An Innovation Economy in Every Backyard

Grace J. Wang’s timely essay, “Revisiting the Connection Between Innovation, Education, and Regional Economic Growth” (Issues, Winter 2024), warrants further attention given the foundational impact of a vibrant innovation ecosystem—ideas, technologies, and human capital—on the nation’s $29 trillion economy. She aptly notes that regional innovation growth requires “a deliberate blend of ideas, talent, placemaking, partnerships, and investment.”

To that end, I would like to amplify Wang’s message by drawing attention to the efforts of three groups: the ongoing work of the Brookings Institution, the current focus of the US Council on Competitiveness, and the catalytic role of the National Academies Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) in advancing the scientific and innovation enterprise.

First, Brookings has placed extensive emphasis on regional innovation, focusing on topics such as America’s advanced industries, clusters and competitiveness, urban research universities, and regional universities and local economies. Recently, Mark Muro at Brookings collaborated with Robert Atkinson at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation to produce The Case for Growth Centers: How to Spread Tech Innovation Across America. The report identified 35 place-based metropolitan locations that are utilizing the right ingredients—population; growing employment; university spending on R&D in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics per capita; patents; STEM doctoral degree production; and innovation sector job share—to realize innovation growth centers driven by targeted, peer-reviewed federal R&D investments.

The US Council on Competitiveness has also focused on place-based innovation. In 2019, the council launched the National Commission on Innovation and Competitiveness Frontiers, which involves a call to action described in the report Competing in the Next Economy: The New Age of Innovation. The council also formed four working groups, including one called The Future of Place-Based Innovation: Broadening and Deepening the Innovation Ecosystem. From these and other efforts, the council has proposed new recommendations that call for “establishing regional and national strategies to coordinate and support specialized regional innovation hubs, investing in expansion and retention of the local talent base, promoting inclusive growth and innovation in regional hubs, and strengthening local innovation ecosystems by enhancing digital infrastructure and local financing.”

Finally, I want to emphasize the important role GUIRR plays in advancing innovation and the national science and technology agenda. Through the roundtable, leaders from federal science agencies, universities, and industry proactively collaborate to frame issues and conduct activities that advance the national enterprise. GUIRR workshops and reports have also historically included elements to advance the innovation enterprise, including regional innovation.

To end with a personal anecdote, I’ve witnessed the success that results from such a nexus, especially from one that was recently highlighted by Brookings: the automotive advanced manufacturing industry in eastern Tennessee. In my former position as chief research administrator at the University of Tennessee, I was deeply involved in that regional innovation ecosystem, along with other participants at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and in the automotive industry, allowing me to experience firsthand just how impactful these ingredients can be when combined and maximized.

More so, as GUIRR celebrates 40 years of impact this year, I know it will continue to serve as a strong proponent of the nation’s R&D and innovation enterprise while continually refining and advancing the deep and critical collaboration between government, universities, and industry as laid out in Wang’s article and amplified by Brookings and the US Council on Competitiveness.

Taylor Eighmy

As Grace J. Wang notes in her article, history has shown the transformative power of innovation clusters—the physical concentration of local resources, people brimming with creative ideas, and support from universities, the federal government, industry, investors, and state and local organizations.

In January 2024, the National Science Foundation made a groundbreaking announcement: the first Regional Innovation Engines awards, constituting the broadest and most significant investment in place-based science and technology research and development since the Morrill Land Grant Act over 160 years ago. Authorized in the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, the program’s initial two-year, $150 million investment will support 10 NSF Engines spanning 18 states, bringing together multisector coalitions to put these regions on the map as global leaders in topics of national, societal, and geostrategic importance. Subject to future appropriations and progress made, the teams will be eligible for $1.6 billion from NSF over the next decade.

NSF Engines have already unlocked another $350 million in matching commitments from state and local governments, other federal agencies, philanthropy, and private industry, enabling them to catalyze breakthrough technologies in areas as diverse as semiconductors, biotechnology, and advanced manufacturing while stimulating regional job growth and economic development. Places such as El Paso, Texas, and Greensboro, North Carolina, will see lasting impacts as they are transformed into inclusive, thriving hubs of innovation capable of evolving and sustaining themselves for decades to come.

The NSF Engines program is led by NSF’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP), which builds upon decades of NSF investments in foundational research to grow innovation and translation capacity. TIP recently invested another $20 million in 50 institutions of higher education—including historically Black colleges and universities, minority-serving institutions, and community colleges—to help them build new partnerships, secure future external funding, and tap into their regional innovation ecosystems. Similarly, NSF invested $100 million in 18 universities to expand their research translation capacity, build upon academic research with the potential for technology transfer and societal and economic impacts, and bolster technology transfer expertise to support entrepreneurial faculty and students.

NSF also works to meet people where they are. The Experiential Learning for Emerging and Novel Technologies (ExLENT) program opens access to quality education and hands-on experiences for people at all career stages nationwide, leading to a new generation of scientists, engineers, technicians, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and educators ready to pursue technological innovation in their own communities. NSF’s initial $20 million investment in 27 ExLENT teams is allowing individuals from diverse backgrounds and experiences to gain on-the-job training in technology fields critical to the nation’s long-term competitiveness, paving the way for good-quality, well-paying jobs.

NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan has stated that we must create opportunities for everyone and harness innovation anywhere. These federal actions collectively acknowledge that American ingenuity starts locally and is stronger when there are more pathways for workers, startups, and aspiring entrepreneurs to participate in and shape the innovation economy in their own backyard.

