(co-authored with Bob Geolas and Julie Wagner)

As Congress moves closer to enacting President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, focus on the elements of a broader recovery package is intensifying. While the relief package addresses the urgent, immediate challenges of the pandemic (including state and local fiscal relief) and accelerated vaccine distribution, the recovery package is intended to address the structural challenges that pre-date the public health crisis: geographically unbalanced economic growth, accelerating climate change, growing income inequities and a reckoning with systemic racism. The recovery package is the vehicle for achieving President Biden’s vision for “Building Back Better.”

President Joe Biden made investments in innovation a focal point of his Build Back Better agenda during the campaign. Biden’s proposals included calls for substantial investments in research & development through existing agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Departments of Energy and Defense. He also called for diversifying growth through investments in technology hubs around the country. Biden’s calls have been echoed in important legislation introduced in the House and Senate, including the Endless Frontier Act and The Innovation Centers Acceleration Act. (US Senators Introduce Bill to Allot $80B to Bolster National Innovation; Sen. Chris Coons Quoted (executivegov.com)) All of these proposals build on excellent work (The Case for Growth Centers (itif.org)) done by Mark Muro, Rob Atkinson and others.

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Innovation districts either exist or are emerging in all regions of the country — in booming high-tech hubs like Boston and San Francisco, large health care centers like Houston and Philadelphia, mid-size older industrial cities like Birmingham, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Winston-Salem and smaller cities like Chattanooga, Dayton, Erie and Providence. Going forward, there is ample potential to grow innovation districts at scale in cities as diverse as Detroit, Kansas City and Memphis and in communities near military command hubs and energy research facilities. The Cortex Innovation Community (Cortex Innovation District | Nowak Metro Finance Lab | Drexel University) is the prime example of the potential of innovation districts to drive large outcomes from small geographies.

The interplay between innovation and inclusion is a particular selling point of innovation districts. Unlike traditional U.S. research or business parks, innovation districts are disproportionately located in the cores of cities often surrounded by neighborhoods challenged by economic disenfranchisement, high unemployment and high poverty. The new spatial geography of innovation offers intriguing opportunities to be seized and serious threats to be averted. Innovation has the potential to be inclusive via customized skills training, increased supplier diversity and efforts to enhance the living conditions and livelihoods of places and people without the downside consequences of displacement that many times accompany gentrification. Similarly, inclusion can be innovative, creating new ways of tackling traditional problems via technological advancement and entrepreneurial dynamism.

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To establish the proposed Innovation District program, federal policymakers should focus on three interlocking policy domains. First, federal investments in district developmentw

The federal government should also invest in talent developmentt

Finally, investments in research and development will supercharge local and national competitiveness by channeling federal R&D spending to specific innovation geographies. Specifically, the federal government should target R&D funding to universities and businesses within specific districts and provide seed funding for the creation of local venture funds that can increase access to financing for new companies. Federal administrators should also promote regional, multi-institution grant opportunities to encourage local collaboration and make federal funding contingent on commercialization metrics to encourage universities to adopt a more entrepreneurial stance towards faculty recruitment and promotion. By pairing increased research funding with the tried-and-tested innovation district model, we can further accelerate the creation of new jobs and businesses.

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With the country facing a cascading set of crises, now is the time for the federal government to invest explicitly in the growth of innovation districts, particularly in regions that have yet to benefit from the innovation economy. Over the past decade, innovation districts have emerged as powerful tools for promoting local economic development and enhancing national competitiveness. With the right combination of investments in physical infrastructure, skills development, and advanced research, federal policymakers can leverage the power of proximity to supercharge American innovation and in so doing lay a foundation for a new and more inclusive era of prosperity.