The Merrimack Valley Regional Innovation Network (MVRIN)
Proposal by: John Michitson & Seth Itzkan, seth.itzkan@gmail.com

Supporting economic growth and workforce development in the Green Technology Sector through innovative approaches to rapid product development and cross-industrial collaboration. |Download PDF|

Diagram1: Open Innovation elements of MVRIN. Click to enlarge.

Diagram 1 above illustrates the Open Innovation elements of MVRIN. It shows the relationships between they key players in the “open marketplace” of intellectual property. There are three levels of access from “Web” – the public – to “Broker” and “Partner”. All the key players, from the Financiers to the Academic Researchers view content through the search engine subject to the rules of their participation.

Highlights
• Leverage the momentum from the Green Chemistry Business Summit (GCBS)
• Brand the region as innovative and eco-friendly
• Attract and retain businesses and create opportunities for workforce Development
• Support cross-industry collaboration
• Support rapid product development in the area of eco-friendly technologies with initial focus on Green Chemistry
• Build on precedents already established in the Commonwealth

I. Overview: Building on Momentum of the Green Chemistry Business Summit

To leverage the momentum from the highly regarded Green Chemistry Business Summit held October 31st, 2007 at the Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, this document recommends establishing The Merrimack Valley Regional Innovation Network (MVRIN). This network will have two purposes:

1) To support rapid product development in the area of eco-friendly technologies through Intellectual Property (IP) brokering and cross-industry and financial sector collaboration - with initial focus on Green Chemistry, and

2) To support robust communication among the larger pool of regional stakeholders including elected officials, regional planners, academia, business and engaged citizenry.

The long-range goal is to brand the region as innovative and eco-friendly and to attract and retain businesses that invent and develop emerging technologies, transform them into profitable, eco-friendly products and provide related services such as workforce development and retail.

Value propositions:

• To brand region as innovative, especially with regard to emerging technologies with an initial focus on green chemistry by successfully rolling out and executing MVRIN tool and conferences for broad collaboration.

• To attract and retain young knowledge workers to the Merrimack Valley by branding region and providing world class workforce development in emerging technologies.

II. "Open Innovation" & Rapid Product Development

The proposed network would employ the model of "Open Innovation" that is streamlining product development and breaking the traditional "silos" of corporate R&D departments. The network will facilitate the interaction of scientists, industrial executives, and financiers to co-develop profitable, eco-friendly products. An online emerging technologies marketplace complimented with face-to-face events and services will spawn corporate interaction and create investor opportunities. This approach is essential to keep the region viable as a center of clean technology industry for a global marketplace.

The Merrimack Valley Regional Innovation Network would tie into and build upon the precedents setting networks already established in the Commonwealth for multidisciplinary collaboration and technology transfer. These models, all of which were represented at the Summit, include: (1) The Green Chemistry and Commerce Council, (2) Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center (MTTC), and (3) InnoCentive and Yet2.com "Open Innovation Marketplaces".

Value propositions

• Help develop green chemistry and other emerging technologies to be catalysts for new industries by linking together broad stakeholders, including all levels of Government, academia, industry, financiers, customers and innovation brokers.

• Help change culture in DoD technology acquisition to enable small technology companies to directly market their next generation products and emerging technologies to DoD in small chunks (e.g. services) in addition to traditional acquisition through DoD system integrators.

Diagram 2: Regional Collaboration, Breaking the "silos". Click to enlarge.

Diagram 2 above illustrates an enhanced networking architecture for regional stakeholder agencies to support robust communications for objectives other than intellectual property trading. A regional communications network using Open Source collaboration tools, such as CivicRM (an evolution of DeanSpace and Drupal), can greatly expand collaboration opportunities for regional stakeholders while improving the agility and cohesiveness or regional branding campaigns. This network can support the automatic propagation of news, events, resource, and forums among participating agencies. This will also server as the basis for the more focused IP sharing network.

III. Robust Communications

In addition to supporting rapid product development, the MVRIN will build a coalition of regional stakeholders committed to economic growth and quality-of-life improvements through a trusted network that facilitates purposeful collaboration, timely and germane information sharing, and robust discussion. Topics from workforce development to international business management will be par for the course.

In addition to the emerging technologies marketplace, MVRIN will have two other key collaboration capabilities: 1. a subscribe capability to allow selected information from any participating web site to be sent to all other participating web sites that subscribe to the information with the appropriate privileges. The goal is to keep the MVRIN participants in sync by providing key information across the board; and 2. a Community of Interest (COI) capability to allow users with a common interest to share access, content and collaboration tools. Members would be invited to participate by the COI initiator and access will be password protected.

This regional stakeholder communications network can be a template for the rest of the Commonwealth. Using the Merrimack Valley as a model, subsequent networks can be established in 4 other principal economic regions in Massachusetts: Greater Boston, Southeast Mass, Central Mass and Western Mass.

Value propositions

• Help partners find new product ideas, principles, practices, and problem-solving methods that give them a competitive advantage for rapid expansion into new markets by exposing them to multidisciplinary, cross-industry and cross-region collaboration;

• Reduce new product and services failures by providing timely feedback from broad stakeholders;

• Share essential business services across region (e.g. conducting business in China is both an art and science - many small companies do not have resources/infrastructure to navigate China’s unique “local” culture and business practices) by partnering with regional companies that provide specialized business services;

• Help companies in the Merrimack Valley reduce the cost of doing business by providing an industry dating service to "match" complementary physical infrastructures, raw materials and byproducts in addition to products and services.

IV. Change Mindsets

One of the key takeaways from the GCBS was the immediate need to change CEO mindsets to think of the environment from the start of product design. At the Summit, Technology Forecasters identified several tools to help change the culture at corporations in the United States to think about the ecology at the same level as profit. One goal of the MVRIN is to change corporate mindsets in the Merrimack Valley to Design for Environment (DfE) and develop and share best practices.

Value proposition:

• Help all levels of Government, industry and non-profits acquire green Information Technology (IT) and other solutions by providing a template, collaboration tools and CEO mindset change campaign;

V. A Coalition of Local Stakeholders

The MVRIN will be formed in close collaboration with the stakeholder agencies that played an instrumental roll in the Green Chemistry Business Summit and that are at the cutting-edge of Green Chemistry and economic innovation in the Commonwealth. These are:

• The Merrimack Valley Economic Development Council
• The Merrimack Valley Venture Forum
• The Greater Haverhill Chamber of Commerce.
• The Warner-Babcock Institute of Green Chemistry
• InnoCentive
• Yet2.com
• Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center
• The Green Chemistry and Commerce Council
• Beyond Benign Foundation
• The Merrimack Valley Planning Commission

VI. Next Steps

Immediate next steps include (1) Developing and launching the MVRIN on-line emerging idea marketplace and collaboration web site; (2) Planning emerging technologies conference for Spring 2008 (3) Create the business model - how are revenues and IP shared?