Revisiting "What Tacoma Has to Sell"
The News Tribune has followed up on their recent opinion piece by Ken Miller on Tacoma’s future, which we wrote about last month. In the latest piece, Jonathan Paul adds his two cents into the conversation about Tacoma’s economic future.
According to Paul, “The most important question to ask is: What will drive economic growth in the 21st century?” That is the question. His answer is that “We need to tap Tacoma’s creative minds and inspire a next generation of digital entrepreneurs to develop technology companies here.” Paul argues for investing in engineering and computer science talent by pushing the subjects in Tacoma’s middle and high schools, and investing in start-ups in the field.
He at first seems to dismiss Miller’s museums and military focus, but then brings them back to the conversation, adding the oft-cited creative class and former military to Tacoma’s list of assets. Investing heavily in educating our students, and supporting our entrepreneurs in substantive ways sound like extremely worthwhile pursuits for Tacoma, and the tech industry is certain to offer room for growth and innovation in coming years.
To us, the recently announced Tacoma College Entrepreneur Network seems like a great resource for this. Is there traction in Paul’s thesis? Where can it go from here?
Read Jonathan Paul’s article in its entirety from The News Tribune.
1 comments
N Nick November 23, 2011
Improving and strengthening education is a great thing to do, but I’m not convinced that it is the area in which Tacoma is most lacking. After all, Tacoma is (if you count Parkland), home to the top two most expensive private universities in Washington. If we can trust that the market is accurately reflecting the value of those schools’ educations, Tacoma is doing pretty well in terms of access to educated college graduates. And that’s before even considering the impact of UWT and its rapid growth into a 4 year campus.
Couple that with the fact that 80 – 90% of graduating students that stay in the region move up north (at least with UPS). That tells me that the supply of educated degree-holding residents is not what is lacking. People are going where the jobs are, and unfortunately, those jobs are currently not here.
In my opinion, what Tacoma is lacking is further up the food chain. And that is mechanisms that create jobs in areas like technology. That would include city efforts to catalyze growth in such industries: tax structures/incentives, support services for small companies, and even a general commitment to help those smaller employers succeed and grow.
Could you imagine the kind of buzz and growth Tacoma would get if it chose to invest in supporting small startups, instead of installing rain gardens, $700,000 parking lots, and hiring Toronto-based tech companies to build city websites?