Why Some Counties Are Powerhouses for Innovation

By Christopher Boone, Dean and Professor of Sustainability, Arizona State University

By the time the application window closed, Amazon had received 238 proposals from cities and regions throughout North America looking to become the second headquarters of the behemoth tech company.

Amazon invited proposals especially from places that looked a lot like its native Seattle: metro areas with more than a million people; a stable and business-friendly environment; communities that could “think big and creatively” about real estate options; and a location that would attract and retain technical talent.

In the race to attract high-tech companies, what can cities and regions do to become centers of innovation? At the moment, some places are clearly in the lead.

By my analysis of data from the U.S. Patent Office, Santa Clara County, California, is sprinting ahead of the country. Between 2000 and 2015, more than 140,000 patents were granted in Santa Clara County. That’s triple the number for second-ranked San Diego County.

Four other counties in California – Los Angeles, San Mateo, Alameda and Orange – make the top 10. Washington’s King County, Massachusetts’s Middlesex County, Michigan’s Oakland County and Arizona’s Maricopa County round out the list.

These counties are in large metropolitan areas that are known as technology and innovation centers, including San Francisco, San Diego, Boston and Seattle. The other metro areas in the top 10, not the usual tech-hub suspects, are Greater Los Angeles, Detroit and Phoenix.

Higher education

Besides large concentrated populations, these metro areas share two other ingredients that support innovation. All of them have one or more leading research universities and a large proportion of college-educated people.

Santa Clara County is home to Stanford University, an institution that has become synonymous with the high-tech and innovation economy of Silicon Valley.

Stanford’s rise as a world-class research university coincided with a rapid increase in federal and military spending during the Cold War. The university’s suburban location gave it an advantage, too, by providing land for expansion and for burgeoning high-tech companies. Stanford’s leadership aggressively courted research opportunities aligned with the priorities of the military-industrial complex, including electronics, computing and aerospace.

As a leader in patents, Santa Clara County benefits from a well-educated population, with more than half a million adults over 25 years of age holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, the 10th-highest figure in the country.

Nationally, there is a strong relationship between the number of college-educated adults and the number of patents filed in those counties. I found that, for every increase of 1,000 college-educated people, one can expect 33 more patents to be granted in those counties.

For counties that contain one or more of the country’s “131 Doctoral Universities with Very High Research Activity,” as ranked by Indiana University’s Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, the average number of patents filed was 6,686, compared to only 371 for counties lacking one of these research institutes.

Cost of living

Another common trait about most of these centers of innovation is the jaw-dropping cost of housing.

The median sale price for houses in San Jose in Santa Clara County exceeded US$1 million for every month in 2018. Between 2000 and 2017, house prices more than doubled in the California and Washington state counties with the highest number of patents.

Competition for higher-wage talent pushes up housing and other costs in these innovation centers. Although housing prices increased in greater Boston, Phoenix and Detroit, they remained relative bargains compared to the West Coast.

The threat of rising housing costs and gentrification was one of many reasons why residents protested the planned building of Amazon’s second headquarters in the New York City borough of Queens. The company has now decided to pull out.

Article source: http://theconversation.com/why-some-counties-are-powerhouses-for-innovation-111040

Peek Inside St. Ed’s Joseph & Helen Lowe Institute for Innovation

Innovation, Education, Technology — Image source: *Rick Uldricks*

By Chris Mosby, Patch Staff

LAKEWOOD, OH — One phrase has been echoing repeatedly down the hallways of St. Edward High School this summer, “Don’t let the perfect stand in the way of the good.” It’s become the rallying cry for students and teachers that want to pursue innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, and the words breathe life into the revamped and expanded Joseph & Helen Lowe Institute for Innovation.

The 28,000-square foot facility resembles a mashup of a Silicon Valley-tech startup and a contemporary shop class on steroids: open spaces, walls covered in marker-written ideas, smart boards and TVs in each classroom, 3D printers, laser cutters, a wind tunnel, space for welding, and more. It’s an incredible space, especially when considering it will be used almost exclusively by teenage boys.

