Editor's Eye on Baltimore: Rewiring Baltimore - A Conversation with Rob Rosenbaum, CEO of TEDCO (Maryland Technology Development Corporation)

Posted November 17, 2011

We Recommend...

Contribute to Citybizlist, Share Your News

Robert A. Rosenbaum

Why is it that every region believes it can emulate the successes of Silicon Valley? If we can just do what they did... But what if that paradigm is the exactly wrong way to go about realizing Baltimore's potential? What if the insight to be gained from Silicon Valley is in recognizing the foundational behaviors that make business formation friction free? So I recently had drinks with Rob Rosenbaum, CEO of TEDCO and reflected on a recent economic development trip to Silicon Valley.

Road Trip. Rob participated with other Baltimore regional leaders, representing a cross section of professions, on a trade mission sponsored by the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore to Silicon Valley. "All went with the same objective but with different granular goals," reflected Rob. The shared goal was, in Rob's view, to "improve entrepreneurial and innovative culture in Greater Baltimore." What made the dynamics of this common experience striking to Rob, and what really evolved as the theme for our conversation, was "the organizational frame of mind [that each participant brought]." "We came as a bunch of individual organizations but [met with] an amalgam of all." Silicon Valley, Rob continued, "is truly one large community, not a region of [separate] groups."

Faulty Wiring. As a quick study in analyzing impedance, Rob ran through how different sectors the group met with viewed their roles in Silicon Valley's innovation ecosystem:

• On tech transfer, from the head at Stanford, "it's not about the money; it's about changing the world." The process is easy, Rob called it "friction free" - standard documents, an objective auction process on all university created IP. While one might assume that all the good stuff gets grabbed by established companies, when no one else licensed some algorithms, Sergey and Larry did and after some naming debates, settled on Google.
• On higher education, the one Stanford lecture Rob heard was on taking risk. The moment became iconic when an engaged discussion on how to start a company abruptly ended as a student stood up and told the class that Steve Jobs had just died.
• On economic development professionals - when asked what they did, the answer "we do nothing." The Baltimore mission was left guessing. For Rob, this meant "that they didn't get in the way," "they didn't focus on one person or organization over another, they supported the community."
• On Politicians - no one ever brought them up. Really.
• On Business People - the common reflection was "that it all happened with such little effort, that everyone got along together in the community." They may compete as businesses but not as a community
• On risk capital - "the VCs seemed engaged in, really a part of, the community." "The angel community is visible and active." Drivers in the culture of innovation.

So what (or who) was noticeably missing from these meetings? The community organizations focused on entrepreneurs. They don't have any... Language can also be telling. Rob began to realize over the course of their trip that there was no "I" in conversation but "we". And every conversation reflected a culture of low impedance - taking friction and barriers out of the process - to the point that they aren't even part of the language. Here's a test: how do each of the sectors Rob outlined above function in Greater Baltimore?

No Bing Bang Redux. "Silicon Valley happened naturally," reflected Rob. It's impossible to fathom any other place and point in time like that in which Palo Alto found itself with the burst of computer science at Stanford, the launch of HP, the birth of risk capital from family foundations (the proto-venture capitalists), and a culture of accepting failure as a critical component of creation. While the rest of us take trips to the Valley to try to bottle it, that organic burst of business formation and technology advancement over 40 years ago isn't happening in another region the same way. But rather than being depressed by its impossibility, Rob and I got to talking about communities that have succeeded in creating great momentum in innovation, and like Baltimore need to work with disparate pieces with great potential. We inevitably focused on Austin. "What Austin did," Rob mused, "was convince its old guard not to put their dollars into [traditional] foundations and social cause issues, but to promote a new innovation engine." The bet, made by Austin's business community over 20 years ago, was that fostering a culture of innovation would drive business formation and, in turn, the health of the greater Austin community. Austin didn't try to be Silicon Valley, they tried to be Austin. Not a big bang, just an incredibly well coordinated and sustained experiment...

Friction Free. So what does the Austin experience and the mission that played out in Silicon Valley have in common? As our conversation tapered off, I asked Rob for his parting reflections. "We don't celebrate our successful entrepreneurs enough." Then he paused, "but it's more than that, we also don't give them the opportunity to lead by example." "We have 100 successful entrepreneurs [in Baltimore] and that isn't enough. We need one visionary." Rob may be on to what happened in Silicon Valley. He called it "spontaneous combustion." But whatever it was, it was driven by entrepreneurs. It was entrepreneurs that created a risk tolerant culture, one that celebrated the knowledge that comes with failure, one that drives innovation and pushes to the margins anything that creates friction. Rob's final reflection tapered off. When I asked him if someone like a Steve Bisciotti, or a Kevin Plank, or a Scott Ferber were to step into the parallel universe in Baltimore to that of 20 years ago in Austin, he finished my thought "You just need one."

The Take Away. Earlier this week I caught up with Rob again at the Economic Alliance's annual meeting. It was an evening that got you thinking about what needed rewiring in Baltimore. They had Tom Kelley of Silicon Valley's Ideo, speak. But my mind kept thinking about the difference in language - the language Rob recalled from the trip, the language Tom used in his reflections of innovation - and I got to thinking about the curious way we behave in Baltimore - not in the sense of commercial competition, but in distended community efforts. How can Silicon Valley have no competing community groups and we're an alphabet soup of organizations with overlapping missions? I thought about all the impedance that creates. It's not as if we don't support each other's initiatives (think about the usual suspects you see at each event) as much as we attempt to chase the same audience - an audience increasingly disengaged. When Mike Baader, the incoming chair of the Economic Alliance, spoke at their annual event earlier this week - he talked of removing the negativity in how we describe Baltimore - and of how we can get out of our own way. So the next column will pick up on how to reshape how we perceive our community, in large part reflecting on how the organization that brought us the iPhone design - Tom Kelley's Ideo - sees the world we collectively face. How can a community support innovation?

For comments about this article or thoughts on future conversations, let me know at: nfowler@rosenbergmartin.com

With more than 25 years experience in law and business, Newt Fowler advises many of the Greater Baltimore region's entrepreneurs and technology companies, guiding them through all aspects of business planning, technology commercialization, and M&A and financing transactions.