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'Innovation, Technology, Entrepreneurship'
New technology czar Nemerson hopes to make these watchwords the state's own
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Business New Haven
12/08/2003
By: BNH
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In September Matthew Nemerson of New Haven became the third president of the nine-year-old Connecticut Technology Council (CTC), which represents technology companies statewide. Previously he was a senior vice president at the Branford-based Netkey (originally known as Lexitech), and before that was president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce.
In an article elsewhere, you said you wanted to get back into 'public policy.' Isn't CTC a private industry group, and how does it intersect with state government and state policy?
In a capitalist society, the very nature of the business-government interface is what public policy is all about. It's the relationship between individual businesses, trade associations, government - so much of what government deals with is the regulation of business and the creation of a business environment. Particularly with regard to technology businesses, there's a tremendous role for public policy.
Who does the CTC speak for, and who does it speak to?
The CTC represents those firms that are interested in innovation, entrepreneurship and using [technology] tools to grow their businesses. Our mission is to create an environment, a culture, in the state where those firms can grow. Our council is also going to be speaking for the reinvention and rediscovery of what Connecticut can be in the next ten years and must be in the next 20 or 25 years. We have to be planning in those cycles because we have an economy that's high-cost, based on a highly educated workforce that's getting older and we're not bringing in enough young people or new companies to [stay even with encroaching competition].
What has CTC accomplished in its nine-year history that encouraged you to take this job?
A lot of people take jobs based on what the office can do for them. I've reached the point in my career where I look at what I can do for the office. So I wasn't that concerned about the past; I was looking at the platform of a statewide organization that represents everyone from UTC and GE and Pfizer down to 100 or so small software and advanced manufacturing companies. We have about 400 members, from small start-ups to the largest companies in the state.
Your office is in East Hartford. Should the group have a greater presence in New Haven?
Yes and no. You can certainly argue that New Haven is the global city in Connecticut. The raw material of global competitiveness is intellectual property, and Yale is a factory that produces it. But you can't discount the role that Hartford and the political environment have on creating a state culture. Being in Hartford forces you to see the totality of the state.
How is Connecticut doing in
terms of technology workforce development?
Looking at all the factors that will keep the state at the top of its game - quality of life, richness of offerings - and being able to again attract the quality of workforce that we attracted so readily in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. We have not done that as well in the last 20 years. Specifically we have fallen way behind the pack of other states in terms of attracting the best and brightest young people. We all know that. Those young people are primarily technically trained.
What would you like the CTC to do more?
Creating a culture and understanding of innovation and entrepreneurship. We'll do fewer seminars that get an 'expert' in an area together with 30 or 40 people who might be in town that day. But we need to create a community of the technology community across the state. I'd like to get 1,000 CEOs together in a two-year process to define a series of entrepreneurial enterprises for the state - and also to create among themselves a community where know one another, feel comfortable sharing information. If you look at the [San Francisco] Bay area and Route 128 in Massachusetts, these areas have wonderful, rich interconnections of people from across the IT/new media spectrum, biotech - meeting, sharing ideas at all levels of their companies. The interchange of ideas and information that happens informally through networking, associations, clubs - is very rich. Connecticut, because of the non-alliance between the Hartford-to-Boston and New Haven-to-New York corridors, doesn't function well as a community. I think by creating a pyramid of connections between and among 1,00 companies over two years [that] we can actually build a community.
Is this a statewide job, or can nurturing this new mindset also function at a local level?
I want each of the towns in the state to understand the new technologies and new businesses that are being created in those towns. A state that thinks its best days are in the past will become nostalgic and try to preserve what it has. But this is time when if you're not willing to invest in creative destruction, you are really in trouble. So my model is this: I have a new hybrid [gas- and electric-powered] car, a 2004 [Toyota] Prius. We're going to sell sponsorships like it was a NASCAR car and drive from town to town every week. We're start out each morning at the diner and invite the mayor and some of the high-tech companies and talk about what's going on. Then we'll go on a site visit and look at some of the things that going on in the local industrial park. Then we'll have lunch and bring in the state reps and the media from that town and talk technology and what it means to Winsted or Colchester or Darien. Because the building blocks of Connecticut politically and operationally are the towns. In two years I hope to have gone to 100 or more towns and to have infused in first selectmen, mayors, state senators, what's going on in their back yards. When people understand how the future is being invented in the back yard of Redding, they'll be more willing to think about the kinds of major investments we need in terms of seed capital, in publicly funded research institutes - the kinds of things that other states and other countries are doing, but that we don't have the stomach for because we're too concerned with saving the old factory or preserving the jobs that our parents had.
What's wrong with a productive, highly skilled 50-year-old?
We don't want to turn our backs on them, but the real deficit in this state is all the people between [ages] 22 and 35 who say, 'There's nothing here for me.' When you lose that generation, soon there will be no [workers] left.
Regarding the intersection of state government and technology companies: Some companies will take help from wherever they can get it. Other technology CEOs are more like cowboys, and the only thing they want from state government is to get out of their way.
The cowboy analogy is a good one. Cowboys have historically herded their cattle across government-controlled land, regulated by government laws that prevented people from putting up fences, putting them on railroads that were paid for by the government to move them from one place to another, into places like Chicago where the railroads at the hub of the cattle networks were paid for by companies that in many cases went bankrupt - and then were bailed out by the government. My point is that if you take the typically [tech start-up] person with her nose to the grindstone trying to raise money to invent something, and ask them, 'What do you think about the government?" they're not going to know what to say. What we hope to be doing in all these [town-by-town] meetings is not just putting government in front of them to make a speech, but filtering and saying, 'Here are the things that government is really doing, and here's what it means to you.'
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