Columbus collaboratory amanda vu how to#

“Part of the idea,” Ashbrook said, 'is that if we can increase the number of data-analytics experts in the Columbus area, then companies are going to want to locate here because data analytics is where it’s at now. “At its core,” Ashbrook said, “this venture is about economic development.” The instigation for the new company came from Columbus 2020, a regional economic development organization that sees this venture as an opportunity to increase the region’s competitiveness and lead to economic growth. Ashbrook explained to me the logic behind the partners’ creation of a new corporate entity.

Intrigued, I arranged an interview a couple days later with Brad Ashbrook, who is the interim CEO of the Collaboratory while a national search is underway for a permanent CEO. “Columbus is big enough to have scale and small enough to do something with it.”

Columbus collaboratory amanda vu how to#

Rather than each of the seven companies continuing to work on its own to figure out how to develop advancements in areas such as customer service or cybersecurity, they've cooperated to create a new, separate company that will help the founding firms-and, perhaps, ultimately, other central-Ohio businesses-be more competitive through the development of new techniques and new tools. The project is aimed at making the area a leading center in data analytics and cybersecurity, a hub for harnessing, analyzing, and safeguarding the huge amounts of digital information that companies generate every year. When pressed for examples that might illustrate his points about collaboration and size, Fischer spoke with excitement of something called the “ Columbus Collaboratory”-a new advanced-technology company created earlier this year through the collaboration of seven big firms in Columbus and central Ohio. There’s more to come next week in this vein-and a good example, too, in the following paragraphs.Īnother interesting observation Fischer made about Columbus is that the city occupies “a sweet spot” with respect to size: “Columbus is big enough to have scale and small enough to do something with it.” He meant: big enough to have many heavyweight, national (even world-class) corporations headquartered there, but small enough that the business leaders all know each other and are able to work well together and make things happen. We've reported already on some of what this has meant, in practice, in Columbus-for example, in explaining the excellence of the Columbus Metropolitan Library (see here), or efforts to revive the down-and-out neighborhood of Franklinton (see here and here), or programs to give at-risk kids a high-quality education (see here).

It's different in detail from the 'collaborative' or 'cooperative' interactions among government, businesses, and private organizations that we've described in some other cities, from Maine to Mississippi, but it is similar in spirit. But in the case of Columbus, there appears to be something very real happening behind the buzzwords. As with companies that say 'Your call is very important to us!' while indicating the opposite by making you wait on endless hold, 'collaboration' statements are often simply an empty tic or reflex. It is natural to be jaded about this kind of emphasis, because it's so easy to say and often so meaningless. It’s the word that Jim Fallows, Deb Fallows, and I heard most frequently when we visited Columbus for several days in early September for the American Futures reporting project. “Collaboration” is the order of the day in Ohio’s capital city, Columbus.