Erwin Gianchandani

Grace J. Wang does an excellent job of capturing the evolution of science and engineering research, technological innovation, and economic growth. She also connects these changes to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education on the one hand and employment shifts on the other. And she implores us to seriously consider societal impacts in the process of research, translation, and innovation.

I believe developments over the past decade have made these issues far more urgent. Here, I will focus on three aspects of innovation: technological direction, geographic distribution, and societal impacts.

Can innovation be directed? Common belief in the scientific research community is that discovery and innovation are unpredictable. This supports the idea of letting hundreds of flowers bloom—fostered by broad support for all fields of science and engineering. Increasingly, however, the complexity and urgency of societal grand challenges are leading to a case for mission-oriented innovation. As Mariana Mazzucato pointed out in a report titled Mission-Oriented Research & Innovation in the European Union: “By harnessing the directionality of innovation, we also harness the power of research and innovation to achieve wider social and policy aims as well as economic goals. Therefore, we can have innovation-led growth that is also more sustainable and equitable.”

Can innovation be spread geographically? Technological innovations and their economic benefits have been far from uniformly distributed. Indeed, while some regions have prospered, many have been left behind, if not regressed. Scholars have offered several ways to address this distressing and polarizing situation. With modesty, I point to a 2021 workshop on regional innovation ecosystems, which Jim Kurose, Cheryl Martin, Susan Martinis, and I organized (and Grace Wang participated in). Funded by the National Science Foundation, the workshop led to the report National Networks of Research Institutes, which helped spur development of the NSF’s Regional Innovation Engines program, which recently awarded $1.6 billion to 10 innovation clusters distributed across the nation. Much, much more, of course, remains to be done.

Can the negative societal impacts of innovation be minimized, and the positive impacts maximized? As example of the downside, consider some of the profound negative impacts of smartphones, social media, and mobile internet technologies. As Jaron Lanier, a technology pioneer, pointed out: “I think the short version is that a lot of idealistic people were unwilling to consider the dark side of what they were doing, and the dark side developed in a way that was unchecked and unfettered and unconsidered, and it eventually took over.” At a minimum, everyone in the science and engineering research community should become more knowledgeable about the fundamental economic, sociological, political, and institutional processes that govern the real-world implementation, diffusion, and adoption of technological innovations. We should also ensure that our STEM education programs expose undergraduate and graduate students to these processes, systems, their dynamics, and their driving forces.

Fundamentally, I believe that we need to get better at anticipatory technology ethics, especially for emerging technologies. The central question all researchers must attempt to answer is: what will the possible positive and negative consequences be if their technology becomes pervasive and is adopted at large scale? Admittedly, due to inherent uncertainties in all aspects of the socio-technological ecosystem, this is not an easy question. But that is not enough reason to not try.

Pramod P. Khargonekar

Technology innovation can be a major force behind regional economic growth, but as Grace J. Wang notes, it takes intentional coordination for research and development-based regional change to happen. Over the past year, as parties coalesced across regions to leverage large-scale, federally funded innovation and economic growth programs, UIDP, an organization devoted to strengthening university-industry partnerships, has held listening sessions to better understand the challenges these regional coalitions face.

In conversations with invested collaborators in diverse regions—from Atlanta, New York, and Washington, DC, to New Haven, Connecticut, and Olathe, Kansas—we’ve learned that universities can easily fulfill the academic research aspects of these projects. Creating the organizational glue that engages and keeps academic, industry, local and state government, and nonprofit partners collaborating as a whole is more challenging. One solution successful communities use is creating a new, impartial governing body; others rely on an impartial community connector as neutral convener.

But other program requirements remain a black box—specifically, recruiting and retaining talent and developing short- and long-term metrics. At least for National Science Foundation Regional Innovation Engines awardees, it is hoped that replicable approaches to address these issues will be developed in coordination with that effort’s MIT-led Builder Platform.

Data specific to a region’s innovation strengths and gaps can lend incredible insight into the ecosystem-building process. Every community has assets that uniquely contribute to regional development; a comprehensive, objective assessment can identify and determine their value. Companies such as Elsevier and Wellspring use proprietary data to tell a story about a community’s R&D strengths, revealing connections between partners and identifying key innovators who may not otherwise have high visibility within a region.

We often hear about California’s Silicon Valley and North Carolina’s Research Triangle as models for robust innovation ecosystems. Importantly, both those examples emphasized placemaking early in their development.

Innovation often has its genesis in face-to-face interactions. High-value research parks and innovation districts, along with co-located facilities, offer services beyond incubators and lab space. The exemplars create intentional opportunities for innovators to interact—what UIDP and others call engineered serendipity. Research has tracked the value of chance meetings—a conversation by the copy machine or a chat in a café—for sparking innovation and fruitful collaboration.

The changing landscape of research and innovation is having a profound impact on the academy, where researchers have traditionally focused on basic research and are now being asked to expand into use-inspired areas to solve societal problems more directly; this is where government and private funders are making more investments.

Finally, Wang noted the difficulty in making technology transfer offices financially self-sustainable, and NSF’s recently launched program Accelerating Research Translation (ART) seeks to address this challenge. But it may be time to reevaluate the role of these offices. Today’s increasing emphasis on research translation is an opportune time to reassess the transactional nature of university-based commercialization and licensing and return to a role that places greater emphasis on faculty support and service rather than revenue generation. Placing these activities within the context of long-term strategic partnerships could generate greater return on investment for all.

Anthony M. Boccanfuso