Matt Enstice - City Forward: How Innovation Districts Can Embrace Risk and Strengthen Community

In the continued craze over innovation and the pursuit of place-based innovation, what continues to be undervalued, if not overlooked entirely, is the necessity of reflective leadership. Harnessing the soft and hard assets of anchor institutions (such as universities and medical institutions) and innovation districts to help achieve more equitable communities demands leadership.

Without leadership, large institutions and companies will never come together to pursue collaborative approaches to research and development, they will not create a competitiveness agenda that values the sharing of ideas and assets, and they will fail to translate their strengths into lifelong opportunities for adjacent communities.

Leadership is a characteristic I described in the Brookings research paper The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation in America. Districts are an emerging geography of innovation found predominantly in cities and urbanizing areas that strive to strengthen their competitiveness through a collaborate to compete model. The research argued how and why the collapse-back of innovation into cities was a growing phenomenon due to the convergence of multiple economic, demographic, and cultural trends. Collectively,these trends revalued high-quality, compact places where people, including talented workers, exchange highly complex knowledge and work to advance collaborative forms of innovation in close quarters, easing the friction of time and travel. Although all this sounds highly theoretical, the paper documented the rise of a new kind of local and collaborative leader ambitious to do more.

In this book, Matt Enstice gives us a view of what reflective leadership looks like and feels like and shows us how difficult it can be. Matt and his colleagues at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC) understand how the development of buildings is only the physical manifestation of mission-driven, deeply needed ambitions. For Matt and a growing chorus of people in Buffalo and around the worldfrom many different backgrounds and experiencesa core mission is the process of rebalancing long-standing inequities that limit the true potential of people of color, economically disadvantaged people, women, people experiencing homelessness, and many other groups.

Emerging primarily in the cores of cities, innovation districts in the United States are often adjacent to neighborhoods characterized by high levels of poverty and low levels of educational attainment. The physical proximity of asset-rich institutions to communities often at or below the poverty line is a painful contrast that organizations, such as BNMC, fight to correct.

The challenging but important work of balancing innovation and inclusive growth is, and should be, a core mission of anchor institutions and innovation districts around the globe. In nearly every corner of the world, disparities related to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and other factors can be found in any aspect of regional economies, including education, workforce training, access to good jobs and career advancement, pay, leadership opportunities, startup activity, and access to capital. As a result, regional economic growth is restricted and, more crucially, economic mobility and access to prosperity for marginalized groups in the United States and globally are severely limited. The data on persistentintergenerational poverty among Black people in the United States, for example, establish clear linkages to residential and school segregation policies.

This focus on equity also helps explain why you will not find a chapter here that is devoted to a traditional definition of city building. Instead, this book provides a powerful and accessible narrative about what it means to rebuild and reimagine community. In his effort to braid together commonly divided worlds, Matt paints a picture of unbalanced power, painful memories, and mistakes but, most importantly, the tenacity to keep trying until there is some form of change.

I close by sharing how this book reminds me of why I founded, and now lead, The Global Institute on Innovation Districts, a new not-for-profit organization dedicated to the growth of innovation districts worldwide. This ambition was not borne out of a desire to keep the status quo; it was sparked by the ambition to alter the dangerous growth trajectory our societies have created. The painful inequalities and systemic racism (something that I and far too many others experience) that continue to increase, the sprawling development patterns and polluting practices that undercut the ability to save our planet, and the myriad health challengesfrom cancer to diabetes to the inability to access healthcarethat continue to plague our communities are all high on the daunting list of challenges we face.

Anchor institutions and innovation districts, though not a solution for all things, if designed by leaders like Matt, can become our worlds place-based problem solvers. From what I see, feel, and have come to understand, as I traverse the globe to support the growth of innovation districts, geographies aligned and equipped to be problem solvers are our only path forward.