From March 26-30, 2012 the German Marshall Fund’s Urban and Regional Policy program led the third in a series of high-level study tours of Detroit practitioners to Turin, Italy as part of the Detroit-Turin Partnership project.  The Detroit-Turin Partnership is a three-year project supported by the Kresge Foundation that seeks to establish enduring relationships between individuals, government agencies, foundations, civil society institutions, universities, and businesses in the two cities through a meaningful exchange of policies and best practices.  Providing logistical and programming support for this initiative were GMF’s long-term partners, the Compagnia di San Paolo, the City of Turin, and Torino Internazionale.

The study tour was designed to connect leaders in each city for an exchange of ideas on urban innovation clusters and economic diversification.  Building on significant successes in diversifying its economy, the City of Turin is seeking to expand its focus on innovation.  At the same time, stakeholders in Detroit are leading efforts to develop a region-wide innovation economy in southeast Michigan.  By leveraging the world-class academic, research, and economic development institutions that exist in the region – as Turin did – these stakeholders are promoting a powerful economic development strategy that could have a potentially transformative impact for Detroit and southeast Michigan.  The focus on innovation and cluster development was one of the areas for further exploration and potential collaboration identified during the initial study tour of the Detroit-Turin Partnership, which was led by Mayor David Bing. 

In close consultation with the Kresge Foundation, the Urban and Regional Policy program identified a fifteen member delegation to travel to Turin.  While not all of the delegation is based in Detroit, they all work in emerging sectors critical to the development of an innovation economy in Detroit and southeast Michigan. 

The delegation consisted of the following members:

Omar Blaik

President, U3 Ventures

Mark Coticchia

CEO, Redwind Innovations LLC

Kerry Duggan

Senior Advisor, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy

David Egner

President & CEO, Hudson-Webber Foundation

Britta Gross

Director, Global Energy Systems and Infrastructure Commercialization, General Motors

Benjamin Kennedy

Program Officer, Community Development, The Kresge Foundation

Trevor Lauer

Vice President, Marketing, DTE Energy

Teresa Lynch

Senior Vice President, Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, U.S.  Department of Environmental Protection

Madhu Prasad

M.D., Director, Henry Ford Health System Innovation Institute

Jean Redfield

Vice President, Public Policy Programs, Next Energy

Jim Saber

Vice President, Business Development and Government Relations, Next Energy

Ned Staebler

Vice President of Economic Development, Wayne State University

Mahendra Ramsinghani

Director, First Step Fund

Cynthia Render-Williams

Environmental Policy Manager, Ford Motor Company

Each of the delegates brought considerable technical and policy expertise to the study tour, allowing them to engage at a high-level with their direct counterparts in Turin.  Equally important, their differing backgrounds enabled comprehensive discussions about the various challenges they confront and opened new dialogues about how to overcome some of those challenges collectively. 

Activities

The study tour agenda was structured to accomplish two major objectives: 1) expose the Detroit delegation to the vision of the major institutional actors driving Turin’s innovation economy, including the government, private, academic, and philanthropic sectors and; 2) provide examples of the programmatic and policy initiatives undertaken by these actors that might be relevant to Detroit and southeast Michigan.  To accomplish these objectives, the delegation met and conducted site visits with a wide range of counterparts, including municipal and regional officials working to streamline public procurement processes and identify emerging economic sectors, private sector officials working to develop new clean energy technologies, and heads of business incubators and research centers working to stimulate investment in hi-tech start-ups and applied academic research.  In each meeting, delegates engaged in question and answer sessions to understand how particular programs or initiatives fit in with the larger city and regional economic development model.

By the end of the week, these meetings led the delegation to understand how various initiatives were beginning to coalesce, by design, into a comprehensive, long term plan to diversify the city and regional economy.  They understood how, by holding firm to a common vision and set of objectives, individuals and institutions across sectors reinforced each other’s efforts.  Most importantly, the delegation realized that because of this alignment of vision, the whole of Turin’s innovation cluster strategy was significantly greater than the sum of its parts. 

However, not all of Turin’s innovation activity is so well-developed. By Detroit (and United States) standards, Turin lacks a strong tradition of entrepreneurship, venture capital to support start-ups, and significant experience in commercializing intellectual property and technology transfer initiatives.  Detroit and Southeast Michigan policymakers thus have a lot to contribute to their Italian counterparts, as the Detroit-Turin relationship continued to develop.

Take Aways

As with any study tour, the individuals in the delegation each gained something different and specific to their fields of interest.  More significant is what the delegation was able to take away as a group.  One of the key takeaways was the role that social cohesion considerations play in the development of innovation policies and strategies.  In Turin and the Piedmont region, a conscious effort is made to ensure that any economic development program incorporates social inclusion policies at the outset, enabling the benefits of prosperity to be shared.  Related to social cohesion, a second key take away is that place matters.  Turin and the Piedmont Region are targeting investments in nodes of innovation and creativity in order to take advantage of specific local institutions and competencies, but also to spread the benefits of prosperity more broadly.  It bears repeating, however, that the most important take away for the Detroit delegation was how Turin has been able to coordinate and align its institutional actors in order to maximize the economic impact of the various innovation activities and existing businesses in the Piedmont region.  If Detroit is to emulate Turin’s accomplishment here, it must align its own institutional actors around the optimization of its existing assets, thereby catalyzing a new era of economic growth for the city and southeast Michigan.