R&D centers seek downtown talent
Major firms evoking dot.com era to attract young tech workers
By Julie Johnsson and Greg Hinz
April 30, 2005
After losing thousands of white-collar jobs during the last recession, downtown Chicago is seeing a resurgence in brainpower as big companies open splashy offices designed to attract professionals in their 20s and 30s who don't want to trek to the burbs.
Even as Sara Lee Corp. hightails it to Downers Grove, Motorola Inc., Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. and PepsiCo Inc. are opening research, design or product development centers, adding more than a thousand high-paying jobs to the city's heart. Other firms are bolstering downtown operations with new hires and out-of-state transfers.
They're responding to a new generation of suburbia-phobes — creative and strategic workers who choose to live in Chicago for its lakefront and lifestyle, and who'd turn down jobs that entail spending hours on the area's clogged highways.
"The best and the brightest are refusing to go to the suburbs," asserts Paul O'Connor, executive director of World Business Chicago, a quasi-public economic booster for the city of Chicago. "They're in the city and capital is forced to follow the talent."
Case in point: Cheol Woo Park, a 32-year-old senior industrial designer for Schaumburg-based Motorola. Mr. Park, a Korea native who recently got his master's degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, was heavily recruited and chose Motorola for its edgy design center at 233 N. Michigan Ave. Dubbed "MotoCity," the facility opened in late 2003 and helped spur the rash of similar innovation centers cropping up around town.
From left: Claire Goff, design lead; Cheol Woo Park, senior industrial designer, and Jennifer Urban, design lead, at Motorola's Michigan Avenue design center. Photo: Katrina Wittkamp
Mr. Park says strolling to work from his Gold Coast home sparks design ideas. "I just walk down Michigan Avenue, where I can check the market trends, the colors."
SPARKING CREATIVITY
Boasting panoramic views of the city, brightly colored walls and an open-air atmosphere heavy on metal and wood, Motorola's 26th-floor office is a hit with CEO Edward Zander, a Streeterville resident, who frequently holds client meetings there.
It's the antithesis of Motorola's no-nonsense engineering culture. But the design center is really designed to recruit and retain people and spark their creativity, says James Caruso, a senior director for operations with the company's mobile device business. MotoCity designers worked on the popular Razr, although industrial engineers in Libertyville dreamed up its space-age materials and thin width.
"This is all about having a place to think," he says. "You have to balance business pressures with a strong creative group. You have to remind, guide, not pound in the head."
The trend is welcome news for a city that has seen many prominent companies sell or fold in recent years, including Andersen, which anchored Chicago's professional services sector.
Chicago appears to have regained some of the white-collar jobs it lost during the last economic downturn, according to Economy.com.
There were 137,000 professional and technical services jobs in Cook County as of June 2004, the most recent data available. That's a gain of 23,000 jobs from mid-2001, the sector's nadir, notes Sophia Koropeckyj, an economist with the Pennsylvania-based economics consulting firm.
She cautions that Chicago's economy is not at full strength: "Office vacancies in Chicago are still climbing, and they've come down elsewhere." Indeed, 15.7% of Chicago's downtown office space is vacant, about double the city's 7.9% vacancy rate at the beginning of 2001.
DOT.COM ACCOUTREMENTS
But the glut of prime office space in downtown Chicago, often available at a discount, makes it easy for companies to justify creating new facilities for the corps of young brainiacs they seek to recruit.
Wrigley, for example, took over space at Goose Island left by defunct Divine Inc. Wrigley now has a 200,000-square-foot innovation center and 40,000-square-foot pilot plant at the site.
The Chicago-based chewing-gum maker this week starts moving 200 to 300 researchers, engineers and other innovative types to the new digs, which will be fully operational by the end of summer, a company spokesman says. They'll cook up new gums, mints and candies in its labs and figure out how to manufacture them in the pilot plant.
While Wrigley has researchers scattered around the world, it selected the Goose Island site for its "proximity to headquarters," the spokesman says.
Texas-based PepsiCo similarly is moving its Gatorade Sports Science Institute from Barrington to Chicago, close to its regional headquarters. Founded in 1988, the institute employs only about 20 workers but has a high profile for its research on hydration and other sports-related medical concerns. Sources say it's likely to land at the old Traffic Court building at 325 N. LaSalle St., although a Pepsi spokesman says the company is still deciding on a location.
Separately, Pepsi has moved about 700 beverage-development people and techies from Texas and Florida to the West Loop over the past 18 months, boosting its Chicago workforce nearly 60%. The beverage conglomerate, which acquired Quaker Oats Co. in 2001, got $5 million in tax credits and a grant as an incentive from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Even staid companies are dressing up their new centers with funky designs, industrial materials, toys like foosball tables and other accoutrements from the dot.com era.
Synovate Americas, formerly known as Market Facts, has found it easier to recruit market researchers from across the city after it moved its 520 workers to the Loop from Arlington Heights last year.
Barbara Goff, senior vice-president for human resources, credits the company's "very contemporary work environment. Where we're located is a big draw."
©2005 by Crain Communications Inc.> |
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