Welcome Address, Day II

Foreign. Welcome everyone to day two of the US Small Business Administration's third annual Innovation Ecosystem Summit. I'm Brittany Sickler, director of SBA's new Ecosystem Development Division here in the Office of Investment and Innovation. We are beyond excited to have everyone back with us again today. Well, remember if you weren't able to join yesterday, you can catch up on the insightful and exciting conversations when the recording is posted and it will be for all of you to enjoy.

Hello and thank you for being here. I am Jennifer Shih. I'm the Acting Deputy Associate Administrator for the Office of Investment and Innovation and today you'll be hearing some common themes as those that were presented yesterday around collaboration, partnership, breaking silos and more. We will also get the opportunity to hear from you with a listening session during the breakouts. But before we just jump into all the amazing programming we have today, we do want to give a little orientation for why we're here together.

Thanks, Jen. You know, for three years we have put together this team and vision to make the Summit happen. We've taken your feedback and tried to bring together a solid mix of people to talk both about the new and old challenges in what we refer to as the Innovation Ecosystem. The Investment Innovation Ecosystem Development Division officially started this year 2023, but was built off of work taking place for many years prior. Not just executing and monitoring programs in the investment and innovation sectors, but building an institutional understanding of how different elements impact the start and growth of innovation or technology led small businesses. My team is challenged to fully integrate the agency's patient capital programs, entrepreneurial and investment networks, along with broader federal support for innovation to truly unlock access to capital and other resources across the country.

And they have very enthusiastically taken up that challenge. But formalizing the creation of the Investment and Innovation Ecosystem Development Division was not the only change we made last year in the Office of Investment and Innovation. We are really aiming to strengthen our operations overall, improve alignment across the innovation and investment programs, and really empower all the talented individuals within our office, across the entire Small Business Administration and really across the entire Federal government in order to meet the needs of small business owners and innovators and entrepreneurs across the entire country. And particularly, we've been working on efforts to ensure equitable access to the opportunities and resources for those in particular who have been underrepresented and under capitalized. So you're going to get to hear a lot more about the exciting developments from the patient capital investment side of our house in a few sessions later today, including our keynote Fireside Chat with Some true champions for diversifying investments to maintain U.S. competitiveness.

And what a tall task. I think throughout all of that. Many of us here today would agree. Innovators in general benefit from champions and champions of all kinds. So who are those champions and what do they do? If you haven't already, please check out those panels from yesterday and of course today that are going to be exploring strong lessons learned, questioning what's been done in the past, surfacing thoughtful questions for all of us as we move forward.

A really key theme that has been and will continue to be is partnership. Like true partnership, figuring out where do each of our strengths lie? Where can we achieve the impacts we want to have? And really sorting out how. What do we each have to contribute? How do we fit in the ecosystem? And it's not just us as individuals, you and me, it's really us. Right? Not having to do everything by ourselves but trying or really what we want to do is support those innovators, those entrepreneurs, support the transformative ideas and help turn those ideas into reality and into positive impact. So this is really a team sport, just like making movie, right? You see those hundreds and thousands of names scrolling by as the credits and we know that you are out there. All of those people and organizations that play play those different roles to support an entrepreneur's journey.

Exactly. I won't be able to scroll through all the credits right now, but I do want to highlight at least some of the kinds of organizations that signed up to be with us over the course of these two days. We have our regional innovation clusters, other kinds of technology hubs, folks that are convening and influencing within technology sectors from developing more robust supply chains, better positioning small businesses to work with large industry players, surfacing hard and soft infrastructure needs. We also have a whole slew of accelerators, incubators, folks that are able to try to fill in gaps, that are specializing in specific technology areas or under capitalized yet promising entrepreneurs orchestrating this needed technical expertise and deep mentorship. We have a variety of investors, folks who are analyzing the capital landscape, providing capital and following the high risk government investments that we see taking place. We have small business development centers, SBDCs and other kinds of business centers. Some of those folks covering almost the full spectrum of small businesses, but able to dive deeper into again the needs of the companies working on R and D or being able to commercialize a technology and how do they structure their their business and access capital. And we have our federal and state technology partnerships, also known as fast, fully focused on America's Seed fund covering the majority of the country now with centralized SBIR and STTR contacts increasing the odds that companies across the country, no matter where, can at least know the people who know the things to get to what they need.

Yes, it really is. Trying to list out that full list is even just organizationally can be challenging because you of course you just named a number of different resource partners. We also have the scientists and engineers that directly work for the federal government through the federal agency labs. We have the innovators who are joining us today who are obviously a core part of the innovation ecosystem as the people that we're trying to serve and looking to support their journey and hear their feedback. And of course the federal and state agencies, you know, all the federal agencies shaping policies and programs, trying to incentivize for the impacts and behaviors to achieve our missions as well as the state agencies that are aiming to align incentives, funding and creating the local conditions and environments that are going to really support innovation.

