Innovate 2 Innovation – An Assessment of California’s Innovation Ecosystem (Phase II) Executive Summary

Abstract

This document is one of three reports produced in response to a request from a bi-partisan group of California Legislators, which asked CCST to assess the state’s innovation ‘ecosystem’ and offer a specific list of recommendations for legislators to enhance the state’s ability to foster and benefit from innovation.

To prepare its response to the Legislators’ request, CCST convened a series of roundtables with academic, industry and research leaders across the state in late 2010 to seek their input on the challenges faced by California and possible solutions that could be achieved by building from California’s S&T capacity. From these meetings, CCST identified two key strategies essential to achieve this task:

• Developing and leveraging public-private partnerships linking California’s assets in education, research, technology, finance, and philanthropy to create social and technical innovations that competitors with less complete infrastructure cannot match.
• Enlisting California’s international competitiveness by enlisting California’s S&T community in finding solutions to two of the State’s major challenges, education and water.

This report contains the Executive Summary of the project and recommendations regarding the three primary focus areas of the study: the California Innovation Initiative, the California Education Innovation Consortium, and the Water Innovation Road Map.