Five Lessons About Building An Innovation Economy
Innovation isn't just a shiny object. To succeed you need sustained effort, committed philanthropy, a collaborative approach, and more.
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On Monday, I wrote about the new Nashville Innovation Alliance, a joint effort between the City of Nashville and Vanderbilt University to kickstart the region’s innovation economy – and create an innovation district adjacent to the Vanderbilt campus.
And that got me thinking about what an “innovation economy” really means, since it’s become a buzzword in economic development circles. In its buzziest form, “innovation” usually means tech or biotech startup companies, often spinning off of university research. But innovation can come from any economic sector. When Roy Choi started up his Korean-Mexican gourmet food truck in Los Angeles in 2008, he was disrupting the restaurant business just as surely as any tech startup ever disrupted any business sector.
Arizona State’s Skysong Innovation Center in Scottsdale.
Still, it’s one thing for an individual entrepreneur to disrupt a single business sector – and quite another for civic leaders to create an innovation economy (and maybe an innovation district) out of whole cloth. Or, perhaps more accurately, out of whatever disconnected assets they have lying around in their community. When business leaders, politicians, philanthropies, and other critical players work together to make an innovation economy happen in a given community, it’s exactly the kind of economic development miracle I wrote about in Place And Prosperity (Chapter 10, for those of you following along). As I said in that book:
“Great cities, large and small, are powered by great prosperity, and the smartest cities—just like the smartest businesses—understand that they have to continuously plow the fruits of their prosperity into sustaining and reinventing themselves. It’s a mysterious process, but it’s pretty miraculous when it works.”
But miracles don’t happen automatically. They happen because of economic development efforts that are intentional, and connect people, organizations, and assets that previously weren’t linked together. And after a lifetime of working with communities on economic development efforts, I can safely say there are five key elements to making an innovation economy work. I’ll list them here, and go into detail about them behind the paywall.
The five keys are
1. Leverage your local assets
2. Sustain your effort over time
3. Focus on the “lifecycle” of the innovative businesses
4. Make sure philanthropy understands its role in economic development
5. Don’t let just one institution or organization “own” the effort.