Unleashing State, Regional, and National Competitiveness with Radical Collaboration

Overview

The future of innovation will rely increasingly on multidisciplinary and multidomain partnerships that connect the research, development, and deployment of new technologies at scale. While the individual players in the Mountain West’s innovation ecosystem are capable of incredible things on their own, their ability to compete nationally and globally will be supercharged if they work together to solve pressing issues and turn new ideas into reality.

Key Session Insights

For regions to benefit from a collaborative spirit, the first step may be to change the way we define them. Radical collaboration is an idea borne out of the first Competitiveness Conversation in Tennessee from remarks of Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, challenging listeners to go further in their regional innovative partnerships. Senior Advisor for Government Relations at Boise State University Mr. Peter Risse began by asking a foundational question: if regional collaboration is so important, what do we mean by “region?” Preconceived or intuitive ideas of what a region is or isn’t may be standing in the way of valuable partnerships and opportunities.

The first to answer was Community & Regional Engagement Director for Idaho National Laboratory Dr. Glen Murrell, who raised up the experience of Wyoming as an example. Having previously worked in the oil and gas industry there, he has seen the transformation of the way the state things about regional integration. In the earlier part of his career there, Wyoming was content to “go it alone” as far as fossil fuel exploitation went. However, as the industry has diversified, the state eventually found that it wouldn’t have the research and technology resources to execute on new opportunities alone. This all but required a regional partnership approach, the state working with Idaho National Laboratory among others to develop local capabilities. A similar story is playing out with Idaho National Laboratory itself, as a focus only on southeastern Idaho where it is located would hamper its ability to function. Instead, it, along with other Idaho institutions, have formed networks to allow easier exchanges of ideas and information, and better cooperation. In Murrell’s view, while geography is important, it is these networks that define a region.

This view was echoed by President of Utah State University Dr. Elizabeth Cantwell, who pointed out that a region can also be defined as a function of problem common sets. The Mountain West region faces challenges that are unique to it compared to every other part of the country; it may be worthwhile to view the region as the sum of the people dealing with the same problems. In this manner of thinking, geographic distance becomes far less of a determining factor than similarity of the economic, social, and technological conditions. By bringing together a group of people and organizations to address shared grand challenges, regions can be at once defined and have greater capacity to solve these issues.

Even beyond collaboration between institutions, individual organizations have the opportunity to engage in region-making activities. President of Idaho State University Dr. Robert Wagner described his school’s approach to community engagement. In each of the four communities where the school has campuses, it is the ethos of Idaho State to ask what jobs, opportunities, and expertise they can contribute. In this way, the school itself begins to build a region of communities with a common linkage to the school, and able to draw on resources from both the university system and other parts of the state it is connected to.

The Mountain West is already home to many successful partnerships, but there is always room for more. One of the fields that the Mountain West is emerging as a leader in is advanced energy production, and to support the growth of this ecosystem, the Idaho Advanced Energy Consortium (IAEC) was founded. Senior Director of Regulatory & Strategic Affairs at the Idaho Environmental Coalition and Co-Chair of the IAEC Ms. Dana Kirkham described the goal of the Consortium as bringing together industry, educators, government, and suppliers to strengthen the regional ecosystem. With focuses on workforce pipeline development, organizing the supplier network, and educating state and local leaders to “speak the language” of advanced energy so they can be effective advocates, the IAEC aspires to build a cadre of people and organizations ready to take Idaho’s advanced energy ecosystem to the next level.

One partner who garnered universal praise from panelists was Idaho National Laboratory, with its ability and willingness to cooperate on a host of project areas seen as an invaluable resource for the region. Both Wagner and Cantwell described how the collaboration between researchers, comprising both students and faculty, at their universities and Idaho National Laboratory had produced stunning results that would not have been possible alone. Cantwell specifically called out AI as an area of particular success, noting that, while funding was still an open question, these partnerships had allowed them to assemble all the pieces of an AI-driven sector in the Mountain West. However, as national laboratories have access to unique revenue streams through their status as a public agency, they can help galvanize new economic structures both where they are physically located and where they have partnerships.

However, there are major impediments to building out these partnerships even further. One of the most disruptive is the inordinate amount of regulatory oversight associated with technology transfer. Limits on what can and cannot be transferred out of national laboratories or federally funded university research projects hamstrings the abilities of these research institutions to work with businesses and other partners to get their innovations out into the wider world. It is not difficult to find examples of such limits; universities and national laboratories may at times face statutory restrictions on partnerships, especially on a geographic basis, despite the earlier point that innovation may be bolstered by being more flexible in how we define regions. Further, long and burdensome processes to approve technology transfers has a chilling effect on partnerships. As Kirkham put it, “You can’t accelerate innovation or tech transfer if it takes seven years to get a license to start.” Reforming these regulatory structures will take a straitjacket off collaboration, allowing for new possibilities that, before, would have been economically infeasible. But these reforms can only come if pushed for collectively.

Establishing sustainable ecosystems and governance structures can supercharge innovation. While partnerships between institutions are valuable tools that can produce incredible results, even broader, more wide-ranging collaborations can help shift the entire regional paradigm. As Murrell pointed out, the governance problems that inhibit innovation exist at all levels but could be bypassed by common governance. A single, unified structure for innovation partnerships could help bypass the conflicting and multi-layered sets of rules governing partnerships and technology between national laboratories, universities, businesses, and other organizations. He put forward the Tennessee Valley Authority as an example of an institution that had successfully convened to solve the innovation issue of electrification and suggested that the lack of a comparable authority in the Mountain West to deal with its own innovation problems was a missed opportunity. He made the ambitious proposal that the players in the region create a “Mountain West Infrastructure Authority” to oversee the expansion and implementation of common innovation projects, bypassing the often-limiting governing structures that currently exist.

Regional collaboration can yield great rewards, if partners can get out of their silos. As the panel concluded, the participants noted that, besides all the steps towards better collaboration already discussed, one overarching issue remained: getting away from previous divisions. Kirkham put forward two goals to make that a reality. First, institutions and individuals in the region need to listen better, putting aside an “I’m right” mentality to better understand the perspectives of those in other contexts. Second, innovators in the Mountain West need to speak to everyday citizens in the region, rather than just those who participate in events like the Competitiveness Conversations. By putting aside ego, better solutions and partnerships can be found.