A delegation from the U.S. State Department visited Oakland on Thursday for a roundtable discussion and walking tour to highlight the neighborhood's various innovation-based assets and the role these assets could play on an international stage.
The Partnership to Advance Responsible Technology (PART), a Pittsburgh-based and independent nonprofit think-tank, and InnovatePGH, an Oakland-based public-private nonprofit partnership organization, hosted Matt Murray, the State Department's most senior official for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and APEC stakeholder engagement officer Soo Koo for the discussion at the University of Pittsburgh's Big Idea Center, which was concluded by a tour around various innovation centers in Oakland. About a dozen people who work in research, workforce development and policy creation partook in the conversation that looked to pitch Pittsburgh as an international competitor for innovation creation and support.
It marked one of the first visits that Murray and Koo plan to embark on across the country in the coming weeks, which will have stops in Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco and Seattle, among others.
"I mean, the bottom line of why I'm here is I want to learn and I want to hear about what's going on in the innovation space in Pittsburgh," Murray said at the start of the conversation. "If we're talking about trade and investment, if we're talking about innovation, if we're talking about sustainable and inclusive growth: Where are the opportunities, where are the challenges that our local communities around the United States are seeing? And what can then I take, and what can Soo and the rest of our team take from interactions around the United States into these (APEC) meetings that we're having, these negotiations that we're having with other economies to really try to advance the best possible ideas."
The conversation went on for about 90 minutes, which started with a presentation from Pittsburgh Innovation District Director Mike Madden who highlighted some of the region's different technological strengths relating to advanced manufacturing, bioscience, automation and robotics. Others then took turns chiming in on their own experience within Pittsburgh's innovation community and how it has allowed them to grow their careers here.
Following the conversation, Murray said he felt that Pittsburgh will serve a leading role in shepherding its technological strengths globally and that he'll remain cognizant of the region's assets when he speaks with his respective counterparts across the 21-member international economic forum. Pittsburgh's past, he said, could also serve as an example of the type of revitalization that's possible in other cities that share a similar history to the Steel City.
"I do think it's important for us to understand as we're engaging on innovation across the region, that every single city is going to have its own strengths and weaknesses as part of their own background and what they can develop," Murray said. "I think that Pittsburgh has been really inspiring for a lot of economies in Asia that have had to go through some of the same transitions Pittsburgh has had to go through. For example, in China, in Southeast Asia, where a lot of the energy production has been fossil fuels, coal-fired power plants and with large steel industries that are inefficient. And in a lot of cases, they've looked at Pittsburgh as being a model of how do you grow out of that, how do you develop more of your services economy in the case of how can you fully leverage your university system to be part of that research and innovation ecosystem."
The biggest takeaway for Lance Lindauer, the executive director at PART who met privately with Murray and Koo following the tour, was his perceived understanding that the federal government has a genuine interest in learning about what Pittsburgh has to offer the world and how it can be a part of global conversations.
"It just shows that Pittsburgh is a potential leader in these spaces," Lindauer said. "I think today was just super exciting. The level of engagement that Mr. Murray had with the roundtable attendees and then bilaterally with just its meeting with PART was extraordinary. I'm super jazzed, I'm on cloud nine."
