Cluster Mapping Tulsa

First, a hat tip to Fred Emmer for his excellent pointer to the data available on the Cluster Mapping Project, for Tulsa and many other regions and municipalities.

It is well worth taking a few minutes to browse all the Tulsa information, as some of the data was (at least to me) unexpected. Here's a link:
http://www.clustermapping.us/…/…/tulsa_ok/cluster-portfolio…

With a little more work to compare data from Cluster Mapping to the Economic Complexity data, it should be fairly easy to see where Tulsa can build on existing strengths to gain greater success.

A few points I noted:
- Tulsa is low-cost for most of the areas that it's good at. There should be room to market this to gain share against higher-cost areas, and it should be possible to raise wages over time as well.
- Tulsa is near the top of oil and gas technologies, wage-wise. We're leaders in this area (no big surprise), but it is unlikely to be an area of massive growth in wages. We're going to ride the tide of oil and gas production, and should continue to surf the leading edge, but really our goal should be to get this good at other areas.
- Overall, we don't spend enough on R&D. We're a manufacturing shop, not a design shop, relatively speaking. Look at the rankings (bottom quintile) for federal R&D dollars, R&D spending in general, and venture capital spending. Yet we're second quintile for high-school grads, BS degrees, and patent filings. We're bottom quintile for doctorates, and for international trade.
- Things we're good at, and getting better at, tend to be production related - O&G production, heavy equipment production, trailer production. A bright spot is aerospace vehicles.
- Things we're not great at, and struggling with, despite still having good wages and reasonable employment, include financial services, information technology, and general business services. These are areas we could probably still leverage.

To me, the strategy is obvious: for business areas where we have success already on the production side, we should climb up the ladder to capture design expertise, and the higher-precision aspects of production (such as tooling). We should target those areas where there is wage arbitrage to leverage, where global economic complexity indicates there is value to be had, and where we have the ability to grow the skill base. Most importantly, we must strive to create an agile workforce that is well-adapted to the evolving technologies and shifting needs of the next decade.

We also need to get a better share of the Federal R&D dollars. This is probably an area that our state and local business dev'p people could help facilitate on both the small-scale startup side and the large-scale defense contractor side. We probably have some of the contacts from doing aerospace production; we need to start doing some of the related design projects.

The "product" side of things doesn't seem too hard. Maybe the trickier issues will be "people" -- building the resource base, and "processes" -- the sort of organization and structure to foster innovation.