ABSTRACT
Innovation and creativity can empower people and create new jobs. The feverish pace of start-up pitch events taking place across the country and the construction of maker spaces, incubators, angel funders and innovation districts may strike many as a fad. Port Covington and Westport had been part of the heart of a manufacturing-based economy when Baltimore was a place of innovation. In the context of manufacturing and innovation, one aspect of Under Armour's development is particularly interesting: local production. The other innovation involves the reversal of a standard staple of the industrial economy: the economy of scale. Maker spaces are no substitute for an industrial base of a local or national economy, but they are seeds that provide a service that leverages people skills through training. Recycling industrial waste-land may take care of the geographical inelasticity problem but still leaves behind the people that remain in disadvantaged communities, unemployed and stuck in concentrations of poverty.
