Attracting the World’s Greatest Minds to a Marketplace of Problems
Four part Q&A with Clark Dean, Executive Managing Director, Transwestern
1. Transwestern assists clients across more than 219 offices in 31 countries as part of a strategic alliance with BNP Paribas Real Estate and Encor. What does the Transaction Sciences team do, and how does your work improve the growth of new and existing innovation districts?
The Transaction Sciences team within Transwestern is best described as a team that plans, designs and executes transactions that contribute to human flourishing. We are a consultancy, a builder of echo systems, and principally a problem-solver, designed around several strategic anchors that drive solutions to complex problems in industries such as global life sciences.
On a basic level, we solve complex problems by building custom real estate solutions that are informed by data analytics and behavioural science. This means the provision of bespoke laboratories and spaces to innovate, mobilising a team with a diverse slate of capabilities that ranges from development; folks who have led large real estate-reliant corporates like CNN, Warner Brothers, and Invesco, to those with biomedical engineering, law and finance backgrounds. We bring expertise and an extensive network as an extension of executive teams, partnering with important enterprises like the Centre for Global Health Innovation and its Global Health Innovation District in Atlanta, in partnership with large global health institutions, corporations, universities, community groups and innovative start-ups.
Connecting people across disciplines, industries, and geographies, is essential to catalysing innovation in science and technology that transcends real estate. The teams we build and the partnerships we create need to be diverse; as diverse as the vastness of these innovation districts.
2. What is the ‘secret sauce’ that makes a scientific community globally significant?
Communities everywhere are seeking ways to have an innovation district in their hands that has a truly global reach. Of course, we can’t simply will these into existence, and in a large part the foundations are initially laid by research-led universities as world-leading conveners of science which have access to capital, to academic resources, and function as talent sinks bringing skills into areas in a highly-clustered fashion. The most authentic districts have been anchored by grand research institutions.
U.S. innovation hubs have long been reliant on these deep roots to develop organically. If we look to the Boston cluster as one example, MIT and Harvard might not have seen the obvious benefits of collaborating due to their very different compositions, governance, and philosophies, even though they’re very geographically proximate, but over time they forged joint curricula such as the joint-venture health science and technology programme which lowered the drawbridge for bright minds to enrol at both places and freely move between the halls of both institutions.
It helped that investment in transport infrastructure had already been made, making it easier to exchange knowledge and cultivate social capital in and around Boston. This makes it a lot easier for research institutions – that tend to receive government monies through grants that pour into programmes – to blend with and seed private enterprise and the broader ecosystem.
Co-operation between universities, research institutions, and private enterprise – what we’ve come to understand as the Triple Helix of innovation – is the fuel for these districts to thrive. The challenge, then, is to create neutral entities and spaces which allow for ties to form naturally, without any one party having a semblance of ownership that another might not have. Globally renowned institutions should carve out neutral ground to convene, bringing the best of what they have to offer, which is exactly what we’re seeing in Atlanta between great universities Emory and GeorgiaTech, as well as prestigious colleges like Morehouse.
This requires leadership and doesn’t happen by accident. Public-private sector engagement is essential, and the value of social capital can bring about extraordinary returns if this is harnessed correctly and there is clear and unwavering commitment to building up the foundations.
3. The notion of ‘social capital’ is a critical factor to how Transwestern supports the creation of innovation hubs. What does this entail, and how can we capture it?
Social capital is the value of the interactions among people, a concept pioneered by Robert Putnam from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. This can include ‘strong ties’ relationships, meaning who we work with, who we meet at school or college, but it importantly captures ‘weak ties’; the intersection of disciplines, experiences, backgrounds, origin, race, skills; everything that manifests a necessary richness that we need to apply to solve globally important and complex problems.
Innovation districts like the Oxford-Cambridge Arc should consider facilitating these interactions as their ultimate objective. These pan-regional ecosystems need to be more than places which create jobs or real estate values, but instead places where big and complicated problems are solved because of the unique convergence of human, intellectual, financial and social capital and the opportunity to work with people who challenge existing thinking.
These districts draw in what we call ‘problem experts’ that can articulate these problems and understand them well, and generates a marketplace of problems worth solving, attracting problem solvers who see profit potential and societal benefit on the other side of these problems.
4. What does the Oxford-Cambridge Arc need to do to stand out globally?
In the same way as the best universities lean into the problems they’re best placed to solve; like Harvard MIT have done with life sciences, and universities across Atlanta in the area of global health, regions ought to adopt an ‘edge’ that allows them to bring to the table something that few other regions globally can say they’re the best at. This spills out to the wider space around these idea factories, as we’ve seen in Cambridge, MA, and the seaport which has been brought into the vortex of this geographic expertise, and only serves to further embolden the case for international talent and funding to gather in these areas.
The issue for Cambridge and Oxford is that both universities and their localities are well-known for many subjects, and if anything, they’ve been successful as generalists. Leaders need to pick out and explore subject areas that can be majored on; unique things that no-one else globally can offer, to attract the best minds across the world. Dense markets have a tendency to become denser, and the popularity of these areas creates a virtuous circle that’s increasingly difficult to compete against.
Houston is the greatest market for energy; Silicon Valley for tech, Los Angeles for entertainment. In each of these areas there is a strong thesis to show where the action is. Is there a thesis that the Arc can develop that sets it apart in its offering? Infrastructure like the JET reactor at Culham Science Park that is difficult to replicate elsewhere? This supports the process of curating world-class elements of an ecosystem, and it’s how you lever those strengths which attracts investment and problem-solvers.
The bigger picture here is that the Arc’s carved out edge can entrench its global reputation within a wider “network of networks” – rich, fractally-aligned innovation districts that connect with each other globally, powering a world-wide ambition to solve the world’s more complicated issues through regional specialization. This enables the building of expertise horizontally, rather than entrenched in deep and long verticals, mining the expertise of one vertical that is undoubtedly translatable to another.
Get in touch
