A Short Flight to a Bright Future: Kingston’s Economic Strategy In Action
A Short Flight to a Bright Future: Kingston’s Economic Strategy In Action
The Kingston-Syracuse Pathway signals the emergence of a new economic corridor, extending the city's integrated economic plan into new territory.
Key Takeaways
The Kingston-Syracuse Pathway is a cross-border, collaborative economic corridor designed to drive regional economic development and innovation.
The Pathway makes sense because of the:
Development of physical and economic infrastructure essential for supporting new initiatives and collaborations.
Implementation of a comprehensive plan focused on economic development and innovation.
Relationships and networks built among key stakeholders, including academic institutions, government entities, and economic development organizations.
Identification and nurturing key sectors such as life sciences and sustainable manufacturing, which are integral to the Pathway.
Environment conducive to innovation, research, and development.
Universal takeaways include collaboration as a key driver, adaptability linked to strategic planning, and leveraging unique strengths.
Lift-Off: The Kingston-Syracuse Pathway.
In one example of the future-is-now concept, specialized medical drones quickly and safely fly between Kingston and Syracuse, delivering life science supplies and samples to key cross-border research institutions. The short flight times and simplified logistics connect researchers more closely, leading to greater collaboration where previously it was impractical. Led by economic development and academic teams on both sides of the Canada-U.S.A. border, next-generation health innovations are arriving on the tailwinds of forward-thinking economic policy.
Once the pilot phase is complete and pragmatic challenges like compliance with FAA and Transport Canada air transit regulations are resolved, "The drone delivery service could be utilized by companies or customers from both sides of the border, from science and technology applications to the products and services emerging from our partnership," says Ben McIlquham, Investment Manager, Health Innovation, Kingston Economic Development. "It not only aids in practical logistics but also significantly strengthens our relationship with the U.S., our largest trading partner."
From drone flights to soft landings, the Kingston-Syracuse Pathway (KSP) — the burgeoning economic collaboration between two cities sharing similar challenges — is emerging as a fully-fledged economic corridor. In the bigger picture, the Pathway promises to unlock a broad-based wave of Kingston and Syracuse-based innovations, which also includes sustainable manufacturing and an array of technology sectors.
I'm interested in looking at long term economic sustainability; we need to make sure we have the workforce of the future. - Donna Gillespie, CEO, Kingston Economic Development
Today, Kingston and Syracuse are obvious and natural partners. But it’s obvious and natural only because key actors in both cities built enough physical and economic infrastructure to peer over the strategic horizon, seeing not only the potential payoff of the drone program but a place where, together, entire marketplaces open up. The 31 million people comprising the New York City, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal markets are awfully attractive to the 320,000 people resident between Kingston and Syracuse.
Soft Landings and Open Doors.
The Pathway, which had its start in 2018, has evolved into an essential part of securing Kingston’s economic future and is now fully embedded within the city’s integrated economic plan. Companies using the soft landing dimension of the program are shepherded into cross-border opportunities. On the Syracuse side, Upstate Medical University, CenterState Corporation for Economic Opportunity , Central New York Biotech Accelerator, and The Tech Garden are among the program’s supporters.
Bilateral opportunities exist for Kingston’s life sciences researchers, including Queen’s and the Centre for Health Innovation, as well as Kingston General Health Research Institute (KGHRI). The Pathway is their channel to research, develop, and validate solutions for the U.S. market, including collaborations with their Syracusan counterparts who themselves find similar soft landings north of the border.
Economic Logic Drives Good Strategy.
Cities compete relentlessly to attract companies, talent and funding. Kingston's proximity to major cities like Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa brings with it challenges and opportunities for carving out its own economic identity. Toronto, only a few hours drive west, is linked with Waterloo via the world-ranked Toronto-Waterloo startup corridor. Factors like population and language arguably make Ottawa and Montreal natural ‘corridor’ partners. But Kingston’s built environment, says Donna Gillespie, “gives us the infrastructure that a large city would have, but on a very human scale." enabling the city to punch far above its weight. Now, with its integrated economic plan and tight linkages between the city, economic development and academia, the city’s assets are coordinated into a focused and practical strategy. Within this, the Pathway becomes a logical extension incorporating Kingston’s built-in competitive advantages.