Jim Kubacki, the president of St. Edward High, said he and his team studied similar Innovation spaces at Notre Dame, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, and Case Western. In many ways, the Lowe Institute is more akin to a collegiate engineering and entrepreneur complex than a high school one.

“The kids that will be the most successful, they’ll need to create something new,” Kubacki told Patch during an early tour of the new facility. He thinks students will need to utilize cross-disciplinary techniques to blend learning into something actionable and unique. The Lowe Institute will give students space to spitball ideas and then walk a concept from idea to actuality, he said.

Making Makers

The new facility will be led by Nick Kuhar, who will maintain his duties as co-lead of the St. Ed’s Film Department. He believes strongly in letting students push the curriculum of any class to new frontiers. While speaking with Patch, Kuhar unfurled anecdote after anecdote about students using their personal knowledge of technology to advance what was being taught.

“Jim [Kubacki] is always saying he doesn’t want film students, he wants filmmakers. He doesn’t want history students, he wants historians,” Kuhar said. “That permeates [St. Ed’s] culture.”

Kubacki and Kuhar both want students to be creative, sure, but they also want them to take that energy and put it toward actually making something. “Great creativity requires great discipline,” Kubacki said. “Great writers have to write a lot, for example.” By extension, great engineers need to be building a lot.

While walking the three floors of the Lowe Institute, students of different ages milled about, prepping the building for Saturday’s ribbon-cutting. Other students took part in summer robotics programs and engineering labs. Aside from their baby-faces, the students looked like budding engineers and robotics experts — they were doing.

Some of the classrooms in Lowe are made of walls that are meant to be written on. Even the windows can be scribbled on with markers. “It’s like an extension of your own brain,” Kuhar said, while looking at a wall covered in notes on a Rube Goldberg machine.

Besides the labs and classrooms and 21st Century shop class areas, the Lowe Institute offers “ideation” spaces. That’s a buzz wordy way of saying “places where students can hang out and spit ball.” Those rooms are filled with chargers for cell phones and laptops, TVs, books on engineering and entrepreneurship (real, actual books…gasp!), and a variety of odd-looking, but undoubtedly comfy, chairs.

Kubacki said students won’t be allowed to have food and drink in most of the areas, but assured readers that staff wouldn’t be sticklers about that. The administration really wants students to want to hang out in the Lowe Institute.

By the looks of it, that won’t be a problem.

Article source: https://patch.com/ohio/lakewood-oh/peek-inside-st-eds-joseph-helen-lowe-institute-innovation

Advancing academics: What should we demand of our education?

BY EDRICK SABALBURO | The Daily Californian STAFF

I remember this guy in high school who had a pretty messed-up home life, mostly as a result of his parents’ nasty divorce. So he wrote a song about it. He uploaded it on good ol’ Soundcloud one weekend, and by the time Monday rolled around, the entire junior class had heard it. It was raw and passionate; he saw something ugly in the world and made something beautiful of it. I was in awe of him.

That week, we got back a long-term essay assignment in English, and he scored pretty low. The implication was clear: He had no talent for writing.

I was confused at how someone who had clearly demonstrated his creative prowess had somehow had his genius overlooked. I became frustrated that the teacher — and more broadly, the class — had failed to properly assess his abilities. My classmate became dejected, even resentful, after seeing that I had scored better on the assignment.

Why was it that the grading system did not accurately reflect his talent? I doubt there was a significant difference between the quality of his songwriting and his essay writing. What exactly was the teacher assessing, and what was she missing?

