From: Peter Jackson, Vice President of JLL
Baltimore Tech Community,
Things came full circle for me earlier this week when I caught up with Heather Fields, the newly named CMO at EcoMap Technologies, for lunch at their Miller’s Court offices in Remington.
10+ years ago, Heather and I worked together on the 1st floor of this same building, a former tin can factory-turned-award-winning home for teachers, nonprofits and social innovators. We recounted stories of filling out 10-visit punch cards from Charmington’s (the in-building coffee shop) on a weekly basis, and squeezing oversized couches, gifted to us from someone’s basement, in through the windows to help fill out our scrappy startup’s offices.
That building, and the community of like-minded companies and individuals that coalesced there, demonstrated the power of place and how it can be a critical part of any company’s growth. As a company focused on providing fundraising solutions to nonprofits, the building supported us as we scaled up, moving up the hall to accommodate a growing team (and back down after acquisition), we built partnerships over cups of Charmington’s coffee and pastries, and pitched our product over pizzas in the conference rooms. The tenants next door were not just neighbors, but became clients, advisors, and friends.
Baltimore is a city full of incredible spaces and places that help nurture our growing Equitech ecosystem. Many of these physical structures, just like Miller’s Court, once housed the industrial-era manufacturing facilities that traditionally fueled this city’s economic engines but have since been re-imagined for the companies now defining tomorrow’s growing tech economy. The spirit of Baltimore’s ingenuity and work ethic lives on within their walls.
The iron columns that support the US Capitol dome and later parts for the Manhattan Project, were all forged at Clipper Mill, a place Blackbird Laboratories now calls home. In East Baltimore, films are being animated for Netflix by OVFX Studio in a former lithographic printing facility, and Personal Genome Diagnostics, now part of LabCorp, is developing cancer diagnostic solutions in a building where beer was once bottled. Galen Robotics and Sonavi Labs are among the companies that are now advancing surgical and medical processes at 1100 Wicomico, a building built for the Baltimore Bargain House wholesale business. Medical device manufacturing is thriving at the Launchport in a former city-owned bus depot at Baltimore Peninsula. Similarly, Penn Station, our historic passenger rail hub, is being reimagined to include space for innovation and collaboration connected to the entire Northeast corridor from Washington DC to Boston. And it’s not just space for office and manufacturing spaces, the former Crown Cork & Seal factory is now where we regularly convene for Equitech Tuesday, to bring people from all parts of Baltimore’s tech community together, at Guilford Hall Brewery. The list of places that fostered yesterday’s innovations and continue to inspire our tech workforce today, goes on.
Beyond the ethos of industry that persists in these historic buildings, local tech leaders and organizations continue to leverage physical spaces equipped with a variety of tools and resources to support founders and make building companies more accessible. At The Cube Cowork, Dr. Tammira Lucas has built-in childcare support to workspaces to helps working-parents pursue entrepreneurship, and at the new Connect Labs at the UM BioPark, ready-now lab space and equipment is available to Baltimore-based life sciences companies ready to move on from accelerators and early-stage tech transfer programs. Downtown’s Spark provides companies with everything to scale from individual workstations up into their own more “grown-up” corporate solutions at Spark Flex.
Baltimore is a city of neighborhoods, and while its tech scene is distributed loosely throughout the city, clusters have emerged centered around anchor institutions including our hospitals and universities, older more-established companies and their veteran people, accelerators, sources of capital, or focus-areas of work. Software and ad-tech companies are concentrated in the southeast of the city, having grown out of earlier physical iterations of the ETC, or created by the alums of Ad.com and Millennial Media. Large parts of our funder communities have taken root in Harbor East, while life science companies cluster around the brain power and research coming out of UMD and Johns Hopkins. In midtown Baltimore in neighborhoods like Station North, we see those championing social enterprise and innovation like Dent Education at or the many members of the Impact Hub. These clusters produce opportunities for collaboration (both planned and spontaneous) and sharing resources, but also create numerous jobs, not only to attract new talent to neighborhoods but also create opportunities for the talent that’s already there. This coming together builds the critical mass needed to make real impact, both within industries and in the communities where they’re located.
The EDA’s Tech Hub program itself is built on this power of place through focused investments in these communities where these assets and resources are clustered. As the EDA’s Eric Smith reflected on his visit to Baltimore this past Wednesday, “Baltimore’s a strong Tech Hub because it has a real foundation of innovation, assets, and resources.”
The past few years may have upended our traditional way of thinking of where work gets done, whether it’s in an office, a lab or at home, but the power of place is as important as ever. As the city’s tech community rallies around a new Equitech vision for economic growth and opportunity, the spaces where we come together to convene, collaborate, learn and invest can be a force multiplier for our efforts, leading Baltimore forward.
This week, I’m excited to invite the #Equitech community to join us for a special Equitech Tuesday at Brown’s Wharf in Fells Point, hosted by Continental Realty Corporation and JLL and catered by Barcocina. Like many other historic buildings referenced above, Brown’s Wharf was built to facilitate the trade of coffee through Baltimore, but now has more recently served as the home of Baltimore-based companies like Protenus, Contrast Security, and JHPiego.
See you there,
Peter Jackson, Vice President of JLL