According to UCSD Extension Dean and sociologist Dr. Mary Walshok, in the 21st century, universities and research institutions are crucial components to making any city great.
At CityAge: Build the Future, Walshok explained that universities can make cities "magnets" for public and private investment. And the research dollars that universities attract make them natural hubs for talent in all different fields, as well as constant sources of experimentation and innovation in a diverse set of industries.
Great cities have to continuously recalibrate, renew, and reinvent themselves in response to ever-changing demographic, technological, economic, and global imperatives … Without a center or centers of intellectual capital that are actively engaged in understanding and helping to navigate the multiple factors shaping regional futures, big cities—like Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle, or Portland—cannot become great cities. 1
...
We often think that if you have just one successful company, you’re going to get an entrepreneurial economy. What San Diego understood early, and worked hard at, is that you need clusters. When someone puts a stake in the ground downtown—moves their business or buys an apartment there—they have to know that if this job doesn’t work out, there are 50 or 100 other IT companies where they might be able to get a job. That’s what clusters are about.
San Diego has a lot of organizations that support the interactions among all of these sectors in order to enable the first or second company to turn into the third or fourth company. I’ve done begatting charts, and what we see is that in the early days, the same 20 or 24 names come up again and again. They’re known as serial entrepreneurs. That helps to build clusters, but you need resources to enable wealth and job creation beyond the early founders.
Scaling companies is very important. Unless we—as a city, as a university, as a region—help companies connect to customers and markets, we won’t grow the companies that create wealth and jobs. In this era of increasing disparities in high-income and low-income jobs, we as a city have realized—and I’m very active in this effort—that we cannot just start companies; we have to scale companies.
When you start companies, you’ve got lots of engineers and scientists and high-wage jobs. But to create job opportunities across the spectrum of employment, you need to grow companies that can hire 500 or even 1,000 people. We have a workforce partnership in this city to die for, because it has found ways to address, not only the issues of the chronically unemployed or underemployed, but also of the potentially unemployed who need their skills upgraded as well as opportunities in emerging and new occupations.
The other piece is the notion of public-private partnerships. The partnership between public institutions, like the university and the city, with downtown developers and in particular philanthropy, is hugely significant.
Last but not least is amenities of place. The city has to be a place to live that is attractive to people. We at UCSD would add that it also has to say diverse. We live in a diverse city and a binational region. Critical masses of distinctive cultural assets are important. Inclusiveness is at the heart of what we’re trying to do downtown. And of course, transportation and infrastructure, particularly communications infrastructure, is critical.2