Aligning a diverse set of city leaders to an innovation district vision and implementation plan.
Framing barriers to successful innovation ecosystems
The creation of Austin’s first medical school (Dell Medical School) presented an opportunity to leverage it as a foundation for an Innovation District with global appeal. Upstream was engaged by the city’s Chief Innovation Office to create a vision for the district and plan for realizing it. Through secondary research, we discovered five key barriers to innovative ecosystems, which included, mitigating risk, access to talent, capital and ideas, exposure to markets, aligning to purpose and rewarding risk-taking. We then benchmarked how well other innovation zones addressed these barriers to identify underserved innovator needs that Austin’s Innovation District could fulfill.
Identifying the vision and roadmap for the district
With underserved innovator needs as an anchor, we engaged leadership from the city, medical school, local hospitals, universities, startup accelerators and businesses in a series of co-creation workshops to identify innovation district offerings. Some of those included programs to reduce cost of facilities and equipment for innovators and to connect them to capital and markets to fulfill their needs. Then we identified the roles each anchor institution would need to play to deliver the programs. With unique offerings defined, we again engaged stakeholders to co-create a vision for the district highlighting the unique assets of Austin and the value the district would deliver to innovators, citizens and the local economy.
Driving implementation of roles across the ecosystem
To jump-start the innovation district, we crafted an executive vision and roadmap artifact that was distributed to all key stakeholders. Additionally, Upstream presented the vision and plan to city stakeholders in the Mayor’s office, where it was decided by then-Senator Kirk Watson to create the 501(c)(3) organization, Capital City Innovation. The purpose of the organization was to act as a hub for integrating cross-organizational activities in alignment to the roadmap and ultimately deliver on the District’s vision.
“Quote coming soon.”
- Senator Watson’s Office, Texas State Senator