EA Opens Development Studio in Chicago
Veteran Development Team Moves to the Windy City to Focus on Next Generation Videogames - Attracts New Talent From the Midwest

Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS) the world’s leading developer and publisher of interactive entertainment this month inaugurated its new studio in downtown Chicago at 215 West Ohio Street. The development team is best known for the hit EA SPORTS™ Fight Night franchise and is currently working on three state-of-the-art games for the PlayStation®3 system and the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system including the hip-hop lifestyle game, DEF JAM: ICON™, as well as a licensed title and a new intellectual property in the fighting videogame genre.

EA Chicago is one of the fastest growing studios at EA with 150 employees currently on staff. EA is planning to increase the number of developers by 100 next year.

The City of Chicago offers EA a unique cross-section of talent drawn from across the Midwest. The history, culture and lifestyle draw creative, design and computer science talent from around the country. By placing the studio in the heart of the city, EA is able to draw from this rich talent pool while offering its employees a sophisticated office space with easy access to public transportation and a host of restaurants and entertainment venues in the near vicinity.

"We are pushing next generation development and technology to the limits and looking for the best talent to help us to create innovative games," said Kudo Tsunoda, Vice President and General Manager, EA Chicago. "We are in a great location downtown in a unique building that gives us access and visibility to the best resources and creative minds of this thriving city."

"One thing that sets Chicago apart from many other cities is our diverse workforce, which can meet the needs of just about any business," said Mayor Richard M. Daley. "EA Chicago will create new jobs and add to Chicago’s reputation as a global center of innovation."

"We have talented teams working on our games but we’re always looking for new perspective and ideas to consistently push us to be fresh, innovative, and creative," added Tsunoda.

EA’s Worldwide Studio Headquarters is in Vancouver, British Columbia. EA’s other North American development studios are located in Montreal, Canada; Redwood City, CA; Los Angeles, CA; and Orlando, Florida.

CME/CBOT Surprise?

Leading with a negative business headline is too often a compulsion in this town.

I can’t recall how many times over the past seven years visitors/outsiders have asked me to explain the disconnect between what they’ve read or heard about our fair city and what they themselves have observed on the ground, first-hand.

So when coverage of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade began with…"Eateries fear flight of the ‘yellow jacket’…" I must admit I didn’t have high hopes.

I was worried that Chicago wouldn’t view the merger as yet another positive indication that both the CME and CBOT are successfully taking on the challenge of reorganizing and revitalizing their business in the face of a changing global derivatives market—something local critiques rightfully have feared they wouldn’t have the capacity to pull-off.

But, I was wrong.

• City’s futures exchanges strengthen their future
• Deal unites futures foes: Merc’s purchase of Board of Trade preserves city’s global muscle
• Delivering on a dream: Merger secures Chicago’s place as a worldwide trading center
• Merger solidifies city as trading power base
• Exchanging Vows
• CME-CBOT to become international powerhouse
• Merger indicates previous snags resolved or gone
• Traders embrace deal even if it hastens floor closure
• Leaders’ friendship seals deal
• CME-CBOT deal will drive more volume, more products

Some other facts worth considering…

Top 2005 Global Derivatives Centers (by volume of trades)
o Chicago — 2.24 billion
o Frankfurt/Zurich — 1.25 billion
o New York — 0.89 billion
o London — 0.54 billion
o Sao Palo — 0.47 billion
o Paris — 0.24 billion
o Philadelphia — 0.16 billion
o San Francisco — 0.14 billion
o Mumbai — 0.13 billion
o Amsterdam — 0.12 billion

Top 2005 Global Derivatives Exchanges (by volume of trades)
o Chicago Mercantile Exchange — 883.1 million (33% increase from 2004)
o Eurex — 784.9 million (15% increase)
o Chicago Board of Trade — 561.2 million (15% increase)
o Euronext.Liffe — 343.8 million (11% increase)
o Bolsa de Mercadorias & Futuros — 187.9 million (8% increase)

--Glen Marker
Director of Research, World Business Chicago

Survival of the Innovative

October was de facto innovation month in Chicago, Illinois, with the fifth annual Chicago Innovation Awards this past Monday night and the Chicagoland Innovation Summit a week earlier.

