Brewster McCracken for Austin Mayor

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How to grow Austin’s economy during this economic downturn

We must start with a vision: to create opportunities for Austinites of all skill levels in the job sectors of the 21st Century Economy. The sectors that Austin should pursue leadership in are biotech and healthcare, clean energy (particularly solar and energy storage) and the creative economy sectors, including film, music and digital media.

I have laid out the seven steps to securing Austin’s economic future. These are the steps that Austin used in the Sematech era and which we must use to achieve leadership in each of these emerging sectors.

The steps Austin should employ to grow the city’s economy include:

1. Recruit new companies and retain existing companies. This includes use of tax incentives and proactive recruitment of major employers.
2. Commercialize university technology. The city and UT jointly fund technology incubators in bioscience, clean energy and wireless. The companies that emerge from these incubators are statistically overwhelmingly likely to remain in Austin.
3. Create research and development consortia. Examples include Sematech and MCC. This is what Austin, UT, Sematech and the Environmental Defense Fund are currently doing in clean energy through the Pecan Street Project.
4. Create infrastructure for innovation – such as research and development labs, wet labs and research parks. Examples include Sematech and the potential Austin/UT/Sematech energy lab through the Pecan Street Project. National examples include Stanford Research Park and the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL).
5. Build a local market. Economist Jon Hockenyos observes that creating a local market is increasingly important to building a successful economic sector. This is particularly true in clean energy, where cities, states and public utilities can promote job creation through purchases of solar, wind and energy storage. New Mexico has catapulted itself into a national solar energy leader by aggressively implementing such a strategy.
6. Empower people to achieve through job training - just as Austin did in the SEMATECH era with the Austin Project and that Temple, TX is doing now in biotech. Such initiatives are critical to ensuring that the entire community shares in the opportunities.
7. Practice unity and “intense cooperation.” Unity was a key factor in Austin winning MCC and SEMATECH against far more established rivals. The city’s business, university and political leadership pulled together in a display of “intense cooperation” (as a University of Texas analysis later described it).

For clean energy, specific steps include:

• Implement the Pecan Street Project’s recommendations (announced August 1) to make Austin a leader in clean energy innovation, to create thousands of jobs for people of all skill levels and to cost effectively install solar on 100,000 homes and businesses by the end of the next decade;
• Recruit major battery and energy storage employers to position Austin for leadership in energy storage;
• Create clean energy manufacturing jobs by forming a regional clean energy partnership with San Antonio that would leverage the two cities’ combined regional purchasing powers to bring new solar and battery manufacturing jobs and protect existing semiconductor manufacturing jobs (this is the approach New Mexico already uses – which helped it lure Solar Array Ventures away from Austin); and
• Pursue federal stimulus funding, as the city, UT and Sematech are currently pursuing, to implement the Pecan Street Project’s smart grid innovations.

For biotech, life sciences and healthcare, specific steps include:

• Recruiting major biotech, life sciences and medical devices employers, including offering tax incentives,
• Expanding the city’s partnership with UT to commercialize medical research at the jointly funded Bioscience Incubator,
• Repurposing semiconductor facilities through targeted tax incentives, federal research funding and business recruitment. Opportunities include facilities for microfluidics and nanomedicine production. Converting closed semiconductor fabs into biotech manufacturing facilities is critical to creating new opportunities for existing semiconductor employees;
• Creating infrastructure for success. Sematech’s biotech success shows how superior semiconductor research and development facilities can attract researchers and innovators. But Austin lacks other critical infrastructure needed to establish a world-class biotech sector. Local biotech companies are traveling outside of Austin to find wet lab space.  To attract research, companies and jobs, Austin will need wet labs and clean rooms. Our region will also need research parks similar to Stanford Research Park and the facilities along Boston’s Route 128. The envisioned TXAN State Lab would be an important asset to achieve this vision; and
• Positioning Austin as a major medical technology and manufacturing center through recruiting and branding. The Milken Institute already ranks Austin as the nation’s 12th largest biotech cluster, but few people locally or nationally realized this, which hinders recruiting.

For the creative economy sectors, specific steps include:

• Starting with a vision of independent film, independent music and 3-D animation leadership in digital media (Dell, Pixar and Dreamworks all identify 3-D as the greatest digital media opportunity, and U.T.’s Advanced Computing Center is a major research leader in 3-D graphics and computing);
• Creating infrastructure for innovation. The upgrades to Austin Studios are an important start. A Creative Economy Incubator modeled on the Sundance Institute’s incubators for independent filmmakers would build on these new cutting edge facilities to create a vibrant creative economy ecosystem. Finally, Austin filmmaker Zane Rutledge writes that Austin’s film sector needs more post-production facilities, which would make a big difference in having film production locate in Austin;
• Recruiting new jobs and retaining existing companies. The loss of our local film talent to Shreveport shows what happens when your existing jobs move away. We will need elected leaders to personally recruit creative economy employers.  We will need expanded incentives to recruit films and TV series. We will need to recruit video game and music publishers and firms with expertise in digital media distribution to empower local creative artists.
• Empowering people through job training. Austin filmmaker Juan Garcia writes, “Austin can create more opportunities in film/digital media by focusing funding efforts and research into new and emergent media technology in both the K-12 and college levels. A solid educational foundation in media literacy is the key to producing more creative/high tech jobs in Central Texas.”
• Creating performance, production and recording space for creative artists, through potential redevelopment of the city-owned surface parking lot where the Armadillo World Headquarters used to be located and through creation of performance and recording spaces in new city-owned parking garages built by the Austin Parking Enterprise.

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