Chronicling Chicago’s effort to promote itself as a high-tech mecca is like touching a tender spot to see if it’s feeling better.
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In this case, it still hurts, but the temptation to keep prodding is irresistible.
Next week marks the two-year anniversary of Mayor Richard Daley’s decision to put City Hall muscle behind the Chicago tech economy.
Responding to fears that Chicago was missing the tech boom, the mayor promised a breakfast gathering of local luminaries that they could make Chicago “a high-tech capital in the 21st Century.”
Since then, the city-led campaign hit a wall and then downshifted, along with the market for tech-based businesses.
A fast and furious deal-oriented effort under Daley’s first tech czar, David Weinstein, has given way to a more strategic and deliberate approach under Daley’s current tech adviser, Katherine Gehl.
Trouble is, planning doesn’t necessarily inspire action. And now, even as the economy sinks, a new plan is in the offing.
Since last week, Gehl and volunteer chairman Stephen C. Mitchell of engineering firm Lester B. Knight & Associates, have been briefing Daley’s volunteers on the preliminary findings of a pro bono study by consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
McKinsey has identified areas such as biotech, wireless and nanotechnology in which the region has special strengths. The consultants looked for sectors that will remain ripe for investment.
The idea is to build on the area’s strengths. The goal is to prepare an action plan, get corporate leaders to buy in, obtain the mayor’s blessing and release the findings as early as March.
“There is logic to this, and there is thoughtfulness,” says Mitchell. “It really is the next step.”
Certainly the award for staying power goes to Mitchell and some 30 other volunteers–executives, entrepreneurs, professors, financiers and others–who have stuck with the effort since that first breakfast.
They’ve made headway in such non-glamorous areas as revamping Chicago’s outdated electrical code to make it less costly for tech companies to outfit buildings with high-speed cable wiring.
They’ve persisted in a project dubbed CivicNet to link city agencies and service providers with homes and businesses.
But the worry is private markets will outrun their painstaking planning.
Meantime, Daley has lost his appetite for bold moves since getting burned by earlier initiatives.
Wall Street’s tech-stock collapse dealt fatal blows to the expansion plans of two of the city’s new-economy poster children: Divine Interventures and MarchFirst.
The cost to taxpayers was zero–less than a dot-comer’s worthless stock options–because the tax incentives Daley pledged to Divine and MarchFirst never were allocated. Their ambitious headquarters projects remain stalled.
Still, the cost was steep in self-esteem and, especially, in momentum.
Some other high-profile city initiatives fared little better.
A venture capital fund to which the city pledged $4 million in pension money two years ago has made one investment and is hunting for a new manager because Divine bowed out.
A city-subsidized rehab of the South Loop’s Lytton Building–now called the Hub–provides affordable space for start-ups. But by the time the Hub got up and running last year, high-tech entrepreneurs had found quarters all over the Loop, without any city assistance.
As is often the case, private markets outflanked government initiatives.
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Credit Gehl for stepping into a tough spot at City Hall. Credit volunteers like Mitchell for sticking with the effort.
But let’s face it, this high-tech campaign is ready for a booster shot of adrenaline and more-visible leadership.
Markets move fast. Thoughtful studies rarely succeed in outrunning them.
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