Mack Paul: Co-author of Miracle Road on designing places where innovation happens

Design Better

Mack Paul, co-author of 'Miracle Road,' discusses the rise of Research Triangle Park (RTP) in North Carolina—a pioneering innovation hub tha

Key takeaways

• RTP's success stemmed not from flashy tech or defense funding but from sustained, unglamorous investments in infrastructure, education, and social cohesion.
• The decision to desegregate public institutions made North Carolina a more attractive location than Virginia for major companies like IBM in 1965.

Main topics

• History of Research Triangle Park
• Innovation ecosystems in post-industrial regions

Notable quotes

Good design, relationships, collaborations.

Conclusion

RTP's legacy shows that innovation isn't just about technology or talent—it's about

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Design is critically important. I mean, you need to have the right environment to be conducive to whatever you're ultimately trying to achieve. So in this case, innovation, support for new ideas, companies, success. And so they need to be in an environment where people want to live and work and interact with one another and to build a place to bring people together. All those are needed. Good design, relationships, collaborations. Speaker 3 (0:29) In the mid-1950s, North Carolina was one of the poorest states in the country. Its economy ran on tobacco, furniture, and textiles, all three of which were in decline, and its universities were turning out talent that promptly left for someplace with better jobs. But today, the stretch of pine woods between Raleigh-Durham and Chapel Hill is the largest research park in the United States. The barcode came from here, and so did AZT, ultrasound, and AstroTurf. Our guest today is Mac Paul, who spent years working out how this happened. He's the co-author of Miracle Road, a history of Research Triangle Park, also known as RTP. The book was written with his father, who was a journalist, and built on about 160 interviews with the scientists, planners, and politicians who were there for it all. It's out October 6th. Speaker 2 (1:20) Hundreds of research parks have been attempted and most failed. RTP started later than Silicon Valley or Route 128 with no defense money, no entrepreneurial culture, and universities that were openly uneasy about mixing academia with industry. But it worked anyway. Mack's answer to why is not what you might expect. The park itself was almost an afterthought. What made it work was a set of long, unglamorous commitments. A governor who went industry hunting, a community college system that promised to train any company's workers for free, and a decision about desegregation that made North Carolina a better bet than Virginia, which is a big part of why IBM came in 1965. We talk about what made RTP take off, the challenges now as it tries to become something denser and less car-dependent, and what it takes to build a place people actually want to be. We also talk about what it's like to write a book with your father. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Wooler. Speaker 3 (2:15) And Speaker 2 (2:15) I'm Aaron Walter. At Design Speaker 3 (2:17) Better, our mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and learn from the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a paid subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. You'll get access to our Slack community where there's amazing people helping one another, our library of e-books, and every podcast and post that we publish. Visit designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe to learn more. We'll return to the conversation after Speaker 1 (2:57) this quick break. Speaker 3 (3:05) And now, back to the show. Speaker 3 (3:12) Mac Paul, welcome to Design Better. Thank you. Great to be here. The occasion for our conversation is you have a book coming out October 6th, and the subject is the Research Triangle, Research Triangle Park, which is in North Carolina. And that's of particular interest to us because it has been for a number of years an innovation center. And there's definitely a formula to what's happening there, lessons to be learned for designers, developers, people in the technology world. But maybe the right place for us to start is just for those who don't know a lot about the Research Triangle, could you tell us what's there and its historic significance? Speaker 1 (3:59) Its historic significance is that it arose at a time following World War II, 1950s, when North Carolina was really struggling. By a lot of measures, it was one of the poorest states, if not the second poorest state in the United States at that time, in terms of GDP, number of people working on farms, and it's only industries going were tobacco, furniture, and textiles. Textiles, for instance, were mostly coming from the Northeast U.S. for lower wages in the South. And those were all in decline as well. So North Carolina did happen to have a strong higher education network, and it saw a lot of its top talent leaving the state to go for opportunity in other parts of the country. So RTP was a deliberate effort to establish a new industry to try to retain its talent and to offer ultimately higher wages, more jobs. in the face of all of these headwinds that were confronting the state at that time. It's unique in the sense that it was something built out of nothing, in the sense that there was nothing physically in the state. And I can go