The city itself is beautiful, particularly along the waterfront. Queen’s University is renowned; Royal Military College is the largest military educational institution in Canada. The Canada-U.S.A. border is a short drive away. While upstate New York isn’t as populous or advantaged as the southeast, it is focused on economic renewal and dotted with high-end universities and colleges, Syracuse University and Upstate Medical University among them. This is the context within which Donna Gillespie frames economic development, “How are we looking at this whole region? Where are the assets? Formalizing an economic corridor with Syracuse is amazing. There are so many linkages with what they’re doing.”
Strategic Takeaways.
Every place, large or small, requires a unique selling proposition (USP). Why live there? Locate one’s business there? Why stay? Leaders from Kingston and Syracuse understand this; part of their solution lies in building an economic partnership founded upon shared and complementary strengths. They’ve opened a flight path in which — should the pilot program achieve its objectives — world-class research institutions overcome distance to become tightly interlinked, drones speeding back and forth exchanging samples potentially leading to future breakthroughs.
But the flight path is also a metaphor of the bigger picture: Kingston’s integrated economic plan in action. The innovation ecosystem and the coordinated, strategic support it receives is a key reason the city is an attractive place to live. Extending the city’s reach and influence via the Pathway strengthens the existing ecosystem and economy. It is also an innovative investment aimed at economic resilience and growth, part of a sequence of logical, forward-looking moves engineered to draw upon and enhance the city’s physical, economic and social infrastructure.
Every city and town needs to engage with the complex matters of understanding their strategic landscape, designing an integrated economic plan, and injecting life into their own innovation ecosystem. But as no community’s strengths and position are the same, the flight paths differ and there isn’t a single blueprint.
Solving Challenges.
As places like Kingston strive to carve out competitive positions in sectors like life sciences, challenges crop up routinely. One of these is straightforward but hard to solve: matching infrastructure to demand.
For years life sciences researchers have relied on offshore wet labs, in China for example, to analyze their samples. Today, huge political and technological shifts make on-shoring—the return of manufacturing to domestic locations—an extremely attractive option. But this has revealed a concerning infrastructure gap: it can take years to build wet lab facilities, with all of the knock-on effects of turning away business and the risk of losing meaningful new research and technology to other locations.
In Kingston’s case, its life sciences hub employs over 11,000 people from Queen’s, St. Lawrence College, KGHRI, and dozens of companies like Octane Biotech. Health Innovation Kingston, a multi-million dollar federal government program designed to inject capital into the ecosystem, spurred jobs and growth. Says Ben McIlquham, “We hit our jobs and growth mark halfway through the funding. We've blown everything through the water.”
Given life sciences are core to the economic plan and foundational to The Pathway, wet lab space is a vital strategic requirement. If additional planned for space isn’t added, it is possible the sector’s growth could slow unnecessarily.
Making the Complicated Simple Attracts Talent.
A quick review of the agencies, research groups, institutions and projects formed to support research, innovation and commercialization emphasizes the transition from innovation to innovation ecosystem. The challenges are more complex; the obstacles are bigger. The innovators tackling today’s research and business challenges need help. Life sciences research, for example, is capital intensive and requires specialized equipment, including wet lab facilities. Commercialization activities—concept validation, funding, market access—rival the research side in difficulty.
Most researchers aren’t good at building businesses. Most business people aren’t comfortable in the lab. Few people know, for example, flying lab samples between research locations by drone is an emerging option. No one fully grasps the implications of this single logistical breakthrough on the scale and pace of life sciences research and commercialization, let alone the unending stream of disruptive breakthroughs continuously changing the rules of the game.
The inspiration residing within the minds of one or two people with specialized know-how is still the big game-changer. Genius is rewarded today more than ever. But now it takes a literal city to get their big ideas to the start line. The Kingston example shows it takes committed professionals coming together from economic development, business, academia, and government backgrounds to manufacture the infrastructure, market access, and political commitment that attracts and retains world-class research and entrepreneurial talent, and thus the opportunities they create.
Infrastructure, from labs to economic corridors, attracts talent. Talent collaborates to crack complex problems. New solutions are born, new markets emerge — some now only a short drone flight away.
