Lee Rubenstein sees an opportunity to connect Arlington’s learning and creative assets with entrepreneurs, emerging technologies, and the region’s innovation economy.
By Michael Armanious and Jared Padgett
This vision emerged during a recent ACMi conversation with Lee Rubenstein, chair of the Tech Diplomacy Academy at Purdue University’s Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy and its chief training and learning officer.
Rubenstein has long worked at the intersection of technology, education, and innovation. Before joining Tech Diplomacy Academy, he worked at edX, the open online learning platform linked to Harvard and MIT that eventually served over 65 million learners worldwide.
His message for Arlington was simple: learning, creativity, and economic development are one.
Learning Can Become an Economic Asset
Rubenstein defines a learning & creative town as one that opens access to knowledge about emerging technologies and opportunities, then links that learning and creativity to employers and entrepreneurship.
His Tech Diplomacy Academy offers a practical model with 26 short courses on critical technologies. Each lasts about an hour and blends technical content with business and policy perspectives.
If available in Arlington, a high-school student could explore AI before choosing a college major, a young adult could test cybersecurity as a career path, a mid-career resident could build new skills, and a lifelong learner could follow curiosity, all without waiting for a four-year degree or changes to school curricula.
Start With Arlington School System
Rubenstein believes Arlington Public Schools’ students should have opportunities to discover emerging fields before making expensive educational and career commitments. He suggests creating opportunities for students to interact with professionals through lectures, Q&As, and work-study groups.
Arlington already has pieces of this ecosystem in place. Students interact with organizations throughout town through volunteering, internships, and community programs. ACMi’s experience with college interns has shown how hands-on work helps young people build the skills employers value. A Learning & Creative Town could connect these existing experiences more intentionally with emerging industries.
Give Startups a Place to Begin
Perhaps the most intriguing part of Rubenstein’s vision concerns Arlington’s vacant and underused commercial spaces.
He points to communities where affordable shared spaces let small startups get started without the enormous costs of traditional technology facilities. Entrepreneurs can work alongside one another while investors, bankers, and other supporting businesses become part of the same ecosystem.
For Arlington, this means exploring whether some vacant spaces become low-cost startup, maker, or innovation spaces.
The objective would not necessarily be to build another large technology campus. Instead, it could be a place where two or three entrepreneurs can start a company, collaborate, meet mentors, and develop an idea.
As Rubenstein put it, startups are the future companies a community may eventually hire and train people for.
Why Creativity Matters
Another important ingredient is culture.
Rubenstein says entrepreneurs do not necessarily want to spend their entire lives in sterile technology environments. They want places where they can work, have coffee, meet interesting people, and unwind by encountering artists and musicians after work.
That is where Arlington’s potential as a Creative Town becomes especially interesting.
Arlington’s arts, music, museums, library, public media, cultural organizations, schools, restaurants, and community institutions can become part of an environment that attracts people as much as companies.
In this model, creativity is part of the community’s economic infrastructure.
Arlington’s Location Is an Advantage
Rubenstein also points to Arlington’s location near major innovation centers and universities.
His vision is not for Arlington to imitate Cambridge or another established technology hub. Instead, Arlington could offer a community where entrepreneurs access the region’s innovation network while living in a place with culture and a more human-scale environment.
That could become the foundation for an Arlington startup ecosystem.
Learning supplies the talent. Creativity supplies the environment. Affordable workspaces supply the starting point. Connections to universities, employers, and investors supply the network that connects everything
Together, they can create a virtuous circle.
From Learning Town to Innovation Town
Rubenstein offered Arlington something more valuable than a prediction: a practical challenge.
He believes entrepreneurs are already looking for communities like this. The question is whether Arlington will make itself visible.
His advice was simple: “Tell them, here I am.”
That could be one of the most important messages behind Arlington’s emerging Learning & Creative Town initiative.
The goal is to build a community where people of all ages keep learning, creativity is part of everyday life, young people discover their potential, and entrepreneurs can turn ideas into companies.
UNESCO recognition, if Arlington eventually pursues it, could be the icing on the cake. The bigger opportunity is what Arlington builds along the way.
A town that learns together can also innovate together, create together, and perhaps build its next generation of businesses together.