The New Republic

and Devashree Saha One reason the U.S. clean economy is struggling to get big fast, as we note in our upcoming report “Sizing the Clean Economy,” is the absence of sufficient, affordable capital with the right tolerance for risk to help scale up new technologies. One response to such problems is the creation of “green banks”—emerging technology deployment finance entities aimed at lowering the cost of capital for innovative projects. And so Connecticut has acted. READ MORE >>

with Devashree Saha One reason the U.S. clean economy is struggling to get big fast, as we note in our upcoming report “Sizing the Clean Economy,” is the absence of sufficient, affordable capital with the right tolerance for risk to help scale up new technologies. One response to such problems is the creation of “green banks”—emerging technology deployment finance entities aimed at lowering the cost of capital for innovative projects. And so Connecticut has acted. READ MORE >>

States don’t often get the state-metro relationship right on economic development, as Kenan Fikri and I observed recently in a paper on the potential of state industry cluster strategies. READ MORE >>

Matt Stepp of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has a good post up now over at CommentVisions on speeding up the largely under-scaled, poorly structured world energy innovation system--a hobby-horse of ours here at the Metro Program. READ MORE >>

Our big event Monday debuting the concept of metropolitan business plans--a new variety of action-oriented strategy-making in which regions assert “bottom-up” what they need from federal, state, or private-sector “investors”—contained a number of great moments. READ MORE >>

Whether or not the federal government shuts down this weekend, I have an announcement: U.S. metropolitan areas are open for business and striving innovatively to create jobs and transform the economy. READ MORE >>

with Devashree Saha In 2008 gas prices topped $4 per gallon and then slumped during the world recession. Now, here we are again (so soon!), with Middle East oil states in turmoil, gas prices rising, and President Obama giving a major speech on energy security at Georgetown University yesterday. READ MORE >>

Yesterday, we noted the extreme concentration in just a few metropolitan areas of the leading-edge U.S. cleantech firms honored in the Global Cleantech 100 list of the most promising start-ups. We noted that a whopping 39 of the 58 U.S. firms included in the list are hyper-clustered in just four metropolitan areas—San Francisco, San Jose, Boston, and Los Angeles, in that order. It goes to show the significant power of proximity in innovation. READ MORE >>

We’ve been working on a database of “clean economy” companies and jobs, meaning those involved in producing goods and services that improve the environment. (Look for that in a few months). As always, though, we are preoccupied with the spatial distribution of these firms and their workforce: where and how they cluster. READ MORE >>

The Obama administration’s FY 2012 budget is all about arguing--perhaps somewhat rhetorically given political realities--the role of investments in growth despite the imperative for austerity. Such tradeoffs are everywhere in the budget. And yet, in no domain are those twin stances more sharply visible than in the Energy Department (DOE) outline, which proposes a classic “cut-to-invest” strategy to ma READ MORE >>