The Pop-Tart mascot runs across the field prior to the 2024 Pop-Tarts Bowl between the Miami Hurricanes and the Iowa State Cyclones at Camping World Stadium on December 28, 2024 in Orlando, Florida. Pop-Tarts were invented in Michigan. | Julio Aguilar/Getty Images
Over the past century or so, Michigan businesses, universities and lone entrepreneurs have produced a staggering number of innovations used by people around the world.
Among them are electric hospital beds, synthetic penicillin, fiber optics, computer-controlled machine tools, corn flakes, baby food in jars, Pop-Tarts and Kitty Litter.
The University of Michigan played crucial roles in the development of the polio vaccine and the internet. Michigan State University researchers developed a groundbreaking cancer drug 60 years ago still in wide use today. Wayne State University began using human cadaver skulls in automobile crash testing in 1939 and later created what is considered one of the world’s most influential injury biomechanics programs.
Michigan’s auto industry has historically been one big innovation factory, creating or refining hundreds, if not thousands, of inventions, including the movable assembly line, air bags, power steering and brakes, and automatic transmissions.
General Motors even produced a self-driving car in 1956, but it was not considered ready for production. (It still isn’t).
Detroit has been called the “Silicon Valley of the 1920s,” for good reason. The innovations developed by Henry Ford and dozens of other auto pioneers during that era made Detroit the richest city in the country by 1949, as measured by household income, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Today the San Francisco metro area, which encompasses Silicon Valley, has the highest median household income among the 25 largest metro areas in the country, according to census data. Detroit ranks 25th.
The reversal of fortunes of the two metros demonstrates the tight connection between innovation and living standards. A recent study by the nonpartisan Citizens Research Council of Michigan contends state government can and should do more to help spark innovation and entrepreneurial activity in Michigan.
The study found Michigan lags most of its neighboring and nearby states in support for entrepreneurs. Appropriations to 21st Century Jobs Fund, launched in 2005 to help Michigan create an “entrepreneurship ecosystem,” have been cut in half over the past decade, according to the CRC report.
Michigan ranked a respectable 17th in the 2022 Milken Institute’s State Technology and Science Index, cited in the CRC study. But a deeper dive into that study shows some troubling weaknesses.
Most of the state’s strengths are in the amount of university research, the number of engineers, manufacturing exports and foreign investment.
But Michigan ranks in the bottom third of states in areas such as economic dynamism, which includes new initial public stock offerings, patenting activity and capitalizing on new industries, such as artificial intelligence.
“In short, while Michigan has significant capacity to innovate, it is not achieving significant ‘bang for the buck’ in terms of converting that capacity into new high-tech companies and product innovations,” the CRC report said.
A variety of business, university and government leaders are trying to change that reality.
Ford Motor Co. recently completed a magnificent restoration of the long-abandoned Michigan Central train station, designed in part to incubate innovations in transportation mobility. The adjacent Newlab, part of the Michigan Central complex in Detroit, is home to more than 100 startup companies.
The University of Michigan is building a $250 million innovation center in downtown Detroit to prepare workers for new knowledge jobs. Michigan State University is planning to build a $340 million Engineering and Digital Innovation Center in East Lansing.
Mortgage magnate Dan Gilbert recently announced he will build a 220,000 square-foot life sciences research building in downtown Detroit, part of a larger planned innovation district in the city.
And Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last year announced a variety of initiatives designed to reduce governmental barriers to entry for entrepreneurs seeking to invent and commercialize the next big thing.
Dug Song, an Ann Arbor entrepreneur whose Duo Security was acquired by technology communications giant Cisco Systems Inc. for $2.35 billion in 2018, last year said one of those barriers is the state’s long-held practice of protecting its automakers and other large corporations from new entrants.
“[T]oo often, struggling industries, including the auto industry, lobby for regulatory relief and legislative grants at the expense of greater economic vitality and dynamism in the state,” Song wrote in a Detroit Free Press guest column.
A group of Democratic lawmakers, led by state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-Royal Oak), tried to change that tradition by proposing to shift hundreds of millions of dollars from the state’s main business attraction fund to investments in public transit, childcare and community development.
The proposed legislation failed to pass before the end of last year’s lame duck session. It represents a missed opportunity to make Michigan a more attractive place for talent and entrepreneurs, said Ned Staebler, CEO of TechTown, a business startup development organization in Detroit.
“We need to create places where workers and companies want to be,” Staebler told me. “We need transit, housing and neighborhood amenities. It’s abundantly clear that places that have those things are growing.”
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.