The Great Lakes region has a chance to replace the Rust Belt with the Blue Belt | Brookings
I have long pointed to the Great Lakes region’s water and blue innovation economy as a fulcrum for renewed economic vitality in this historic industrial region. This is only partly due to the fact that the region has more freshwater than nearly any place on earth, along with 10,000-plus miles of freshwater coast and great waterfront locations to clean up and leverage for community revitalization and new economic development.
Equally or more importantly, the region has substantial, largely unlocked economic leadership potential, given that it hosts an almost unrivaled array of innovation, R&D, and talent assets, to drive the new technologies and business models needed to be a worldwide exemplar in the multi-trillion-dollar global smart and sustainable water solutions industry.
The Great Lakes region’s potential future as a water technology leader has gotten a big boost this year. This winter, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) nationwide Regional Innovation Engines competition awarded $160 million to Great Lakes ReNEW—led by Current, the Chicago-based water innovation hub—to help the Great Lakes region dramatically enhance this activity and reach its promise as the world’s water innovation center: sparking new investment opportunities, businesses, technologies, and thousands of good-paying jobs in the process.
This breakthrough coincided with the design and awards-competition processes of the U.S. Commerce Department’s ongoing national Tech Hubs Program as well as the announcement of the program’s big winners recently. The region’s business and university partners won awards to provide new national leadership in fields including new smart sensing systems, bio-medical breakthroughs, sustainable polymers, and advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
With smart water technology systems and solutions needed around the world, water technology may be the Great Lakes’ arena of most distinctive competency and strongest advantage among its fast-growing business sectors with global reach. Literally the whole world needs to learn how to use water more sustainably; clean and deliver it effectively and efficiently; and build new resilience in the face of climate change, drought, and even climate migration to water-rich places (like the Great Lakes).
Public- and private-sector leaders across the Great Lakes have seen this opportunity; many communities are already seizing it. Milwaukee, with its business-led Water Council, organized around water as its new brand beginning twenty years ago. Milwaukee’s business and civic leaders fueled business growth in water technology; expanded water research and education centers; and developed new cultural institutions, entertainment venues, and recreation facilities along the cleaned-up Milwaukee River and Lake Michigan shores. In Cleveland, the Cleveland Water Alliance seeds new water technology companies through its Freshwater Innovation Fund. And Buffalo, New York—which grew as the water gateway linking the East Coast and the Great Lakes through the Erie Canal—is now reclaiming its waterfronts to fuel a new round of community economic development and growth in the blue economy.
Central to the region’s preeminence in the water space and other emerging technology sectors is its world-leading concentration of major research universities (with 22 of the world’s top 200 such institutions in the binational Great Lakes region—more than any place on earth). These institutions have developed leading competencies in water engineering, science, and system-building, and they are active today in developing and commercializing new technologies with existing companies and nurturing a robust water technology startup ecosystem.
To make good on this momentum and promise, the region will need to create a powerful market-led investor interface, one that helps outside investors spot, spur, and commercialize the new technologies and resulting licensing, royalties, and start-up companies that kick out of this growing university- and business-driven innovation ecosystem. Doing so would also help reverse the long-standing dynamic of too little capital finding and commercializing innovation in the region, meaning a weak translation of Great Lakes innovations into new, fast-growing businesses and high-value jobs.
To meet these challenges, Great Lakes ReNEW is working hard to harness the intramural competition for innovation leadership in the region, a competitive spirit that has frequently undercut many regional growth efforts. At times, this dynamic has seen Ohio State trying to outdo the University of Michigan as it tries to outhustle the University of Illinois. Similarly, economic developers in places like Madison, Wisconsin, and Milwaukee at times have competed for dollars and deals against other nearby cities like Buffalo and Cleveland.
In many ways, this competition is inevitable and healthy, with every institution working to attract the best and brightest researchers and win competitive corporate investments and federal R&D funding. The trick for ReNEW will be to help competing regional centers of excellence in water innovation to avoid playing just a zero-sum game for investment dollars.
Under the winning proposal in the NSF’s Regional Innovation Engines competition, a host of these competitive universities and economic development entities are newly joining forces as contributing partners in ReNEW’s research consortium—in essence collaborating to compete as a region.
Current and the ReNEW consortium are also trying to animate a regional, independent organization committed to innovation and investment in the blue economy and to marshal corresponding funding that would bring much more money to the table. Current and Great Lakes ReNEW are working to pool millions in federal, state, local, corporate, and soon-to-be-launched venture investment funds in the kind of water -tech –specific regional investment fund we recommended for the region a few years ago.
To work well, this fund needs to be led by experienced venture and startup investors who know how to spot and then support promising technologies and startups through the commercialization phase—and how to help other investors from the region and around the world do the same. The operative guiding goal is to help investors make a whole lot of money, while catalyzing water business growth around the Great Lakes.
There is also a related challenge and opportunity if the Great Lakes region is to realize one of the major ambitions of NSF’s Regional Innovation Engines program—to tap extant innovation competencies and bring tech-led growth to geographic areas that aren’t finding it on their own. In the Great Lakes context, this means fueling innovation ecosystems and the growth of new startups and companies in communities beyond those housing the research university “motherships” like Ann Arbor, Michigan, (University of Michigan); Madison (University of Wisconsin); and State College, Pennsylvania (Penn State)—communities that already boast thriving tech-driven economies.
Great Lakes ReNEW has a chance to realize this goal in a variety of ways. It is connecting researchers and enhancing early-stage capital investment pools with the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay and the local venture investor TitleTown Tech. It is bringing together outside investors with the cutting-edge technologies being created at Grand Valley State University’s Annis Water Research Institute in Muskegon, Michigan. It means helping the Great Lakes water research centers at Michigan Tech and Lake Superior State University in the Upper Peninsula commercialize new startups as well as bringing more investment dollars to the Erie Hack innovation competition that rewards and supports water-tech entrepreneurs in the industrial communities ringing Lake Erie’s shores.
Perhaps even more fundamentally, the Great Lakes ReNEW consortium is organized by Current to not only deliver clean water solutions and water access on a much more equitable basis but also to ensure that the region’s racially and economically marginalized populations share fully in the new jobs and business growth opportunities catalyzed by the emerging innovations and start-up businesses—a fundamental expectation of the NSF Regional Innovation Engines program. In doing so, it can attend to what I recently billed the economic Achilles’ heel of industrial Midwest communities, the history of fierce racial segregation and lack of purposeful actions to close these divides and tap the full potential of the region’s tremendous diversity.
Great Lakes ReNEW and the Regional Innovation Engine designation for water technology is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help our water-rich; idea- and invention-rich; and diverse, talent-rich Great Lakes region seize global leadership of smart water innovation and demonstrate new inclusive solutions to water use, access, and sustainability problems for the rest of the world.
Let’s hope we make the most of this opportunity.
Source: The Great Lakes region has a chance to replace the Rust Belt with the Blue Belt | Brookings
