Originally published on February 15, 2018 by Staff Writer on BoldBusiness.com
In the recently concluded Innovate Sac as part of Sacramento’s celebration of Global Entrepreneurship Week, the Mayor’s Office for Innovation and Entrepreneurship head Louis Stewart announced that the city would soon become the Sacramento Urban Technology Lab (SUTL). Inspired by Atlanta’s Technology Square, the city would be a hub for innovation and technology.
Triple Helix Innovation Model
Stewart is aware that this will take some time, citing the 20 years of development that it took for Atlanta’s Technology Square. He also explained that the SUTL uses the “triple helix” economic innovation model. The Triple Helix Stanford University thesis posits that economic development requires the combination of elements from the academia, industry and government to initiate social and institutional formats. This will allow the transformation and application of knowledge. The SUTL will have seven focus areas: sustainability and clean tech, life sciences and health tech, food innovations, cybersecurity, civic and government tech, the Internet of Things (IoT) and workforce development.
The transformation will require a continuous effort from the community, building from the ground up and pushing innovations out the door. It would require years of collective work for a mentality of innovation to take root.
A practical example of this initiative is the use of the city or parts of it for autonomous vehicles . Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and other community leaders, including U.S. Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) support these initiatives in building Sacramento as a tech sector. Mayor Steinberg discussed the vision for the city as a place where new things happen, and where the Urban Technology Lab is not a single building or campus, but the entire city.
Stewart explained that the announcement does not mean that there would be funding for the projects. Instead, it was meant as a rallying cry for technology companies to make Sacramento a research and development area. The call puts a name to the area’s innovation economy with its numerous resources, and the tech companies it encompasses.
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