astonishingly diverse,” Roberts said.

The questions Clark County should ask, he said, are: “Does this represent a cluster? Does this represent a concentration of skill sets that can actually have an economic impact?”

Enough workers?

Whether Clark County has the talent pool to serve health care companies’ information technology needs is an open question.

Office Ally, which provides electronic medical services — including an electronic billing service for doctors — is growing so fast it can hardly keep up with the staffing demands, said Brian O’Neill, the Vancouver company’s owner. “We have 18 (job) openings right now,” he said, noting that when the company set up shop here two years ago it employed 80 people; now, it has 140.

O’Neill said he’s having a tough time finding highly skilled people, including software developers and business analysts. That’s not all because of a lack of college-degree-toting tech heads. That’s also because of the rattled labor market, he said: Some of the workers he’d like to hire simply don’t want to risk leaving their jobs during a time of economic uncertainty.

O’Neill, whose company generates between $20 million and $30 million in revenue annually, said he appreciates TIP Strategies’s focus on health care and information technology.

Different approach

Avery, the chief administrative officer for Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center, said he doesn’t see how Legacy’s or PeaceHealth’s presence gives Clark County an advantage in the health care information market. After all, he said, plenty of other major metro areas are home to big health care providers that are embracing advances in health care information.

What makes more sense, Avery said, is for Clark County to focus on companies that provide medical devices. For example, Vancouver-based nLight provides high-power semiconductor lasers and specialty optic fibers that are used in industrial, medical and defense products.

“We use their lasers in our operating rooms for a number of things,” Avery said.

Along with its focus on health care information, TIP Strategies also urges the CREDC — the county’s veteran nonprofit economic development agency — to add “health care services” to its list of targeted industries.

There’s “real opportunity for entrepreneurial activity” in health care information, said Roberts, the TIP Strategies leader, although it won’t be an easy undertaking for Clark County. “There’s still a ton of work in this,” he said.