Be creative -- or die

I went to Rutgers, got a Ph.D. at Columbia looking at housing and urban dynamics. Then once I became a professor at Ohio State and later at Carnegie Mellon, I really studied the behavior and dynamics of high-tech industries. I did a big project on venture capital and the high-tech industry, and after that I did a project on globalization and Japanese foreign direct investment, both of which resulted in books. I was at Carnegie Mellon and had been part of the attempt to make Pittsburgh a high-tech city. I had heard about Lycos when it was formed, this company that really seemed to define what we then called the "Internet age."

And when I heard Lycos was moving all its operations to Boston, that was the trigger event. In Pittsburgh you had the technology, you had the capacity, you spun off this company from the university -- you had everything it would take to make Pittsburgh a high-tech center -- yet that company was being moved whole-hog to Boston, and the question was why. The reason, as I came to understand it more and more over time, is that human capital, the creative people, were in the Boston metro area, that there weren't enough of them in Pittsburgh. Then I began to ask people in Pittsburgh and elsewhere how they chose places to live and work.

What were some of the reasons?

The initial hunches all came out of the first set of focus groups conducted in Pittsburgh in early 1999. We wanted to look at people making location decisions, so we looked at graduating college seniors, second-year MBA students, and we just started asking, "How do you choose a place to live and work?" and the answers just came out: Diversity, we want a place that's diverse, where there's different kinds of people on the street. Of course a job is important, but it isn't just "a" job: We need lots of jobs because we know now that "a" job isn't going to last long. We want a city to be creative, we want it to be exciting, we want it to have all kinds of amenities, we want it to have outdoor sports, extreme sports, rollerblading, cycling, art scene, music scene. Then we asked, "Do you do all that stuff?" and the answer was "No, we just want to know it's there." Then we did more interviews, more focus groups, and then finally tried to test some of these things statistically.

That's when we invented the gay index. Gary Gates had already invented the gay index when I came back to Carnegie Mellon after being at Harvard. He was looking at the location patterns of gays, I was looking at the location patterns of knowledge workers or talented people, and we quickly found that they were making the same kind of location choices. Initially we theorized that it was for the same reasons, to be near lifestyle amenities.

Then we invented the bohemian index, and when we started looking at the predictive power of those two things over the course of many papers and articles and statistical analyses, we began to say, "Oh, it's this combination of creativity and diversity." But that took a good two and a half years to work out. And it's not done. This book is very much exploratory. There is a lot of empirical scholarship and a lot of things that have empirical proof and are to some degree confirmed. But I am writing this book as a set of hypotheses with initial data and explanation; it's opening up an area, and there's going to have to be a lot more systematic research to prove it.

The thing is, though, the "creative capital" theory, the bohemian index, the supercreative core, and our innovation and gay indices, seem to outpredict conventional measures. And that's what's both puzzling and interesting, that these measures seem to outpredict the classic human capital measure, which is the percent of the population with a B.A. and above.

Explain the indices.

My theory uses the three T's: technology, talent and tolerance. You need to have a strong technology base, such as a research university and investment in technology. That alone is a necessary but not in itself sufficient condition. Second, you need to be a place that attracts and retains talent, that has the lifestyle options, the excitement, the energy, the stimulation, that talented, creative people need. And thirdly, you need to be tolerant of diversity so you can attract all sorts of people -- foreign-born people, immigrants, woman as well as men, gays as well as straights, people who look different and have different appearances.

My indicators try to catch elements of those three things. We have two indicators of technology -- the innovation index, which is a measure of patents in an area of population, and the high-tech index, which we just adapted from the Milken Institute, which is in California and invented this great index of high-tech company concentrations. We use our creative-class index -- percent creative class and percent supercreatives -- as our talent measure. On tolerance we have the melting-pot index, which is immigrants, and the gay index, which takes people living in households where partners in the household were of the same sex.

Gays are the canaries of the creative economy. Where gays are will be a community -- a city or a region -- that has the underlying preconditions that attract the creative class of people. Gays tend to gravitate toward the types of places that will be attractive to many members of the creative class. That said, a high score on the gay index, for example, New Orleans or Miami, does not translate into being a creative center, unless you couple that with technology assets. It's not that gays predict high-tech growth, it's that gays signal an environment that would attract creative-class people from a variety of backgrounds.

Next Page: "Creative-class people are fickle, finicky"

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