After this initial injustice, it didn’t take…Continue reading

Article source: http://www.dailycal.org/2018/04/29/advancing-academics-demand-education/

A journalist’s 12 tips to writing good content

Writing, Content — A journalist’s guide to writing good content / Thought Catalog

By Andrew Brookes | The Drum Network

Good writing isn’t easy, nor should it be. The fact that every man and his dog thinks he can write these days only serves to make the role of writers more important – with a real need for people to write quality content that stands out from the mediocre morass.

However, even the best writers get writer’s block and it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. In that spirit, here are 12 things I learned as a journalist that I’ve taken into marketing. Hopefully they can aid you in your quest to fine tune your writing.

Read widely: The more you read, the better a writer you become. Look at your competitors – but also become a voracious reader of blogs, websites, newspapers, magazines and books. Good writers ‘magpie’ ideas from a variety of sources.
Keep it simple: Journalists are encouraged to consider whether their parents or grandparents would understand their copy, stripping away unnecessary jargon and explaining terminology. Always consider if your audience would understand what you’ve written and use short, sharp sentences without too many clauses to avoid confusion.
Be active: Think of the loose formula ‘subject, verb, object’. So, ‘Andrew wrote a rant for The Drum’ is probably better than ‘The rant came in an article written by Andrew’. Don’t be constrained by this rule but keep it in mind to write punchy content.
Bullet point lists: Google loves a bullet point list – and so does your reader. Use them to make your content digestible.
Use a thesaurus: Avoid using the same word more than once in a sentence. A thesaurus is your friend.
Become self-reflective: Read back over posts you’ve written, preferably after a week or more has passed. Learn to critique your content and see what has and hasn’t worked.
Write for pleasure: Writers who keep their love for their craft will give you that little bit extra. Write a blog about your personal passion in your free time and the process of writing will never become a chore.
Listen to others: Good writers observe the world around them and channel their observations through the written word. Listening carefully to others will especially help if you write for an audience you aren’t part of.
Don’t be too precious: People will disagree with you as a writer. They’ll often fuss about one or two words. You need a thick skin. Don’t be upset by the one word you were forced to change, be proud of the hundreds of others that are published.
Challenge your brief: If you’re writing something and it feels wrong, it probably is. If you’re bored or confused by what you’re writing, then you can expect your reader to feel the same. Be prepared to question what’s in your brief.
Write it how you’d say it: Are you stuck? Think about what you would say if you were to explain this verbally. Maybe write this out and then turn those words into something that’s more appropriate in a written form.
Talk to other writers: A good team spirit and open dialogue between writers is important. Writers can help each other through difficulties by suggesting possible solutions or maybe offering links to articles they’ve read or written for inspiration.

This article first appeared as a chapter in volume two of The Ultimate Guide to Blogging for Your Brand.

Article source: http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2018/02/13/journalists-12-tips-writing-good-content

Every Box Top Helps

The staff of InKnowvative Concepts clipped, collected and donated Box Tops for Education™ labels and Labels for Education™ to one of our area schools. Box Tops for Education™ was born when in 1996 General Mills wanted to create a program to help support education that would benefit America’s schools.

Box Tops for Education, Schools, Education Labels — Image Credit: Box Tops for Education

By Clipping Box Tops, schools are able to earn cash to buy things like computers, books, and playground equipment. According to BTFE, by 2010, schools across the nation had earned over $320 million. Brands such as Ziploc®, Hefty®, Kleenex®, Scott® Pillsbury™, Old El Paso™ and Green Giant™ products were added to the program. Be sure to check with the Coordinator at your child’s school or a school you select to support, then clip, collect and donate before you recycle those containers.

Although the Labels for Education™ program is coming to a close, click here for more information about the Box Tops for Education™ program and participating schools in your area. Believe us, your contributions, no matter how small, can make a huge difference.

The Power of Visual Communication

The Power of Visual Communication
By Tim | source: HubSpot Feb 16th, 2016

Visual communication has been sweeping the globe. The reason it is so effective is because we’re more likely to understand and remember visual comm over text.

Article Source: http://www.dailyinfographic.com/the-power-of-visual-communication