Thanks Jen. I know it's quite a mix and perhaps you were able to meet some of those other groups and people in our networking happy hour before and after yesterday's session as well as today. I did want to make a comment that this summit is not the only thing that we do. Other convenings even this last year included America's Seed Fund Week, a Startup Expo, restarting the in person SBIR Road Tour, now America's Seed Fund Road Tour and of course our monthly calls, really the staple that keeps us together and that Jamila has mentioned and supported here throughout. We connected and trained esos entrepreneurship organizations throughout the year at events like with some of our partners at NBIA, SSTI and TechConnect as well as larger scale events such as CES, the Consumer Electronics show and south by Southwest. We had a whole series of funding go out just in our area. Funding 7.25 million in accelerator prizes with the GAFC, the Growth Accelerator Fund competition, and most recently $2 million in the Regional Innovation Clusters. We have more to come out early next year on our programs in those sectors.

Yes. So definitely make sure you sign up and keep in touch. And you know, really again, I kind of talked a little bit about how federal agencies and state agencies, we're working to create the environment and the conditions that keep and support you and the entrepreneurs you support innovating. And we look at this as a key job of ours to really partner with everyone in the ecosystem to achieve common goals. And I really love this quote from Robin Wall kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which was reciprocity is an investment in abundance. And the Small Business Administration SBA is really looking forward to having this true partnership with you in creating an abundance of opportunity and innovation for, for the entrepreneurs as well as for you, the entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial, spirited individuals who are helping to support the entrepreneurs. So really, I want to encourage you to take full advantage of this event, all of the possible connections and collaborations that all of the different convenings we do participate in or organize that we have to offer.

Thank you, Jen. And of course, you know, beyond the excitement that the two of us obviously have for this community, for this kind of chance to be together at this scale, you know, I really do want to emphasize how important it is for us to understand and look at this network of networks and the potential impact that we can have by coming together. We want to welcome those of you who are new to this, new to either us, new to this kind of conversation where we're both understanding our individual assets, our needs, what's available, as well as looking across the landscape of what else is taking place in this large web of a network of networks. But we also want to strengthen those of you and support the work many of you have been doing for years, decades, and be able to make sure that, you know, across the board, to Jen's point, that we are looking at what we have in that broad vision together.

Yes, we, we hope that this was a somewhat helpful orientation to thinking through why we brought this group together. And we hope that that means that you, you hear yourself in it. And now it is my immense pleasure to get to bring Jamila Corbett to the stage. If you've been a regular or occasional or maybe soon to be member of our community with the monthly Innovation Ecosystem calls, you get to see that Jamila's energy is what keeps us on track and engaged throughout the day. So thank you so much and I'm going to hand it over to the incredible Jamila Corbett.

Thank you. Welcome Jamila.

Welcome, Jamila.

Thank you, Jennifer.

Thank you, Brittany. I am thrilled to be back here with you all today at the third annual Innovation Ecosystem Summit. One of the perks that I just love about being in a virtual event is the opportunity to connect with people at scale. So let's do some roll call in the chat, share your location and the name of your organization. Who knows, maybe your neighbor or next partner is right here, here in the room. I'm Jamilah Corbett, engagement director at established on behalf of the SBA and I am located in the Washington D.C. area. Do I have any neighbors here. I see Jovalin from Texas, Paul from Florida, Jack from Arizona, Eugene from Tampa, to Linda from Utah, Kevin from Baltimore, and many others. So while you do that, I need to go over some housekeeping to ensure that we're all enjoying our time together today. First, your input is really important to us, so if you have a question, just simply type it in the chat. Also, closed captions are available. If you need it, just click the CC button at the bottom of your screen. If for some reason you're experiencing technical difficulties, maybe you can see but can't hear, or hear but can't see, take a deep breath. It's going to be okay. Just try refreshing your screen first. Usually that takes care of the problem. If that doesn't work, please email us at supportst us. We also encourage you to share your learnings and aha. Moments with us and highlights on social media using the hashtag. This is my hashtag symbol eso summit 2023 and also see the future. And you can Tag us on LinkedIn and X well XBIRGov. And since we're in a virtual environment, we have to find creative ways to express ourselves as such. Please utilize the emojis and or GIFs to let us know how you're feeling about the content. We also share our gratitude after each panel by giving our speakers a round of emoji or gif applause. Go ahead and experiment with the gifs and emojis right now. But with that said, our team will be monitoring the chat closely to ensure this space remains a safe, safe environment for you to express yourself. We're all professionals here, and the expectation is that we conduct ourselves as such. That means no inappropriate language, no inappropriate emojis, no inappropriate gifts. Please no spamming the chat with your links, your business links. Please no bullying, no hate speech. We have a zero tolerance policy for that. We just don't do that here. Okay. All right, we're going to take a quick break. Oh, I love the emojis. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll hear from the Associate Administrator, Bailey Devries and her panel on critical technologies and small businesses, so stay tuned.