Cooking Up Big Plans for Philadelphia and China

6/8/2010 - Long time China hand and TCBN Charter Member Terry Cooke is founder of GC3 Strategy and on a special project with The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC.  He gives a first look at Philadelphia's September conference Health & Green: China in Philadelphia's Future, organized by GC3, Main Line Chinese Culture Center, and The China Business Network.   The conference was inspired by China Business Boot Camp Philadelphia, a day long conference featuring some of Philadelphia's most experienced China professionals that took place in February 2010.  Terry was among the panelists that participated.  He is the founder of GC3 Strategy Inc., helping U.S. technology and investment firms to create and sustain commercial partnerships in Greater China and India.  From June - August 2010 Terry is on special assignment with the Woodrow International Wilson Center for Scholars as a Public Policy Scholar.

For more information on Terry Cooke, visit his TCBN profile or his webpage.

For more information and to register for Health & Green: China in Philadelphia's future, click here.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

THE CHINA BUSINESS NETWORK: Hello this is Sarah Chera with The China Business Network. Terry Cooke is founder of GC3 Strategy Inc., helping U.S. technology and investment firms to create and sustain commercial partnerships in Greater China and India.

Terry, thank you for taking the time to speak with us.

TERRY COOKE: It’s my pleasure, Sarah.

TCBN: So Terry, what is your China business story? How did you get into it and what are you doing now?

TC: Well the way I got into is two parts. One part is a language piece and the other is professional business involvement piece. The language part of the story goes back to the time I was a college student in the mid 1970s and then a graduate student in the later 1970s. I had an interest in international cultures and I had done a couple of European languages. One day when I was registering for my courses, a course I had planned on was scrubbed. I had to improvise a new course at the last minute, and I decided I would take Chinese language for one semester. To make a long story short it became a lifelong involvement.

From that beginning as a student, in the late 1980s I joined the US and Foreign Commercial Service. There was a need even at that time, although China’s economy was substantially smaller that it is today, there was a need for com… who knew China and had the language background. So I was immediately sent, for my first posting, to Shanghai. I was there for two years (1988-1990). From that professional beginning, whether it was in the foreign service or in my own business or with the World Economic Forum, I’ve always maintained an involvement with China business.

TCBN: Tell us about the September conference you're working on: Health & Green: China in Philadelphia's Future. Where did the idea come from and what are the goals of the event?

TC: The idea came in large part from something that The China Business Network, and you, and your colleague Janet, and others sparked on February 18th of this year, which was coming to Philadelphia with the China Business Boot Camp event. That Boot Camp brought together a broad spectrum of experts in the Greater Philadelphia area who had not formally worked together. The idea came to me that we could build on that collaboration that had started in February to align local resources to help leverage opportunities with China for the region as a whole. In other words, to put together the individual skill sets of various people and various organizations that took part in February and help the region build more of an infrastructure to engage with and attract Chinese business.

So the goals of the event are to bring China focus to a very strong resource base that the greater Atlantic region has in the biomedical and the biotechnology field. That’s a very mature and established area of industry strengths for the Greater Philadelphia area. It builds off the concentration of pharmaceutical firms in southern New Jersey, and the very deep and broad pace of university research -- to name a few: University of Pennsylvania, Temple, Drexel. In addition to that there’s a strong legacy of Fortune 500 company expertise – companies like DuPont and Glaxo. In fact the Greater Philadelphia region does attract a higher degree of funding than any other biotech cluster in the country. The one challenge that the area has is it’s divided among several states: Pennsylvania, NJ, DE. People don’t think of it as immediately as they do the San Diego cluster in California or the Boston cluster in Massachusetts.

One goal is to focus on the existing very strong sectoral opportunity biomedical biotechnology. A paired goal of the conference is to tie together and also bring focus to a more emergent area of opportunity where the region also enjoys some great strength. That is the emerging field of clean energy and clean tech.

TCBN: Well we hope that it goes well and look forward to more details for that. Today we’ve been speaking with Terry Cooke, founder of GC3 Strategy based in Philadelphia and Charter Member in The China Business Network.

TC: Before you sign off, if I may, I just wanted to mention to the TCBN members that I’m currently doing a clean energy project with the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC that focuses on the areas of commercial cooperation with China in the clean energy field, looking at both the technology and investment dimensions of US-China clean energy cooperation. Thanks for letting me sneak in that last word.

TCBN: Absolutely. Fiind out more about about that project on Terry’s profile on TheChinaBusinessNetwork.com.

Thanks very much Terry.

TC: It’s my pleasure, Sarah.