Building an innovation ecosystem for the next century

Megan: And last year, when Michigan’s Governor Whitmer announced this new initiative and your position, she noted the need to foster this sort of culture of innovation. And we hear that a lot that terminal in the context of company cultures. It’s interesting to hear in the context of a U.S. state’s economy. I wonder what your strategy is for building out this ecosystem, and how do you foster a state’s innovation culture?

Ben: Yeah, it’s an awesome point, and I think I mentioned earlier that I came into the role with this builder’s mentality. For me, this is how I am wired to think. This is how a lot of the companies and other founders that I spent a lot of time with, this is how they think. And so bringing this to the state government, I think of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, their motto, the English translation at least of it, is “Step by Step, Ferociously.” And I think about that as a lot as a proxy for how I do that within the state government. There’s a lot of iterative work that needs to happen, a lot of coaching and storytelling that happens to help folks understand how to think with that builder’s mindset. The wonderful news is that when you start having that conversation, this is one of those in these complicated political times, this is a pretty bipartisan thing, right?

The notion of how to build small businesses that create thriving main street communities while also supporting high-growth, high-tech startups that can drive prosperity for all, and population growth, while also being able to cover corporate innovation and technology transfer out of universities. All of these things touch every corner of the state.

And Michigan’s a surprisingly large and very geographically diverse state. Most of the things that we tend to be known for outside the state are in a pretty small corner of Southeast Michigan. That’s the Motor City part, but we do a lot and we have a lot of really interesting hubs for innovation and hubs for entrepreneurship, like I said, from the small mom-and-pop manufacturing shop or interest in clothing business all the way through to these insane life sciences innovations being spun out of the university. Being able to drive this culture of innovation ends up being applicable really across the board, and it just gets people really fired up when you start talking about this, fired up in a good way, which is, I think, what’s really fantastic.

There’s this notion of accelerating the talent flywheel and making sure that the state can invest in the cultivation of really rich communities and connections, and this founder culture. That stuff happens organically, generally, and when you talk about building startup ecosystems, it’s not like the state shows up and says, “Now you’re going to be more innovative and that works.” That is not the case.

And so to be able to develop those things, it’s much more about this notion of ecosystem building and getting the ingredients and puzzle pieces in the right place, applying a little bit of funding here and there, or loosening a restriction here or there, and then letting the founders do what they do best, which is build. And so this is what I think I end up being super passionate about within the state. You can lead by example in a lot of these ways, and that flywheel that I mentioned really can get going in a beautiful way when you step out of the prescriptive innovation culture mindset.

Megan: And given that role, I wonder what milestones the campaign has experienced in your first year? Could you share some highlights and some developing projects that you’re really excited about?

Ben: We had a recent one, I think that was pretty tremendous. Just a couple of months ago, Governor Whitmer signed into law a bipartisan legislation called the Michigan Innovation Fund. This was a multi-year effort that resulted in the state’s biggest investment in the innovation ecosystem development in over two decades. A lot of this funding is going to early stage venture capital firms that will be able to support the broad seeding of new companies and ideas, keep talent within the state from some of those top tier research institutions, bring in really high quality companies that early stage, growth stage companies from out of state, and then develop or supercharge some of that innovation ecosystem fabric that ties those things together. So that connective tissue that I talked about, and that was an incredible win to launch the year with.

This was just back in January, and now we’re working to get some of those funds out over the course of the next month or two so we can put them to use. What was really interesting about that was, it wasn’t just a top-down thing. This was supported from the top all the way up to and including Governor Whitmer. I mentioned bipartisan support within Michigan’s legislature and then bottom-up from all of the ecosystem partners, the founders, the investors advocating as a whole block, which I think is really powerful. Rather than trying to go for one-off things, this huge coalition of the willing got together organically and advocated for, hey, this is why this is such a great moment. This is the time to invest. And Governor Whitmer and the legislators, they heard that call, and we got something done, and so that happened relatively quickly. Like I said, biggest investment in the last two decades, and I think we’re poised to have some really great successes in the coming year as well.

Another really interesting one that I haven’t seen other states do yet, Governor Whitmer, around a year ago, signed an executive order called the Infrastructure for Innovation. Essentially, what that does is it opens up state department and agency assets to startups in the name of moving the ball forward on innovation projects. And so if you’re a startup and you need access to some very hard-to-find, very expensive, maybe like a test facility, you can use something that the state has, and all of the processes to get that done are streamlined so that you’re not beating your head against a wall. Similarly, the universities and even federal labs and corporate resources, while an executive order can’t compel those folks to do that, we’ve been finding tremendous buy-in from those stakeholders who want to volunteer access to their resources.

That does a lot of really good things, certainly for the founders, that provides them the launchpad that they need. But for those corporations and universities, and whatnot, a lot of them have these very expensive assets sitting around wildly underutilized, and they would be happy to have people come in and use them. That also gives them exposure to some of the bleeding-edge technology that a lot of these startups today are developing. I thought that was a really cool example of state government leadership using some of the tools that are available to a governor to get things moving. We’ve had a lot of early wins with startups here that have been able to leverage what that executive order was able to do for them.

Here we are talking about the MIT Technology Review to tie in an MIT piece here, we also started a Team Michigan for MIT’s REAP program. It’s the Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, and this is one of the global thought leaders on best practices for innovation ecosystem development. And so we’ve got a cohort of about a dozen key leaders from across all of those different stakeholders who need to have a seat at the table for this ecosystem development.

We go out to Cambridge twice a year for a multi-day workshop, and we get to talk about what we’ve learned as best practices, and then also learn from other cohorts from around the world on what they’ve done that is great. And then also get to hear some of the academic best practices that the MIT faculty have discovered as part of this area of expertise. And so that’s been a very interesting way for us to be able to connect outside of the state government boundaries, if you will. You sort of get out there and see where the leading edge is and then come back and be able to talk about the things that we learned from all of these other global cohorts. So always important to be focused on best practices when you’re trying to do new things, especially in government.

Megan: Sounds like there are some really fantastic initiatives going on. It sounds like a very busy first year.