On 30 October 2012, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program and UNL – Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, UTEN Portugal will hold the strategic session: “Entrepreneurship and Regional Growth: Connect with Pittsburgh”.

This session will focus on Pittsburgh’s story of reinvention that has spread quickly across the world. Technologies being developed in Pittsburgh by world class universities and commercialized by entrepreneurs, have indeed helped to transform southwester Pennsylvania’s economy, but more importantly they are solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

The keynote speakers for the event will be Suzi Pegg and DeWitt Peart. The Pittsburgh Regional representatives are here in Portugal to share the story of how growth in innovation and entrepreneurship go hand in hand as a key economic driver, not just for the Pittsburgh Region but the United States. The strategy adopted by Pittsburgh acted as an international business attraction magnet for the region, as global companies with innovative technologies are increasingly seeking global growth by soft landing in the Pittsburgh region.

Targeted at policy makers, public authorities, university management, technology transfer officers (TTO’s), start-up companies and researchers as well as the general public, the session aims to share new visions about how to use Entrepreneurship as a way to achieve economic and regional growth.

Topics up for discussion

Entrepreneurship for the sake of entrepreneurship is no longer the answer to regional growth
Small businesses do account for the majority of new jobs but without a culture and economic system to help those businesses grow and survive, failures will increase an economic development will suffer. With the low cost of technology, a start-up can occur more frequently but regional growth comes from growing start-ups and the employment that results. A hobby or life style business might be entrepreneurship but generally doesn’t yield economic growth.

Regional strengths and potential customers must serve as the backbone for entrepreneurship
The Pittsburgh’s regional strengths of course include the research institutions including the $1b per year flowing through the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. It is in those institutions that the beginnings of Pittsburgh’s regional strengths can be found. The science behind that research leads to innovations and inventions which can then be commercialized not only through licensing but also entrepreneurship. The commercialization process takes a coordinated system of knowledge and resources to result in economic development. Knowledgeable lawyers, who understand the needs and importantly the cost structure of young businesses are essential. Our region has evolved over time and now an entrepreneur has many choices of counsel. The same applies to accounting, marketing, product design and technical resources. The same exists for finding mentors and connectors. Those connectors usually have relationships with our established companies in our region. These established business, and our diverse economy means we have every type of market/type, represent the backbone of market validation and those all-important first customers.

This is the future of innovation and entrepreneurship in our Region.
The future of regional growth that is tied to entrepreneurship comes from our efforts to connect together the regional participants and further integrate the larger more established businesses all the way into the research activities of universities. Not to determine what research the universities actually conduct but to ensure that the research includes market applications in order to identify business value earlier in the innovation process. For example, our region is the home to many materials based companies who are leaders in their field while the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University have world leading research in materials science. If the researchers are interacting with the appropriate business leaders both the awareness of the research is known and suggested market problems could be considered. As a region we are working toward that goal in many ways, from our economic development partner efforts to facilitating forums to have that occur. From speed dating and poster presentations at the University of Pittsburgh to businesses committing to “buy local” not just in produce.

http://utenportugal.org/events/regional-growth-2012/