Cleveland Innovation Project moves to scale up water-related industries - Crain's Cleveland Business

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The latest approach to rejuvenating the regional economy began a quiet rollout last week when the federal Economic Development Administration (EDA) awarded a $600,000 grant to the Cleveland Water Alliance (CWA), a 6-year-old nonprofit that will use the money to support the scaling up of the region's water-related industries.

It's the first visible step in a plan to stimulate the region's struggling economy developed by the Cleveland Innovation Project (CIP), a collaboration among two philanthropies — the Cleveland Foundation and the Fund for Our Economic Future — and three business and economic development groups — the Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP), JumpStart Inc. and Team NEO.

The alliance was a reaction to several stark, public reminders that the region's economy is not reversing its long-term decline.

February,"Ts". Then in June 2018, attorney Jon Pinney offered an unvarnished assessment of the regional economy in a City Club of Cleveland speech. "We're getting our butts kicked. We're dead last or near the bottom in most economic metrics," he said at the time. "Our population continues to decline at an alarming rate (and) our economy has not evolved into an innovation economy quickly enough."

The Cleveland Innovation Project was announced in June 2019 and has been spending the past 15 months building an understanding of how best to move forward. The project has a two-part focus. In addition to accelerating innovation in three sectors of the regional economy, a goal is to make Cleveland the leader in minority-led innovation and to increase the economic strength of the region's minority communities.

In a meeting with Crain's reporters at the time of the kickoff announcement, the group's leaders said CIP intended to gather information from 250 companies and organizations of all sizes, and more than 400 individuals, to assess how to turn around the regional economy.

While it plans to continue the region's longstanding focus on health and manufacturing industries — and it expects to make public its plans to build those industry sectors in the coming weeks — Baiju Shah, a senior fellow for innovation at the Cleveland Foundation and a member of CIP's steering committee, said the group thinks the region has an opportunity to become an international leader in developing new water technologies and businesses.

"The partners selected water technology as one of our strategic sectors for focus given Cleveland's unique position, not just being on fresh water but having an industry of companies here that are active in water technology already," he said in a telephone interview. "The growth of the water sector year over year has been stunning, and we believe we are well-positioned as a region to leverage that strong foundation."

The CWA leads a network of corporations, universities, research institutions, public agencies and utilities. It has tallied 300 companies or organizations in Northeast Ohio connected to the water economy. They include everything from businesses and research centers tackling the algal blooms in Lake Erie and companies that make sensors used by municipal water systems to assure quality water supplies, to suppliers of plumbing fixtures and parts.

The sector includes companies such as Kinetico Inc., Moen Inc. and Oatey Co. that, respectively, make water softening and filtration systems and residential plumbing fixture and offer plumbing supplies to professionals and do-it-yourselfers.

The EDA grant, which must be matched locally, will help the CWA develop what it calls its "Blue Economy Innovation Initiative." The goal is to grow the region's water economy by providing water industry innovators from all over the country a place to develop innovative water technology and demonstrate the technology to customers. In June, the Cleveland Foundation made a grant of $300,000 to CWA for part of that match.

"We actually started getting some really positive data about the impact of the water economy in Greater Cleveland," said Bryan Stubbs, executive director and president of the nonprofit. "There are over 16,000 employees in the water economy, and we're adding about 300 net new jobs annually, with (annual) salaries ranging from $62,000 to $109,000. And they do not all require advanced education. We have people with associate degrees all the way up to Ph.Ds."

A key element of the initiative is what the water industry calls test beds, which are demonstration sites for taking lab research out into the real, watery, world.

"There are some existing test beds out there, but they're very limited," Stubbs said. "This could be a game changer for Northeast Ohio, and it's a significant value add for the water (industry)."

Stubbs said one pilot test bed already is operating at the mouth of Old Woman Creek in Huron in Erie County, where the creek flows into Lake Erie.

"We're developing the platform to test new sensors for things such as nutrient monitoring. Nitrogen phosphorus, which leads to harmful algal blooms, is a worldwide problem and huge growth opportunity," he said. "If we can figure out ways to monitor it much more cheaply, we're going to be able to do much better managing it."

While CIP isn't quite ready to make a broader announcement of its plans, in addition to the water economy initiative, it is involved in the plan to create an innovation hub near the planned Cleveland Foundation headquarters on Euclid Avenue at East 66th Street. That's in Cleveland's Midtown neighborhood, which connects downtown with University Circle and has become a home for more than 100 health and technology businesses bundled into what has been dubbed the Health-Tech Corridor.

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