Science and Technology Panel - Clip 1: Transcript

JONATHAN BOWELS

You know, really the city has among the world's most renowned technology and science instructions, from Columbia University and NYU to Memorial Sloan-Kettering and Polytechnic University. These universities and non-profit research centers, like similar institutions in other cities, serve as the intellectual engine behind emerging industries such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology and telecommunications.

In New York City, the universities and research institutions boast 13 Nobel Prize winners and at least 31 Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators. A 2005 ranking of faculty who are a member of the National Academy of Sciences found that New York City has six schools in the top ten.

The city is second in the nation, behind only Boston, Cambridge, in attracting federal research dollars from the National Institutes of Health, with eight New York City institutions among the top 100 recipients of NIH dollars. And the New York Metro region ranks first in the number of biotechnology patents.

So we've got all that going for us, particularly in the biomedical research field. New York City is just incredibly strong.

Beyond the life sciences, New York City has a formidable number of companies in the software and information technology fields as well as new media, many of which are here and are thriving because they produce products and services that cater to the financial services industry and other elite sectors that are based in New York City - media, advertising among them.

In addition, the study that Garrick mentioned that I was an adviser on says that New York City has approximately 226,000 IT workers here. It's something that no one really knows about and hasn't been talked about because these are technology workers that are embedded in other mature corporate sectors - so people that are in the R&D department at Tiffany's, people that are at financial services companies doing software development and other IT services.

Despite all of these assets, it's really not accurate to say that New York right now is a major center for innovation in growth industries. For starters, New York really is not Silicon Valley. Silicon Alley, New York's equivalent, has roughly 44,000 jobs today. That's nothing to scoff at, but Silicon Valley, in the 150 largest companies, has about 930,000 jobs.

Earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg talked about how New York City today has approximately 125 biotechnology companies, and it's a field that clearly New York has been growing in over the last decade or so. I suspect that that figure is a little bit inflated, but even so, it's really a fraction of the number of biotech companies compared to the Boston area and Silicon Valley. The Bay Area in California has 423 biotech companies and Boston, Cambridge has 327.

I think one of the keys that we've been focusing on - we're working on a study right now of New York City's ability to harness its science and tech assets - is that, I think, historically New York City's institutions have not been good at commercializing their research.

While we get all of this federal money in to do research, we have these top scientists, we're not known as a particularly entrepreneurial place, a place that commercializes its inventions into startup businesses. The city trails institutions like Stanford, MIT and so many others when it comes to spinning of the research into new ventures.

The institutions here in New York have also been accused for quite a while of putting more emphasis on selling patented discoveries to companies outside of New York than generating locally-based start-up companies.

As one example of that, a recent study by the Milken Institute, in a ranking of the world's 50 leading research universities, put NYU first on the list when it comes to licensing income but third to last in turning that research into start-up companies.

And while New York City universities and research institutes excel at the life sciences, they spend less than one percent of the research money on engineering, by far the lowest amount of any major American research city. And the city today has no large top-rate engineering program.

Now, why is this important? It's because engineers typically devote their intellectual lives to pursuing real-world applications where many basic science researchers are inspired purely by the quest for understanding. And it's that mix of engineering and basic research that often leads and stimulates invention, commercial applications and economic growth opportunities.

A couple of other just final statistics - one that I think is pretty telling is that less than half of the deals made by New York Angels, which is the city's leading group of angel investors, were to New York City companies, less than half to New York City companies.

We interviewed the founder and chairman of New York Angels, David Rose, recently, and he told us they just don't get the deal flow from technology entrepreneurs in New York City.

Finally, New York City's technology start-ups tend to flee the city. There was a 2002 analysis in Massachusetts that found that about 80 percent of MIT start-ups end up staying in the Massachusetts area, in Eastern Massachusetts, whereas when we recently interviewed Columbia University officials, they told us that since 1996, only 3 of its 72 start-up companies retained significant operations in the city.