What a City! (by Gary Rosensteel)
I morphed the comedian Yakov Smirnoff’s catchphrase (What a Country!) to help express my feelings after attending the Cornerstones Symposium 2008 – Entrepreneurial Pittsburgh: Building Bridges to a City’s Future held this week at the Duquesne Club and CMU.
The Symposium dealt with a variety of topics, but was primarily focused on the wealth (yes, wealth!) of entrepreneurial activities occurring in our region across a diverse array of industries. Some I previously knew of, but much of the specifics were new – such as the almost science fiction like things going on in regenerative medicine at Pitt and UPMC.
Helping put everything in a global context were interesting presentations from the government of Zaragoza, Spain, an internationally renowned robotics professor from Osaka, Japan, and a CMU professor who works at the CMU campus in Doha, Qatar.
Each of these cities has ambitious development underway to create opportunities to foster entrepreneurial development. While we can envy some of the things they are doing, they all envied the strong position Pittsburgh has in entrepreneurial development. The importance and strength of our university, foundation, non-profit, and government sectors in collaborating to advance our entrepreneurial community is simply unmatched in any other city.
By the end of the Symposium you could feel the excitement in the air. All the attendees were energized to not only continue their endeavors, but to take them to a new level. It was obvious that Pittsburgh is approaching a tipping point, being extremely close to achieving the mythical ‘critical mass’ in entrepreneurial activities to propel our region into a explosion of development and growth.
If we could get this word out through the general population, we could quickly start our ascendancy. It’s obvious that leaders across all fields from everywhere else in the world already have accepted our Pittsburgh 250 slogan, "Imagine what you can do here."