into a little background about how it's distinct. You know, we're often compared to Silicon Valley and Boston 128 and other tech centers, but it really did get a much later start from the standpoint of... The number of federal contracts, military defense that poured into Northern California during World War II and Boston area and the institutions in those areas like Stanford and MIT really embraced that new ecosystem of federal research dollars. And being in the South, even the academics at the area universities, primarily University of North Carolina, Duke University, NC State University, were pretty... skittish about mixing industry and academia. They didn't really have that mindset that they could see themselves doing applied research and ultimately commercializing ideas. Speaker 2 (6:11) What are some of the better known innovations and inventions that came out of the area when we were doing our research? I was surprised to hear some of them. Maybe you can give us a few highlights. Speaker 1 (6:20) First was the universal product code, the barcode, which came out of IBM. IBM was the catalyst for RTP in 1965 when it decided to come here rather than go to Manassas, Virginia. Research AZT, ultrasound, astroturf, biotech types of innovations, particularly endemic to RTP. Speaker 3 (6:41) I had no idea that the UPC code came from there. That's very cool. Truly is universal. Who are some of the key players in the creation of... scenario, this space for innovation. You mentioned post-World War II, there was a lot of reticence to doing this sort of thing, but it was also a time of tremendous growth and investment. So for listeners simultaneously, the Eisenhower administration, DARPA, the beginning of the internet, there are these significant investments that the administration was making into highways and to the internet. Who were those key players and what did they do? Speaker 1 (7:24) Again, you know, North Carolina had some unique elements to its culture at that time that encouraged some of these leaders to emerge and seize this project. So there's a really interesting book that had a lot of notoriety called Southern Politics by a Harvard professor, V.O. Keyes. The point of the book was that the southern states, and he wrote that in the late 1940s. and how different all of the southern states were. So a lot of the rest of the country looked at the South as a monolith, you know, as a sort of very backward part of the country, never really got over the Civil War. North Carolina, you know, had this bit of irony because, as I said, it was really at the bottom of the economic ladder in the South, like the poorest part of the country. And yet it had, he called it the progressive plutocracy. So some of the industries that did emerge here, like textiles, banking, furniture, tobacco. Those folks knew each other. There was a lot of belief in the state. And so North Carolina was one of the first states to have like a public art museum, a public symphony, the public university system in UNC. So they saw the benefit of investing in the state for the good out of self-interest, but it was enlightened self-interest. By helping the state, they would help their own business. And they were very aware, he called it, of their mediocrity relative to other states, but they had this militancy about their mediocrity. In other words, they knew that they had to pull themselves up on their own and they didn't have this great legacy like in South Carolina, Virginia, of the South. North Carolina really didn't have that. And so they really had to build it itself, which turned out to be a big advantage for the state. So one of these progressive plutocrats was a young guy named Romeo Guest, whose family had a construction company. And they sent him off to Phillips Exeter, which was probably. Pretty unusual, you know, for someone coming from the South, but also coming from this background. Ended up going to MIT, got his engineering degree, and he actually got to see some of the innovation occurring on the Charles River outside of MIT in the 1920s. So he unfortunately graduated right during the Great Depression, but he could see the future of technology coming out of industry, out of university settings. So he saw like them creating the Polaroid camera. Raytheon came out of MIT at that time. When he saw his customers declining, he wasn't able to build these industrial buildings because they were really hurting at that time in the 1950s. He got the idea of getting a lot of the state leaders to buy into this idea of identifying the place in North Carolina. At first, it wasn't like RTP. It was just an area near UNC Duke and NC State and going out and trying to recruit industrial laboratories to North Carolina R &D. He got a good friend in the Commerce Secretary. And then ultimately, by happenstance, the governor died in 1954 and a new governor took his place, a lieutenant governor named Luther Hodges. And Hodges happened to be the right guy to seize this concept and put the leadership behind it because he had been born into like a mill village, one of nine kids. worked in the mills as a kid, but went to UNC, ended up moving his way up in textiles to head up in New York, all of the Marshall Field textile factories in the world. And he went over and served in the Marshall Plan, came back. So he had this idea of industry hunting. He would be a governor who would go out and recruit industry here. And he had no idea of what this new industry might look like. They had no idea