Creating more high-quality jobs remains one of the defining challenges facing regions across the United States, particularly those without the traditional innovation assets of R1 research universities or dense venture capital ecosystems.
This paper explores a different “big bet” approach. The core premise is that innovation-driven companies, rather than business attraction or generic entrepreneurship programming, are the most reliable engines of durable job creation and economic mobility.
This approach intends to invert the traditional innovation model by starting with real problems inside established companies, pairing those needs with distributed academic talent, and deliberately developing entrepreneurs to turn validated problem/solution pairs into new, scalable ventures.
If successful, it offers a replicable alternative for mid-sized and post-industrial regions across the United States, including Northeast Indiana.
Why This Matters: Jobs, Opportunity, and Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful mechanisms for economic mobility in the American economy—whether an individual becomes an entrepreneur or works for one. Longitudinal research from the Kauffman Foundation shows that, on average since 1977, all net new job creation in the United States has come from firms less than five years old1, with only a handful of short-term exceptions during economic shocks.
Not all new firms contribute equally. Innovation-driven enterprises, or those built around novel products, technologies, or business models, have an outsized impact on job quality and regional resilience. Research by economists such as Enrico Moretti demonstrates that innovation-intensive firms generate strong local multiplier effects2, supporting additional employment and higher wages across regional economies.
The Limits of Traditional Economic Development
Despite this evidence, most regional economic development strategies remain anchored in two approaches:
- Business attraction, often through tax incentives or subsidies
- Broad, early-stage entrepreneurship support, typically funded by philanthropy or government
Business attraction strategies frequently produce zero-sum or negative-sum outcomes, as regions compete to subsidize firms that would have located somewhere regardless, often placing them in direct competition with existing local employers. Meanwhile, traditional entrepreneurship programming tends to emphasize inspiration and accessibility rather than outcomes, promoting entrepreneurship as a lifestyle choice rather than as a disciplined engine of job creation.
These approaches may be necessary table stakes, but according to research by Brookings and others, they rarely produce outsized or durable economic impact3.
What Works and Why It’s Hard to Replicate
Regions that consistently outperform (such as Boston, Austin, Boulder, and Indianapolis) do so through close collaboration among three actors:
- R1 research universities
- Established innovation-driven companies
- Venture capital and entrepreneurial talent
In these ecosystems, applied research often emerges from industry/academic collaboration, and when a superior solution is identified, capital and entrepreneurial talent are rapidly assembled to commercialize it. This model works, but it assumes the presence of an R1 university and a dense venture ecosystem, assets that many regions simply do not have.
The challenge is therefore clear: How do regions without R1 institutions generate an outsized innovation and job-creation bounce?
The Big Bet: Inverting the Innovation Model
This initiative proposes a different answer: invert the traditional innovation model by starting with industry problems rather than academic research agendas.
In this system, innovation begins inside established, innovation-driven companies that already employ significant workforces and understand real market needs. These firms identify product gaps, process bottlenecks, or unmet customer demands and then engage academic talent, often from non-R1 institutions, regional campuses, or remote research partners, to solve defined technical challenges.
When a solution shows commercial promise, entrepreneurs are deliberately trained and embedded to turn that problem/solution pair into a new, scalable company. Entrepreneurship, in this context, is treated not as inspiration but as applied workforce development: building talent capable of transforming validated opportunities into businesses that create good jobs.
The Role of Innovation System Hubs
Organizations like the Northeast Indiana Innovation Community (NIIC) play a critical, catalytic systems role by ensuring that the three core inputs required for innovation: capital, talent, and place, are made readily available to innovators at the right time and in the right combinations. NIIC does not replace workforce, higher education, or economic development organizations; rather, it coordinates across them to reduce friction for companies and entrepreneurs working to commercialize new ideas.
By aligning industry problems with academic expertise, entrepreneurial talent, and capital pathways, this model enables innovation to move more quickly from concept to company. While workforce outcomes naturally follow (through new hiring, applied learning, and job creation) they are a consequence of innovation activity, not a shift in mission. This systems approach allows regions to produce innovation-driven companies that scale, remain local, and create good jobs without fragmenting responsibilities across disconnected programs.
The “big bet” then is:
The next wave of regional innovation will come from catalyzing systems that start with industry problems, not universities, and deliberately manufacture entrepreneurs to turn those problems into scalable, innovation-driven companies that create and retain good jobs.
Rebalancing the Talent Equation: From Supply to Demand
Across many mid-sized regions, public and philanthropic investment has understandably focused on the supply side of talent, particularly higher education and workforce training aligned to next-generation manufacturing technologies such as IoT, automation, and artificial intelligence. The underlying assumption has been that expanding the pipeline of skilled graduates would, on its own, enable local manufacturers and innovation-driven employers to survive and thrive in the Fourth Economy.
Increasingly, however, regions are confronting a harder question: are there enough employers prepared to productively absorb both the quantity and the quality of talent being produced? In many cases, the challenge is not a lack of skilled graduates, but a lack of clarity inside firms about where to invest in technology, automation, and innovation so that new talent can be effectively justified and deployed.
Viewed collectively, networks of smaller regional universities, often spanning multiple counties or even state lines, produce engineering and technical talent at a scale comparable to flagship institutions elsewhere. In isolation, these institutions are often perceived as limited; together, they represent a significant but under-leveraged engine of talent development and applied research intelligence. The missing link is demand-side alignment: helping employers identify which problems to solve, which parts of their innovation stack to upgrade, and which capabilities to build next.
Well-established startup frameworks, such as the Lean Canvas, offer practical mechanisms to close this visibility gap. By helping established companies reassess problem/solution fit and identify specific points of innovation leverage, the process puts “headlights” on where automation, digital tools, or new technical capabilities will create the most value. This naturally surfaces both near-term hiring needs and opportunities for applied collaboration with university faculty. As faculty and students engage in solving real company problems, firms gain clearer innovation pathways, universities gain relevance and visibility, and students gain experience that often translates directly into employment, reinforcing a demand-led system for talent, innovation, and good job creation. System hubs like the NIIC should missionally apply these frameworks to these employers to catalyze these outcomes.
National Collaboration
Programs such as the Rockefeller Big Bets Fellowship are helping to accelerate this initiative by providing national visibility, peer learning, and strategic refinement at a moment when the model is ready to scale. It would help translate regional proof points into a coherent national framework, strengthen partnerships with funders and policymakers, and support the development of shared metrics for job quality, retention, and long-term opportunity creation. Equally important, it might situate this work within a broader community of leaders rethinking systems for economic mobility and shared prosperity.
Why This Is a Bet Worth Making
This approach challenges a core assumption of U.S. innovation policy: that high-quality job creation requires proximity to elite research institutions or large venture markets. It also addresses a growing imbalance between talent supply and employer demand by helping companies clarify where innovation, automation, and new capabilities are truly needed. By aligning industry problems, distributed academic expertise, and entrepreneurial execution, this model offers a faster, more scalable path for regions seeking inclusive growth, economic resilience, and upward mobility, while ensuring that investments in education and workforce development translate into real, durable job opportunities.
- “The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction,” Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 9 September 2010 ↩︎
- “The Multiplier Effect of Innovation Jobs,” MIT Sloan Management Review, 6 June 2012 ↩︎
- “From Federal Investment to Regional Economic Transformation: A New Model Linking Industry Growth to Economic Mobility,” Brookings, 24 July 2025 ↩︎
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