KWAME

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

The Inner Ring – C.S. Lewis

Countries around the world are looking to foster innovation within their borders as global cooperation and great power competition remake the globalized world that has dominated the past several decades. As countries embark on this journey, the ones that do well in heeding C.S. Lewis’ counsel will be the ones that succeed in cultivating truly innovative economies over the next several decades. I’ll explain why in this piece and make a case for North Carolina’s Triad region to be one of those innovation hubs.

Tech Hub Competition

The examples of countries in this competition are several. Canada is reimagining its incentives for attracting foreign technology talent. The UK is enacting policies to make itself attractive to the crypto industry. India is replacing its brand as one of outsourcing destination with one of innovation collaborator. The United States is pulling on several levers to reassert its global technology leadership, primarily through the Inflation Reduction and CHIPS and Science Acts.

One of the levers the U.S. is pulling is the Economic Development Administration’s Tech Hubs Program. It is focused on catalyzing the diffusion of technology innovation hubs from Silicon Valley to the rest of the country. With $10 billion allocated to it over the next five years, the program is focused on “ensuring that the industries of the future—and their good jobs—start, grow, and remain in the United States.” Last week, the program announced the opening of its application for the first phase of its initiative, through which regional consortiums from around the country will compete to be one of the 20 designated Tech Hubs in the country. Phase two of the initiative is for those 20 Hubs to compete to be one of the five that receive millions of dollars in funding to implement their vision.

As you can imagine, these incentives have the potential impact of focusing prospective applications on beating their competition. In some ways that is a good thing. Constraints have a powerful way of catalyzing productivity. At the same time, innovation is infinite. It is not zero-sum. How do you prevent the missing the infinite opportunities as competitors chase this funding and the United States seeks to reassert its hegemony?

This is where C.S. Lewis’ counsel comes into play. Focus. “Face your front” as my Nigerian friends say. All the players here face some relation to the Inner Ring. The United States seeks to prevent itself from not being firmly at the center of the Ring. Regional consortiums across the country face the potential of finding their way into the Inner Ring alongside Silicon Valley. A hyper-focus on trying to gain or not lose the Inner Ring may keep you from noticing the opportunities that could lead to exponential results rather than winning hand-to-hand combat at an incremental pace.

“But Kwame, what’s going to keep these players focused on getting results rather than chasing shiny objects, if not for competition?” Perhaps a better way for me to make my case is to ask whether the competition we’re in is a fight or a race? Are we duking it out to name a winner at the end of the day? Or are we in a race to catch the infinite?

Innovation in the Triad Region

With that question, I’ll shift my attention to North Carolina’s Triad region. I would love to see the area secure funding to accelerate its development into one of the country’s core innovation hubs. The region has quality technical talent, existing collaborative infrastructure, and an ideal location.

NC A&T produces high quality technical talent. Corporations see the talent and are making moves to align themselves with the school. Merck recently launched a partnership to develop a biotech R&D center. Wolfspeed also partnered with A&T to develop a R&D center as the company prepares to build the world’s largest silicon carbide chip plant in nearby Chatham County. With that kind of activity, I was shocked to learn that the school currently receives less than 3% of the research and development funding in the state’s budget. For comparison, 87% of federal, state, nonprofit, and business R&D funding that comes into the state goes to UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, and Duke. NC A&T is out-kicking its coverage and I would love to see what it could do with more funding.

Further, UNC Greensboro and NC A&T have been building a culture of collaboration for years now. Over the past 20 years, the two schools have been developing the $400M Gateway Research Park research and development campuses in the Triad with the aim of catalyzing at least $50M in annual economic benefit in the area. The park currently supports ventures spanning nanoscience, materials testing, and contract research. The two universities have tech transfer capabilities that enable them to commercialize discoveries that come out of the various labs.

Geographically, the Triad is smack dab in the middle of North Carolina, giving you easy access to a range of cool things to do. Asheville and Kitty Hawk are easy weekend trips to make. Charlotte is not too far away if you want to catch an NFL or NBA game, or a NASCAR race. Downtown Greensboro has a wonderful sense of place to it with a mix of good food, creative arts and vibrant commerce. Nearby Winston-Salem has loads of character and High Point is rapidly becoming a destination beyond furniture deals.

There is a real opportunity for the Triad to be a key player in driving innovation across the technologies we benefit from today. Albemarle Corporation is developing one of the largest lithium mining operations in the country a couple hours drive from the region in Kings Mountain. The Triad has strong roots in textiles and denim, industries whose supply chains have long ago moved to other parts of the world. There is no reason why the region could not drive a reimagining of supply chain and manufacturing technology as reshoring continues to take place in different parts of the country. The state produces some of the best peanuts in the country (particularly if you’re eating some roasted by my dad’s Pimpong’s Unique brand). There’s no reason new applications for peanuts in food cannot be developed in the state to help alleviate hunger issues in the U.S. and beyond. The opportunities are infinite.

The risk of missing the infinite in chasing the Inner Ring is evident in NCInnovation, a relatively small nonprofit that looks like it will be taking the mantle to raise North Carolina’s stature as an innovation leader in the country. When you open up NCInnovation’s website, you see immediate reference to where the state falls short when it comes to innovation. The state currently ranks 20th in innovation compared to other states, though it is second in terms of the amount of R&D dollars that the state attracts. The organization has raised $23M to fix this and has been selected as the flagship for the state on this front. There is a proposed one-time $1.4B appropriation in the state’s budget bill to endow NCInnovation. We’ll see if the entire allocation makes it all the way to the Governor’s desk for signature.

My concern is that NCInnovation may be approaching its work from the worldview that this is a zero-sum game they are playing. Yes, there are real risks of losing talent and companies to other parts of the country. It is important to be aware of those. Yet, as long as there are people and capital in the state, you can cultivate a culture of innovation to build the future. Innovation is not a zero-sum game, unless you make it so. If you do, you likely create blindspots that position you to beat yourself. Here’s to my home state not making that mistake.