ED 101: Setting Reasonable Expectations

That is the message in a recent St. Petersburg Times article about the new Scripps Biotech Institute to be developed in Florida. The article examines the Texas Research Park in San Antonio and says that the Scripps project should learn from it.

The Texas Research Park was supposed to spark a biotech boom in San Antonio, with 100 companies and 30,000 employees by 2020. Thirteen years later, only 15 companies with about 300 employees have set up shop. Are Florida's goals for a boom led by Scripps Research Institute overly ambitious?

Undisputed biotech centers such as Boston, San Francisco and San Diego developed over several decades, fueled by a potent mix of academia and entrepreneurship, rather than being the inventions of an economic development task force. Like Florida, San Antonio set out to build a biotech economy from scratch. The results have been mixed.

Setting reasonable expectations is a lesson all of us need to learn. Beware of those inflated numbers in your economic impact study that is designed to convince state and local government to invest heavily in the deal. In two words: "Get real!"

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