What's behind the chart-busting buzz word "innovation," and is it just a flavor-of-the-month fad?

With cheap brain power now joining cheap labor as globally available commodities, the economic leadership and worldwide agenda-setting of the advanced economies (read "America") will depend upon their ability to generate continuous waves of value-added innovation for which billions of new consumers will pay a premium.

Innovation—like workforce skill development—is a game for all the marbles. But is it a game we rust-belters can play?

"Three of the top five innovation consulting firms are based in Chicago," innovation guru Lawrence J. Keeley pointedly told the 450 attendees of the Innovation Summit staged at IIT by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the Council on Competitiveness, and WBC.

"Innovate or Die" read the op-ed headline in last weekend's Wall Street Journal, with a call-out reading "The Merc picked innovation." And indeed long before demutualization, incorporation, IPO and merger with the CBOT, the CME committed itself to the conscientious pursuit of innovation—which could explain its evolving success.

In fact, the Merc created the CME Innovation Center which annually gives the Fred Arditti Award, named for the man who innovated the Eurodollar futures contract.

It was almost six years ago that Sun-Times business editor Dan Miller and Tom Kuczmarski of the eponymous consulting firm came up with the idea of searching out and then visibly celebrating metropolitan Chicago's leading innovators in products, services and even government at the Chicago Innovation Awards (CIA).

One past CIA winner, Argonne National Labs, recently also won five of R&D Magazine's awards for break through innovation.

One of Argonne's fields of global leadership is in grid computing, creating virtual supercomputers by linking together the grains of the underutilized capacity of multiple computer networks.

Surprising many, the president of the Council on Competitiveness Deborah L. Wince-Smith told the Innovation Summit that this was a new tool that could restore competitiveness to a local economic sector prematurely declared dead.

"We need to push supercomputing down to the small manufacturing level," Wince-Smith said, and the rust started to fall from the assembled business thought leaders' eyes.

Larry Keeley, who teaches the new discipline of innovation academically and to the Fortune 100 as president of Chicago-based Doblin, Inc. is even re-engineering the perspectives of local government leaders in an innovation initiative of the national CEO's for Cities.

The survival discipline of innovation is all about changing how we do just about everything that got us here in the first place, so that we can stay at the front of the accelerating global pack and more fully realize a fuller and more broadly based prosperity. It's like burning ourselves to the ground, so we can have the benefits of starting over fresh.

Can a place like Chicago, a perpetual hot bed of radical change and economic reinvention throughout its history, a spawning ground for Nobel laureates in economics and applied science, a willful city of pragmatic visionaries, can we play this game of Innovation?

Well I guess.

--Paul O'Connor
Executive Director, World Business Chicago

Upcoming Events

Making the Chicago Region More Competitive in the Global Supply Chain
Sponsored by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Chicago Metropolis 2020, UIC—Center for Supply Chain Management & Logistics, UIC—Urban Transportation Center and World Business Chicago

Join business, government and freight industry leaders at this day long conference focused on the challenges and opportunities that impact the competitiveness of the global supply chain in the Chicago region. At the conference participants will develop public-private partnership proposals and plans of action to ensure that the Chicago region anticipates and responds to dynamic global trade forces.

When
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
8:30am-5:30pm

Where
University of Illinois at Chicago
Illinois Room, Student Center East
750 S. Halsted Street
Chicago, IL 60607

Register
Call the Event Hotline at 312.494.6709 or click here to register online.
Cost of the event is $50 before Nov. 14th or $75 after Nov. 14.

Chicago by the Numbers

World Business Chicago
177 N. State Street, Suite 500
Chicago, Illinois 60601

To be removed from the mailing list, click here.
To be added to mailing list, click here.