I had a great conversation with Bob Tresize, President & CEO of Lansing Economic Area Partnership. We covered a lot of ground, from regional specialization to designing for serendipity: Game-changing breakthroughs often come from chance encounters between highly-skilled individuals who bring complimentary skills to the table.
We also talked about lifestyle as a differentiating factor. The Lansing region is a rare (perhaps the only?) example of being 15 minutes from both the countryside and a world leading particle accelerator.
For anyone engaged with local innovation ecosystems—EDO professionals, government, chambers of commerce, academic institutions, incubators—these eight minutes are worth your time.
Interview Part One
Lansing, Michigan: Understand Your Moment
Where matters
Innovation is vastly more than a buzzword pasted into boilerplate pitch decks or a term to nod at during weekly conference calls. It is a transformative, global force. Innovation is baked into every decision we make, individually and collectively. We all make the implicit assumption that virtually every aspect of our lives will advance in positive ways—either fundamentally or at the margins—given time and resources. This is more true now than at any time in history.
But where will that next innovation take place? Real, tooth-and-nail competition between communities, regions, and among nations is unrelenting. That competition extends into the geopolitical realm as trading blocks and alliances jostle for advantage. Someone, somewhere, will own each innovation, mining and multiplying its benefits for the surrounding area in terms of jobs, infrastructure, economic resiliency and quality of life.
