At Whitewater’s December 7th Common Council meeting, City Manager Kevin Brunner, near the beginning of the meeting, gave an update on Whitewater’s publicly-financed technology park. I have embedded the video of the session below. Brunner begins talking about the park at 2:14 into the video, and continues until around 4:40.

Below the video, I have transcribed a part of his remarks, on which I will comment.

Transcription:

We’re really excited about the building, I think once you see it, it’s a phenomenal building. We, the university just today committed to building labs, lab space at the building. It’s gonna take about two of the module spaces on the first floor, and we’re very close to announcing our first private firm that’s going to move into the building, and I’m hoping that they’re gonna take two or three suites on the second floor.

So if everything goes right, by the time we open the building, it will be close to 50% occupied, which is really phenomenal for a building of this nature. Typically, these incubators take three to four years to really get going, and to start creating opportunities, job opportunities, and business growth. So, I think that’s it.

This is simply defining waste as phenomenal success.

Most parks of this nature don’t succeed at all. See, Marc Levine, The False Promise of the Entrepreneurial University. Levine writes:

Notwithstanding tendentious accounts of “success stories” such as Silicon Valley or Boston’s Route 128, as if they represent the general historical pattern, these data as well as case studies such as Johns Hopkins University and Yale University reveal that even world-class research universities are neither necessary nor sufficient in promoting local economic development. University research parks are particularly oversold as engines of local economic growth.

While proponents of academic commercialism routinely overstate its economic benefits for cities and regions, they rarely mention the significant costs. These include potential undermining of the system of basic research and open science that has been the cornerstone of scientific discovery in the US, and, ironically, undercutting innovation.

Contrary to claims by many university leaders that research commercialization will generate revenues for their institutions, for most universities tech transfer is a money losing proposition. Tech transfer is a classic example of jackpot or casino economics, with very few big winners, and over half of US universities lose money in academic commercialization. Research funding and commercialization revenues are heavily skewed to the same “top 15” universities that have dominated these statistics for decades, and, as one expert has argued, outside of this top group most universities are getting nothing out of tech transfer “except a lot of economic development rhetoric.”

Candidly, the gentlemen of Whitewater who’ve pushed use of public money for this venture haven’t shown evidence that they’ve planned well enough even to be a failed project of the kind Levine mentions.

Beyond that (yes, beyond that!), the anchor tenant’s a large public entity relocating from one community to ours, the lion’s share of the initial occupied space will be for public employees working in public building, and the many thousands! of private jobs promised as a consequence of this project are simply nowhere to be found.

Brunner points to a glass half full and says: Look how far we’ve come! All these millions, to house already-employed public workers, demonstrates no success at all. (Whatever their worth, the employees from CESA 2 are not business-builders, but instead public educators providing existing services.)

Put one way, this is a glass half full, yet half full not of wine, but instead of water.

There’s no success in this, and the only phenomenal accomplishment is the ability to tout this project’s supposed success with a straight face. more >>

The English language sees countless new words and expressions coined each year, as human needs and experience shape and alter our common vocabulary. Far away, in distant England, in a musty study, there’s a learned British lexicographer who probably tracks so many of these new expressions as he can.

The old Oxford don likely spends all day, and well into each night, thinking about the evolution of the English language. America, a large and dynamic place, must contribute many of his new finds.

When a person first spoke or wrote the expression, ‘WTF,’ I’m sure that clever British academic soon learned of it, and recorded its provenance. I don’t know where the expression was first used, but I bet that he does.

Here, in small-town Whitewater, we may soon find ourselves part of his latest discovery, that of the next great exclamation of shock, surprise, puzzlement, and irritation. Every expression begins somewhere, and the next great exclamation may well begin right here. We may even be able to identify the first cause of that new exclamation. I think this will prove that first cause, from the November 5th Weekly Report of Whitewater’s city manager:

Beginning this week, I will begin featuring the quotes that will be inscribed on the walls of the new Whitewater Innovation Center. These quotes are intended to capture the entrepreneurial spirit and ambition that all are hoping to facilitate in this new business incubator facility.

“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.”

-Woody Allen

Well, there’s the kindling of the next, great exclamation of utter exasperation. Some might read this quotation and its intended use and mutter ‘WTF,’ but others are likely to find that current expression wholly inadequate to the choice of this inscription.

At least one of those others probably coined something new, already, on first reading the Weekly Report.

Woody Allen as explicator of the entrepreneurial spirit — that’s possible only if one defines the entrepreneurial spirit such that the definition could apply to anyone, at anytime.

That’s the problem with the whole Innovation Center: a wasteful project, where a few proud officials simply offer one empty or false declaration after another, relying on absurd contentions in the place of real accomplishments.

Where officials substitute words for accomplishments, it was only a matter of time before one of them thought the insights of Woody Allen worthily described an entrepreneurial culture.

Allen’s a noted film-maker, but he’s no one with special insight into entrepreneurial life. Actually, he’s someone sadly, morbidly obsessed with death and the supposed meaninglessness of existence. Allen’s recent interview with the National Post on May 15, 2010 about life is more a cry for assistance than insight:

I have a very grim, pessimistic view of it. I always have since I was a little boy. It hasn’t gotten worse with age or anything. I do feel that it’s a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and the only way you can be happy is if you . . . deceive yourself.

On the contrary, there’s profound meaning to life, Allen’s false and bleak view notwithstanding. It’s almost a parody of reasoning — disguised as youthful insight — that the septuagenarian Allen holds to a feeling that is — by his own account — nothing but the unchanged, morbid perspective of a boy.

By the way — If ‘not failing every now and again’ means one’s ‘not doing anything very innovative,’ then does failing time and again mean that one’s supremely innovative? I don’t think so, but if such should be true, then our municipal administration would have quite the Innovation Center after all.

I can think of no more fitting inscription for the Innovation Center than one that’s as odd as the project itself.

There’s a bonus in this, too.

Somewhere in England, our language’s finest scholar will have a new word to mark, an exclamation for a new decade, courtesy of our small city.