Leadership Forum Unites SoCal’s Innovation Ecosystem

On October 18th, the Alliance hosted our fourth annual SoCal Ecosystem Leadership Forum which is a professionally facilitated one-day intensive workshop focused on uniting and catalyzing the leadership of Southern California’s diverse and compelling innovation nodes which define the SoCal innovation network. This year, 50 ecosystem leaders gathered at the BioscienceLA collaboration hub in Culver City to generate clarity of purpose, goals, and a coordinated strategy to tackle shared challenges and opportunities across the region. The overarching theme this year was focused on clarifying and communicating the impact and overall vibrancy of the innovation ecosystem in Southern California. Or phrased as a question posed to the attendees: “What are the assets and key components that tell the true story of SoCal as a world-class innovation hub?”

The Alliance hosts this annual event as a way to bridge the gap between the often fragmented, geographically dispersed hubs of innovation throughout Southern California. Despite common purpose and often overlapping missions, there is little coordination among these compelling pockets of innovation to address common issues. However, the Alliance believes aligning best practices, external messaging, and delivery of services and resources are necessary to harness the collective potential of the region’s innovation assets to make Southern California the next great innovation ecosystem.

This year’s workshop was facilitated by Kyle Hermans, founder and CEO of Be Courageous (who were also sponsors of the event) and three of his team members. Kyle kicked off the day with an interactive discussion and exercises that established a shared mindset of being courageous and embracing expansive thinking to prepare ourselves for setting big audacious goals that capture the potential of the ecosystem. Once the group was properly aligned, we were treated to brief presentations from a wide range of speakers including:

• Chris Earl from the CA Governor’s Office of the Small Business Advocate on how the California government is supporting innovation through programs that fund small businesses (startups!) such as the iBank program
• Calvin Selth gave us a sneak peek at PledgeLA’s 2021 diversity in tech survey results which showed that although SoCal is well above the national average in funding female and BIPOC founders, we still have a long way to go in many areas
• John Keisler, CEO at Sunstone Management shared how Sunstone is supporting startups and innovation and why they’re making big investments in the SoCal region
• Fred Farina from Caltech gave us a glimpse into what he views as SoCal’s compelling innovation assets and differentiators
• Krisztina ‘Z’ Holly from Good Growth Capital proposed a new (perhaps ‘courageous’?) way to view the push for growth and scale that is more aligned with our planet’s capacity

After a lovely lunch sponsored by Sunstone Management in the courtyard, we separated into breakout groups to dive deeper into articulating and setting ambitious goals for the region around four key ingredients of an innovation ecosystem: Human Capital, Financial Capital, Academic/Research Institutions, and Corporate Environment. The groups each shared back their reflections which were captured in real time by graphic recorder Michelle Boos Stone and written up by the team at Be Courageous. See below for the drawings and here is a link to download the full report.

We posted some photos of the day in our online gallery as well.

Thank you to our generous sponsors Verizon, Amazon, Be Courageous, Annenberg Tech | Annenberg Foundation, Sunstone Management, and BioscienceLA.