TBED at the Border

Regional activities supporting innovation and entrepreneurship are reaching across U.S. borders, forming new partnerships with organizations from neighboring countries to broaden their impact and leverage their strengths. Beyond traditional trade relationships, these activities are promoting new opportunities for longer term collaborations with potential to benefit the U.S. and its neighbors. In these cases, a recent trend is that regional technology-based economic development activities are beginning to expand to border nations as a way to maximize impacts.

Through September 2016, the United States has traded nearly $800 billion in goods with Canada and Mexico – 29.6 percent of the nation’s total trade and a rate nearly double that of with China (15.4 percent), according to year-to-date data from the U.S. Census Bureau.  This trade is especially pronounced in metro areas along the federal border, where regional economic development is beginning to take on a broader meaning.

An examination of cross-border collaboration for economic development indicates three different stages of collaboration:

• Identifying Partners: Organizations within the broader, multi-national regional economic development system begin to meet, both formally and informally, to identify shared challenges and potential opportunities.
• Developing Strategies: Partners make commitments to pool resources to conduct research on the region and develop actionable short- and long-term strategies that support the broader area, taking into account pre-existing institutional bandwidth and regional strengths and capabilities.
• Sharing Activities:  Collaborative activities, supported by both core partners and potential new partners, are developed, implemented, and modified based on shared impacts to leverage the assets of the multi-national region.

In the Midwest, a collaborative, cross-border, 22-member committee comprised of economic developers, business incubators, educational institutions, entrepreneurs, and health systems has worked to coordinate a Regional MedHealth Innovation Cluster, dedicated to advancing the Southeast Michigan and Southwestern Ontario region's status as a hub of innovation within the health care industry. For the past two-years, the cluster has helped organize Hacking Health Windsor-Detroit, a cross-border Health IT hackathon featuring over 250 participants, 20 technology pitches, and more than $30,000 in prizes awarded. While the 2015 rendition of the event was held at TechTown’s Detroit headquarters, the 2016 version was at the University of Windsor. In April 2016, the cluster and the Consulate General of Canada hosted the first Canada-U.S. Health IT Innovation Summit as a mechanism to further connect Canadian health IT companies to U.S opportunities.

At the nation’s Southern border, the Borderplex Alliance was developed in 2012 by a merger of two economic development agencies, to function as a private, nonprofit economic development organization funded largely by businesses in the broad geographic region that covers Las Cruces, NM, El Paso, TX, and Juarez, MX.  Released in June 2015, the Alliance’s strategic plan includes an emphasis on spurring innovation and entrepreneurship as a means to diversify and strengthen the regional economy in a sustainable way. As described in the plan, examples of key actions for the Borderplex Alliance around innovation and entrepreneurship are:

• Regionalizing entrepreneurism;
• Building angel funding;
• Coordinating university research;
• Promoting joint applications for research grants from universities;
• Creating an independent contract manufacturing association; and,
• Securing bonding and financing for SME’s.

In the Northwest, leaders from Microsoft, the Washington Roundtable, and the Business Council of British Columbia brought in the Boston Consulting Group to begin to explore opportunities in spring 2016 for Seattle and Vancouver to collaborate on making the cross-border region an international hub for innovation by developing the report Better Together: The Cascadia Innovation Corridor Opportunity. At September’s Emerging Cascadia Innovation Corridor Conference, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed an agreement to examine how  best to strengthen the relationship between Vancouver and Seattle, including more research collaboration between the universities of British Columbia and Washington, as noted in a recent New York Times article. The conference also featured speeches from university presidents, elected officials, and industry CEO’s such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates on topics such as talent, capital, and potential industry opportunities.

Other examples across North America in earlier stages of the cross-border collaboration include:

• The University of California, San Diego and Centro de Ensenanza Tecnica y Superior of Mexico’s Baja California signed a Memorandum of Understanding to strengthen collaboration around entrepreneurship and innovation in March 2016. The San Diego Chamber of Commerce organized the first Cross Border Business Forum in late July, which brought more than 50 industry professionals and business leaders together to discuss foreign direct investment, business development, and technology. The next month, the City of San Diego celebrated the second anniversary of Tijuana EDC Day, which celebrates efforts at continued collaboration at the nation’s Southwestern tip. 
• Earlier this month, Brock University’s Niagara Community Observatory in Ontario and the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning in New York announced they were going to begin conducting workshops to engage the private and public sectors in an effort to develop cross-border approaches to economic prosperity, beginning with the health and life sciences sector.

Taken together, these international partnerships signify a new trend in cross-border regional economic development. By assembling key partners and maintaining relationships based on identified needs, developing short- and long-term actionable strategies, and sharing these activities to support the far-reaching region, economic development practitioners and other meaningful partners can potentially broaden the impacts of their networks to better support economic prosperity.