Harold Miller is probably the most respected author and blogger on Pittsburgh’s growth and prominence. He’s an adjunct professor at CMU’s Heinz School of Public Policy and a semi-regular contributor to the Post-Gazette. His article in the P-G yesterday (posted in expanded form to his blog) is worth reviewing in this space since it’s titled, “Tech Businesses Are a Small But Important Piece of the Region’s Economy”.
Dr. Miller begins by defining what he means by the tech industry. For him it includes four industries, “Two represent the core of the life sciences sector: pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing, and medical equipment and supplies manufacturing; two represent the core of the information technology (IT) area: computer and electronic product manufacturing, and computer systems design.” Of course, on this blog, my focus is the latter two, but the article is still worth considering. I highly recommend reading the article from either of the two links above, but I do want to call out a few things that stood out to me.
- We’ve got a lot of work to do. The article provides several sobering statistics.
- Of the 36 largest metro areas we 28th in computer systems design and 17th in computer and electronic product manufacturing. In the former category we trailed Columbus and Cleveland. In the latter we trailed several comparably sized cities including Milwaukee.
- We lost jobs in computer and electronic manufacturing during the recession.
- There was some good news though
- The systems design sector grew by almost 10% during the recession.
- Though only 2% of Pittsburgh’s private sector is employed in these 4 fields, the jobs in these sectors is much higher then the Pittsburgh average. In fact it’s close double (44k to 77k) in systems design.
- The thing that stood out to me is the relatively small size of firms in these industries (the average company employs less than 20 people). I believe that this lack of big companies, in combination with the shortage of funding in the city are our two largest problems.
- Dr. Miller’s bottom line (which this blog shares) is that we have no choice but to learn to excel in these categories. More and more of the economy will be in these sectors and if we can’t grow there, we will not be sustainable as a city.
