Here in the heartland, a region once known as the Rust Belt, we’re continually scanning the landscape for signs of a high-tech mecca.
We look for portents of our future in a wired world as anxiously as agrarian societies watched the heavens for signs of rain during dry spells.
Two public figures who beat the drums for technology–and served briefly as fixed points in the constellation by which we measure our progress–are moving on.
A replacement could be named as early as Friday for Katherine Gehl, Mayor Richard Daley’s tech adviser, who’s taking time out to decide what she wants to do next.
Among the front-runners to replace her are Angela Ball, deputy to the city’s chief information officer, and Robin Schabes, director of tech development in the planning and development department.
At the non-profit Illinois Coalition, a search began this week to replace president Shaye Mandle, who is leaving the Chicago-based tech promotion outfit to head up a business group, the East West Corporate Corridor Association in Naperville.
Mandle and Gehl took their posts within three months of one another in late 1999 and early 2000 during the dot-com frenzy. They’re leaving in a very different era.
The stock markets are recovering from the bursting of one of history’s great speculative bubbles. Government surpluses have turned to deficits, though federal spigots are wide open for technology spending to combat terrorism.
Money is tighter, but fewer people question the importance of technology to every industry or to the region’s economy.
The biggest change during Gehl’s and Mandle’s tenures is a firmer local consensus that the best way to ensure high-tech job growth is to invest in the basics–schools and universities, research centers, high-speed networks–rather than offer incentives to specific companies or industries.
“Although it’s tempting to get into that game,” says University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee, “the risk is that you spend an inordinate amount pushing something that ends up being a big bust.”
Witness the city’s flirtation with tax incentives to now-defunct MarchFirst and the former Divine Interventures, now Divine Inc. Neither prospered sufficiently to draw their city subsidies.
What should Gehl’s and Mandle’s successors advocate?
For the city, the most important initiative is CivicNet, an ambitious–and risky–plan to create a wired metropolis by spending $31 million of the city’s telecommunications budget to hire a company to extend fiber-optic networks to schools, libraries and public facilities in far-flung neighborhoods.
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The hope is that other companies will jump in and use the network to hook up places that otherwise wouldn’t get high-speed Internet access.
For the coalition, Mandle’s replacement will ply a new governor next year with a new tech agenda. She or he ought to try to persuade elected leaders to give the coalition more money–not less, as is likely–to expand programs like the Technology Development Bridge Fund.
The 4-year-old program provides money, advice and visibility to start-ups. Private investors, not bureaucrats, take the lead and provide most of the money. The fund’s internal rate of return: 23 percent as of June.
In a more perfect world, the coalition also would wrest from state bureaucrats control of a program conceived by the coalition in 1998 to put experienced entrepreneurs near universities and research labs. The idea is to help scientists, professors and students start companies based on promising research.
Called ITEC (Illinois Technology Enterprise Corp.), the state-funded program shows early promise in Evanston near Northwestern University, but it’s rolling out much too slowly.
When budgets are tight, it’s tempting to cut investments that don’t pay immediate returns. That would be a mistake, Goolsbee and others say.
Now more than ever, the city and state need passionate advocates for a realistic tech agenda.
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