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Published on 08/10/1998 All articles from this issue

Joint Venture Silicon Valley: Stressing collaboration, quantifying success

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By Carol Tiegs

Special to the Town Crier

From its beginnings, Joint Venture Silicon Valley has demonstrated that competitors can collaborate, and that collaboration pays.

The San Jose-based nonprofit, headed by president and chief executive officer Rebecca Morgan of Los Altos Hills, has become a model for regional cooperation known for its unique approaches to problem-solving.

Morgan said the group came together in 1993 in response to the area recession caused by a downturn in the defense industry. The resulting loss of jobs was one impetus, she said, and firms were moving out of state because of dissatisfaction with municipal regulatory processes. Joint Venture took as its mission "to enhance the economic vitality and quality of life in Silicon Valley."

Group investors wanted to show the value of collaboration from the beginning, said Morgan, who came on board five years ago. "Everything we do is either a collaboration of business and government or business and education," she said.

The group's investors - it is not a membership organization - include the Silicon Valley's leading employers from Adobe Systems to Wells Fargo Bank, cities, counties and special districts, including Los Altos and Los Altos Hills. Districts and municipalities contribute 16 percent of the collaborative's funding. The remainder, except for about $5 million in foundation grants, comes from corporate investors.

Joint Venture's board of directors is co-chaired by Los Altan Lewis Platt, head of Hewlett-Packard Company. The board includes Los Altos and Los Altos Hills residents Robert Cavigli, of Erlich-Rominger Architects; Charles Dostal Jr. of Woodside Asset Management, Inc.; and Chester Wang of Pacific Rim Financial Corporation.

Dostal said he is "really impressed" that Joint Venture "looks at the whole region, they are the only one that does that."

"The Bay Area suffers from a 'Balkanization' of planning," Dostal said. "The challenge is how to get people to meet and to agree."

Morgan said Joint Venture looked for an organizational model in 1993. Finding none that crossed sectors and geographic boundaries, it invented its own. Now, she said, the nonprofit Irvine Foundation in Southern California is funding 11 other regional groups and a tri-valley collaborative is starting in Sacramento.

Morgan, Dostal and Wang agree on the Bay Area's biggest challenges: education, housing and transportation.

Last fall, Joint Venture put together a collaborative process - Silicon Valley 2010 - to involve residents in creating a vision for Silicon Valley's future. The process involved focus groups, community forums, questionnaires, random polling, Mercury News letters to the editor and one-on-one interviews. Results of the visioning process will be released in early October, Morgan said.

The next challenge, Morgan said, will be "getting a civic network to come together around Silicon Valley 2010."

"Our work in K-12 education has had impact around systemic change and assessing student progress," Morgan said.

Challenge 2000 works only with elementary, middle and high schools that are working together to give students an integrated continuum of world-class education, she said. The initiative's success will be based solely on how much impact it has on student achievement, which is assessed continually, Morgan said.

"Our theme is 'growing a work force locally,'" Morgan said. "With scarce housing, we can't import more people. We have people here. We need to get them trained."

Dostal is also impressed that Joint Venture doesn't "just issue platitudes, they set very specific goals and benchmark their progress."

Morgan said that, "If you want to have investors, you have to show results. Our most tangible success is in the area of regulatory processes."

Working with six cities and the Santa Clara County Assessor's Office, a Joint Venture team was able to streamline the process for appealing home valuation reassessments. Over 90 percent of appeals are now settled in less than one year, Morgan said. Before, appeals languished over two years.

Next, a team worked with 29 jurisdictions, including Los Altos, on building code unification. "We went from 400 to 11 code amendments," Morgan said.

These achievements paved the way for SmartPermit, a uniform building application form now in place in five cities. The goal is 10 cities using SmartPermit by 2000.

"We're all about catalyzing change," Morgan said.

"I've learned the collaboration process takes a lot of patience," she said, "but the collaboration model is right for moving into the Information Age."

"We have to work together for the whole community. My wish is for more dialogue between different groups, such as environmental groups, government agencies and developers," Wang said. "We are all in the same boat. I would tell people, 'Hey, this is your community. Get involved.' "

For more information, call (408) 271-7213 or visit the Web site at www.jointventure.org.