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Peter Hirshberg

Presentation at Near Future Summit

By Blog, Localism, OZ
Peter Hirshberg spoke of Opportunity Zones and localism as “America’s Next Great Frontier” at the Near Future Summit 2019 #NFS19 during their “Local Maximum” session. The capsule focused on how Big Data meets public/private partnerships to bring new solutions to communities in record speed. America loves a frontier, it’s our national myth. Think Kennedy’s New Frontier, or Reagan’s city on a hill. That’s when our national character is best. We’re...
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Connecting the dots: from Maker City to Opportunity Zones

By Blog, OZ
Connecting the dots: from Maker City® to Opportunity Zones It would be a pretty strange nation that concentrated all its economic goodness in one tiny place and left everywhere else future starved. Yet that’s precisely where we are as a nation. One of the most hopeful economic stories in America is the investment in innovation in cities large and small in the USA. Some of this is being driven by the...
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Video Interview with Mayor Eric Garcetti and Bruce Katz

By Blog, OZ
Opportunity Zone Interviews: Videos with Mayor Eric Garcetti and Bruce Katz On March 18, 2019 we had occasion to attend the Opportunity Zone Investor Summit sponsored by Accelerator for America and Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth; hosted by the Stanford Global Project Center. You can read about what we learned here. Peter Hirshberg, Cofounder & Chairman of Maker City®, had the occasion to interview Mayor Eric Garcetti (Los Angeles) on...
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Fresno: The Underdog City of Innovation

By Blog, Localism

When you think of Fresno, the first word that comes to mind probably isn’t “innovation.” Jake Soberal and Irma Olguin Jr. are part of a wave of Central Valley entrepreneurs hoping to change that. In 2013, they founded Bitwise Industries, and over the next 5 years went on to create a transformational 250,000 sq. ft. space: part school, part incubator, part auditorium, and 100% tech ecosystem. Speaking with Peter Hirshberg…

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Localism: Closer Than We Think!

By Blog, Localism

In the past four years, we’ve been inspired by how localism – the movement in cities and towns to drive civic engagement and inclusive economic development – has ignored the national climate of dysfunction and pessimism, and made real, tangible progress across America. At first, the national discourse in turn ignored localism; it was little more than a glimmer of hope on the horizon, at time when hope was hardly…

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7 Ways to Hack Your City

By Blog, International

Cities present a paradox to innovators, entrepreneurs, and young people with a passion for improving urban life and public services. On the one hand, cities can seem like perfect candidates for innovation, with important problems that are far from solved, and the kind of rich data that problem-solvers love. On the other hand, cities are bureaucracies, and even the most visionary civil servants operate in an environment that doesn’t exactly…

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New Mechanism Design for a Changing World – Swytch.io

By Blockchain, Blog, Sustainability

For the last 12 months or so, we’ve been working with Swytch.io, a company that uses the blockchain to reduce carbon emissions in unique ways. Recently, Peter Hirshberg had the opportunity to share this work in a broader context, discussing how the blockchain can be used to create new mechanisms to pull through behavior change on a global scale. In this talk Maker City Chairman Peter Hirshberg looks at how…

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Connecting Youngstown to Silicon Valley for Growth

By Blog

How do you go about the tough, on the ground work of rebuilding jobs and opportunity in a hard-hit part of the country? Where will the new investment and fertile business partnerships come from? Those were the questions raised last week when a group of 14 entrepreneurs and investors from Silicon Valley flew to Youngstown, Ohio to understand more about the economy in the Mahoning Valley. This is an area…

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What the Foxconn display plant choice tells us about the future of manufacturing in the United States and China.

By Blog

Hint: its not about repatriating old jobs at all. As President Trump is learning, it’s as so simple as badgering Apple to repatriate manufacturing of the iPhone to the United States. Foxconn, the iPhone’s contract manufacturer suggests that there’s a bigger prize: making the U.S. central to the supply chain for advanced screen display technology, with a large plant here in the U.S. which could add 10-50K jobs. The iPhone is…

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White House, meet Burning Man: A Coda to the Obama Era

By Blog

An extraordinary coda to the Obama era is the story of the White House and Burning Man. As Dale Dougherty and I were developing the Maker City project, we worked with the White House to engage over 100 U.S. cities in making the pledges necessary to turn their cities and towns in Maker Cities. As I was leaving the White House one night two years ago I thought, “100 maker…

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