Northwest Indiana has a strong culture of innovation that needs to be promoted better, including in the region, thought leaders and innovators were told Tuesday.
“As a region, we’re pretty humble. We don’t like to talk a lot about ourselves,” Hobart Mayor Josh Huddlestun said.
“I believe we actually are the innovation capital of the world. The world just doesn’t know it yet,” Elevate Ventures CEO Christopher “Toph” Day said of Indiana.
Elevate Ventures, an independent nonprofit, is making the rounds across Indiana to offer an annual report on investing in entrepreneurship. Valparaiso’s summit was one of the stops.
“We have all the ingredients to make the innovation economy a reality here in Northwest Indiana,” WeCreate Media founder and CEO Wade Breitzke said at the innovation conference at Lower Lincoln in downtown Valparaiso.
“I believe we are one of the best-positioned regions in the entire country for the innovate economy,” he said. “We have the future of the digital economy coming here.”
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That’s coming through both a proliferation of data centers locating here and the next generation of computers coming to the Quantum Corridor running through Northwest Indiana.
“We’ve gone from analog to digital. Well, quantum is what’s next,” Northwest Indiana Forum President and CEO Heather Ennis said.
“What that really means is the most fast, secure fiber infrastructure,” Ennis said.
The region invested READI funds into building that quantum infrastructure to promote advanced technology and research and development, she noted.
“The assets that we have here is so amazing. The quantum stuff is going to be the next generation of opportunity for Northwest Indiana,” Ennis said.
At last week’s Midwest Defense Innovation Summit in Indianapolis, she said, “they were all talking to people about quantum, whereas three years ago we were dragging people kicking and screaming to this table.”
“There’s no place like the region, and the future doesn’t belong to just those on the east or the west coast,” Breitzke said.
But getting folks to understand that involves getting engaged with others in the region to share those perceptions.
“In Northwest Indiana, we tend to circle our wagons and shoot in,” Ennis said.
“Stop yelling, start listening,” she said. “Be a beacon of hope.”
“Get off social media and talk to your neighbor,” Huddlestun advised.
“People are excited about the region,” he said, and events like Tuesday’s innovation summit show it. “It was really just filling my cup back up” to attend.
Huddlestun, Ennis and Allyson Straka, founder of Frozen Garden, participated in a panel discussion moderated by Day. Each spoke about ways to improve Northwest Indiana.
Straka spoke of the need to support local businesses. Frozen Garden sources its products from small local farms, she said, and sells frozen smoothies and other healthy products nationwide.
“We ship frozen with dry ice direct to consumers across the United States. We could not do that unless we were in Indiana,” she said.
Straka was honored Tuesday as Elevated Ventures’ Northwest Indiana entrepreneur of the year.
“We need to approach things with sustainability in mind,” Ennis said.
“We’re welcoming people, but we need to create that quality of place,” knocking down barriers to high-density housing, she said.
“We want people to visit here, and then we want those visitors to become vacationers, and then we want those vacationers to become residents,” Ennis said.
“We are nice people,” but that requires encouraging engagement with neighbors. “I think we’ve McMansioned ourselves out of those opportunities to engage.”
Huddlestun spoke of the need for additional affordable housing – not just for what people of lower incomes can afford, but across the spectrum of price points.
“We get approached a lot about what does that next housing sector look like,” he said.
Huddlestun, a millennial, knows that younger generations have different needs. “The house with the dog and two kids isn’t exactly what they’re looking for.”
Elder members of Hobart’s City Council might say apartment is a four-letter word, but Valparaiso’s example – 400 high-density housing units downtown in the last 20 years or so, Mayor Jon Costas has said – shows apartments can be nice.
“Building a community where we’ve given the people the tools to leave but they choose to stay” is key, Huddlestun said. “We used to take for granted that we have the mills and people came here to work.” That’s no longer true.
Convince people to stay in the region, he said, and “I think we’ll blow the roof off this place.”
“Change is hard when you stop changing, so keep changing,” Ennis said. Be nimble. “The sedimentary mentality is what will kill us.”
Huddlestun is excited about the advent of data centers, including Amazon’s massive investment in his city. It’s building the future economy, he said.
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He accentuated the positives. “There’s a lot of myths around data centers, and they’re not the movie villain everyone portrays them to be.”
Huddlestun went to Loudon County, Virginia, the nation’s data center capital. “What we found out is not all data centers are built the same,” he said.
The money Amazon promises to bring to Hobart is staggering. “We think over the course of the next 35 years, we’ll receive additional revenue of about $1.5 billion.”
“The city of Hobart will receive about $200 million in the first three or four years and then $50 million a year after that,” Huddlestun said.
“The region is really good about attracting manufacturing,” he said, but it also needs to attract talent. “$1.5 billion over the next 35 years will help us do that.”
Amazon has already committed to paying 120% of the cost of power generation, he said, and it’s paying for $80 million in necessary utility upgrades that other ratepayers otherwise would have had to pay through rate increases, Huddlestun said.
“We created a tech campus so it’s all housed in one spot,” he said.
Addressing residents’ concerns about heavy water usage, Huddlestun said the plan to use 14 million gallons of water annually sounds high, but it’s less than the average golf course or 200 homes. “A good portion of the year, they just open the windows and pull in outside air,” another reason to locate in Northwest Indiana.
Data centers are becoming even more essential with the growth of artificial intelligence.
“Utilize AI for idea generation” and process improvements, Straka advised entrepreneurs.
“There are so many things that we could be doing.”
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.