Houston Innovation District

McNair Project

Houston Innovation District
Project Information
Project Title	Houston Innovation District
Owner	Ben Baldazo, Dylan Dickens, Joe Reilly, Taylor Jacobe
Start Date	9/20/2017
Deadline	10/27/2017
Primary Billing
Notes
Has project status	Active
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Link to slides with starting project breakdown: https://docs.google.com/a/rice.edu/presentation/d/1xZFHbmokrq4PE1GqztUEsEkq_swTrR2DHTlx6KwdNwE/edit?usp=sharing

Mayor of Houston has asked us to make recommendations about how to create an innovation district in Houston

• Go through patent data, find people with patents
• Find people who have done R&D work
• Carve up the world of innovative people in terms of data
  • Find their needs
  • Turn it into some sort of office space requirement
  • Try to find where this office space would be, what it would look like

Resources to pull from

Houston Entrepreneurship has info about:

• Start ups
• Accelerators/Incubators
• Entrepreneurship Ecosystems
• Small Business
• VC

We would ideally have data about:

• Patents in Houston - Houston Startup Ecosystem > HoustonPatents.txt
• R&D in Houston
• Factors relating to best Innovation Districts:

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/312173269_fig15_Figure-19-Key-success-factors-for-innovation-district-development

Ideal Factors for an Innovation district

Here, I will try to break down measurable ways of understanding how an area fulfills the requirements of an innovation district

Data needed is in bold

Optimize Land Use and Placemaking

• Flexibility, responding to market preferences
  • Available office space/undeveloped land in Houston
  • Availability of capital
    • equity
    • VC
    • Investors of all kinds
• Infrastructure and land as a platform for experimentation
  • Flexibility of space and infrastructure
  • Zoning?
• Placemaking to achieve critical mass of real estate and commercial activity and authentic sense of place
  • Location, location, location

Strategy as a City of Innovation

• and leverage the regional innovation context
  • What we currently have going for us as a city- who is here and how can we leverage them?
    • R&D Data
    • Patent Data
• Prioritize attention on city wide eco-system and development and networking
  • Current Government benefits to improve innovation ecosystem
  • What would we ideally have to attract business?
• Grow and support existing innovation firms and activity
• Manage externalities that arise
  • Houston's risk preparedness
  • Competition?
• Adapt through cycles
  • Predictability of Houston's economy data?

Build the City's Innovation Brand

• Leverage city DNA and expertise in promoting innovation
  • Where is Houston at the forefront?
• Develop innovation brand as a broad identity and shared narrative
  • How can we market the city as an innovator? How do we gain that image?
• Invite others to feel and experience the innovation culture
  • How accessibile is Houston?
    • Public transportation
    • Travel costs: flying, lodging

A thought: Houston's key capabilities seem to be in Oil/Gas/Energy and Medicine. Can we start by portraying Houston as a leading innovator in those areas? Innovation district can start with our core capabilities

Location data

• Information on largest office spaces available, and on US median income for 2000 and (estimated) for 2015 are located in E:\McNair\Projects\Innovation Districts\Houston Startup Ecosystem\Location data.
• Office spaces for sale in the the zip codes listed below were compiled in "Office property listings..." in E:\McNair\Projects\Innovation Districts\Houston Startup Ecosystem\Location data. Included is acreage/square footage and address. Listings under "office space" that looked like houses were removed.
  • Listings pulled from zip codes:
    • 77002
    • 77003
    • 77004
    • 77005
    • 77006
    • 77007
    • 77008
    • 77009
    • 77019
    • 77098
    • 77030
    • 77027
    • 77025
    • 77046
    • 77024
    • 77056
    • 77057
    • 77401

Pulling Yelp Data

It seems entirely possible, though against the terms of service of yelp, to pull data from Houston centered searches for things like cafe's or bars. Peter J has done some work like this before with his "Chipotle" and "Starbucks" finder webapps and is working on creating a map / pulling the data from google or yelp to have the locations of all of these points of commerce within the 610 loop.

• Note: Using yelp data (and regressing things like reviews, new businesses and locations) havard business was able to project (with 30% correlation) the economic growth on a granular scale: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/18-022_0bb9b749-f275-41ff-899c-afd9109568ee.pdf
  • We may be able to produce something similar but less developed using density of restaurants in houston to find entrepreneurial / growth hotspots

Educational Attainment

• For the city of Houston,
  • High school graduate or higher, percent of persons age 25 years+, 2011-2015: 76.7%
  • Bachelor's degree or higher, percent of persons age 25 years+, 2011-2015: 30.4%

• For Harris County,
  • High school graduate or higher, percent of persons age 25 years+, 2011-2015: 79.6%
  • Bachelor's degree or higher, percent of persons age 25 years+, 2011-2015: 29.5%

• Compared to the rest of the US:
  • High school graduate or higher, percent of persons age 25 years+, 2011-2015 83.3% 86.7%
  • Bachelor's degree or higher, percent of persons age 25 years+, 2011-2015 20.4% 29.8%

source: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/harriscountytexas,houstoncitytexas,US/PST045216