When Yash Gupta was dean of the business school at the University of Southern California, "I would get five phone calls a day from different businesses," he says.
Entrepreneurs were looking for advice or resources. Start-ups sought interns. Investors wanted ideas. Business leaders wanted to teach.
Then he moved to Baltimore. "Not as much" evidence of passionate innovation or business-academic symbiosis here, he says. "We could do better."
Gupta, the dean of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, is probably being diplomatic.
Maryland does have tech companies such as Arcion Therapeutics, Groove Commerce and so forth. But given its enviable capital and higher education, the state is an entrepreneurial underachiever.
It lacks the spark of Boston, Silicon Valley or Austin, Texas. Blame a decade of federal spending on homeland security, defense and economic stimulus that, while keeping the Maryland economy above water, acted like a drug against innovation and creativity.
"Everybody is talking about 'I'm going to D.C. to get money,' " Gupta said in an interview. "You know, it's amazing. I never heard that in California - 'I'm going to Washington to get money,' or 'I'm going to Sacramento to get money.' "
Sometimes it takes an outsider to diagnose your problems and prescribe the next step. Think of Gupta as the McKinsey & Co. consultant for the Maryland economy.
Signing on last year as the Carey School's first permanent dean, he plans to quadruple the size of the faculty, create a unique, multidisciplinary curriculum and make Hopkins the kind of entrepreneurial turbocharger for Baltimore that Stanford is for the Bay Area or MIT is for Boston.
Sitting in his downtown office, he had a few thoughts about how Baltimore can better compete against its high-tech rivals and reverse what looks like new erosion in its potential for innovation.
New Enterprise Associates, the storied venture-capital firm that was founded in the city in the 1970s and helped finance Apple, Juniper Networks and HealthSouth, has most of its Maryland partners in Chevy Chase these days. Grotech Ventures has moved its investment pros to Virginia, leaving only an administrative office in Hunt Valley.
Why this should happen when Johns Hopkins is obtaining hundreds of patents a year, not just in medicine but in applied physics and other areas, is something of a puzzle. Working for Hopkins, former Maryland economic development secretary Aris Melissaratos is trying to make the connection between scientists and business people. But he's only one guy.
