Central Indiana’s innovation constellation

Metropolitan regions no longer build a single flagship innovation district. They build several. That shift creates a new task for economic development: helping multiple innovation geographies operate as one coherent system.

Central Indiana is taking on that task ahead of most peers. Commissioned by the CEOs of Indiana Corporate Partnership (CICP), this report maps the region’s innovation economy down to the building level. It finds an unusually complete discovery-to-delivery system: a region that discovers, invents, produces, and delivers complex products within a single market, with that activity concentrated in a small set of differentiated places and connected by four shared technology platforms.

The report’s recommendation is a constellation: an operating model that gives each district and hub a clear role, links them through platform-enabled interfaces, and makes handoffs among them predictable, routable, and repeatable. Three pathways define how much operating capacity the region can build around that model, and five no-regrets moves give it a place to start.