Football fans may find this whole collaboration thing is getting out of hand. But Northeast Ohio's efforts to foster a biomedical industry came out of competing hospitals and competing universities working together. The head of the McCune Foundation of Pittsburgh says their efforts did as well. Henry Beukema says they began collaborating to attract university talent and then worked on commercializing the research.
Henry Beukema: And so this inter-regional cooperation is the natural step in each our region's maturity. The next logical step is to reach a little farther out.
Beukema says he hasn't discussed it with other philanthropies back home but he thinks it'll go over well. The deal would team up Cleveland's Bio-Enterprise and the Pittsburgh Life Science Greenhouse. Both organizations work to incubate bio-medical startups. The goal is to attract investors - by using more bait to lure them to this, now larger region. The Greenhouse CEO, John Manzetti doesn't think the cities will be fighting for the same dollars.
John Manzetti: The VC folks that we talked to in San Francisco had sweet spots and we were in some of those sweet spots and Bio-Enterprise were in others of their sweet spots. We're not going to be competitive for the money. It's going to be cooperative and collaborative and complimentary.
And likewise Bio-Enterprise CEO Baiju Shah says startup companies are unlikely to jump from one city to another because they're already high risk ventures.
Baiju Shah: They need to be where they can be successful and that means the business support and the clinical support to help them grow and reach their milestones.
So is the idea simply to make this region look bigger and attract venture capital?
Baiju Shah: That's part of the idea. Part of the idea is getting more national attention from investors, from industry from the NIH and others that are able to finance the growth of these types of ventures. And by showing them an opportunity to get engaged in a region - two regions that are next to each other that represent double the amount that either region alone could do. I think we'll get more attention.
State money is being invested into the individual efforts and that's not going to cross the border. But supporters like Manzetti wonder whether the collaboration between Pittsburgh and Cleveland could spread.
John Manzetti: I would hope the universities would collaborate, following the lead I would hope the Clinic, University Hospitals, Allegheny General and UPMC would work find a way to help solve the world's problems together off some initiative.
Team efforts may be necessary. Henry Beukema pointed out that some big federal bio-med projects on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine will cross borders.
Henry Beukema: There are going to be in the next year or two some major centers established by the army around the country and it's going to be a very competitive process. And the organizations that are putting together the proposals to get one of these centers are actually multi-organizational entries.
All that talk at the bio-med conference had some people wondering about synergies between Pittsburgh and Cleveland's other new economy ventures - information technology, fuel cells, and so on.