How Can Cleveland and NE Ohio
Really Accomplish Something Through
Improved Town-Gown Relations?

Cities and their universities need to work together to reach their individual and shared goals. They can do this. That was the central message of the Great Cities/Great Universities conference held in Cleveland recently. The City of Cleveland and its leading research university, Case Western Reserve University, want to strengthen their ties. Why? Because both need it, and because they have a great deal to offer each other.

Cleveland leaders heard about how Richmond, VA, New Haven, CT., Chicago, IL, and several other cities have "innovated" in this area. This was a useful first step.

Why do we really need to strengthen the town-gown relationship here in Cleveland? Here are some reasons that have not been mentioned yet:

1. Higher education, despite all of its budget woes at this time, is a vital actor in the economic development process directly and indirectly through its various research, educational and public service activities. CWRU, KSU, CSU, University of Akron, Lakeland Community College, Tri-C, Lorain County Community College and the other area colleges and universities provide several thousand jobs to regional residents, including a very large number of "knowledge jobs." These institutions spend a large part of their budgets each year in the local/regional economy. This is the subject of a much-needed upcoming study by the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education (NOCHE).

2. The real "new" economy across the world is the "knowledge economy." Where does a large part of our knowledge base exist? It exists in and around our colleges and universities. The knowledge economy already exists in Greater Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. It has roots in our academic institutions, in our large and still very important manufacturing sector, biosciences and medicine, and a number of other industries. Higher education is a strategic knowledge supplier and developer for all these industries. And these industries are markets and sources of funds for area colleges and universities.

3. The higher education industry is rapidly globalizing, despite the attempts by some Luddites to impose formal and informal controls on the boundaries of knowledge, including the geographic markets that public universities serve. Knowledge is highly mobile now, and through the Internet, will become even more mobile in the future. Distance education, or online learning, is a growing reality for all higher education institutions--both public and private. Private for-profit universities are also a well-known reality. Can they survive and grow in the long haul? I think they can if they follow the right strategy and focus on delivery of a reasonably-priced and high-quality product.

Cleveland and Northeast Ohio must compete to hold onto and greater utilize the knowledge resources it currently has, and they must compete for new resources. Attracting new knowledge talent is essential because we will experience some losses in the years ahead. As they say, you win some and you lose some. The best strategy in this case is to win more than you lose. The accelerated mobility of knowledge and the talent associated with it is inevitable. The answer is not "protectionism," and trying to control the flow of knowledge and its supporting infrastructure of institutions, people and intellectual property. Instead, the solution lies in building stronger knowledge-producing and knowledge-using "networks."

4. This leads me to my final point for now. Cleveland and Northeast Ohio need to help their colleges and universities to develop more national and global relationships and partnerships, and then use those relationships to grow the region's knowledge economy.

How do we do that? Here is an example. The bioscience cluster is an important one for the NE Ohio economy. We have significant academic and institutional strength, and some business strength, in the biosciences, but we cannot get very much further in the biosciences by simply following a "go-it-alone" strategy. How do I know this? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that nearly every major metro area in America and many cities worldwide are trying to grab a bigger piece of this pie. Moreover, many are far ahead of us. Plus read the recent Brookings Institute report on metropolitan rankings of bioscience centers. The study on biotech in the U.S. says that 51 metro areas lay claim to being "biotech meccas." The Brookings study finds, however, that 9 metros control 3/4 of the nation's largest biotech companies and they accounted for 3/4 of all new biotech startups in the past decade. Greater Cleveland is not one of the top nine, nor is it even close to the top list. Do not dispair.

What's the alternative? It is a "partnering" strategy that links NE Ohio's academic, medical institutional and business bioscience resources with appropriate national and international bioscience resources. The answer is to weave a national and global network around our bioscience resources--part of it already exists.

Is this possible? Yes, I believe it is, especially if we are successful in identifying the right opportunities for national and international collaboration and can build the right relationships to make it happen. Who is in the best position to do that here in Greater Cleveland? It is The Cleveland Clinic, CWRU, University Hospitals, area philanthropic institutions, and a handful of our finest bioscience and medical product manufacturing companies.These leaders already have valuable national and international relationships that can be built upon. New ones will need to be built in the future.

Now that we have had the first round of interactions to learn how other cities and their universities are making a difference, let's organize the second round that focuses on building strategic development partnerships between our knowledge infrastructure and those found in other U.S. and world cities that have something to offer us.