An outside view of a place that gets the hard part of an innovation ecosystem right, and the organisation holding it together.
We build deep tech businesses for a living. Most of that work has happened in the UK, in Oxford, Birmingham, Newcastle and Strathclyde. But Hatch is a transatlantic firm. So the other half of our address is Grand Rapids, Michigan. People ask us why. This is the answer.
Ingredients are not a system
An innovation ecosystem is easy to describe. Still, it is genuinely hard to build. Every region has the raw ingredients by now. For example, a couple of universities, some research, a fund or two, and decent coffee. But ingredients on their own don’t make a system.
What turns them into one is connective tissue. In other words, it is the people whose job is to get the researcher, the funder, the engineer and the first customer into one room. Most places get that part wrong. Grand Rapids, however, gets it right.
A city that keeps reinventing itself
None of this is accidental, and none of it is new. Grand Rapids has reinvented itself before. In the nineteenth century, for instance, it was Furniture City. Some of the finest furniture in the world came from a town with timber, a river and people who could build things.
But when that industry faded, the region didn’t cling to it. Instead, it built the Medical Mile. That meant roughly a billion dollars of public and private investment. Now the cluster is anchored by the Van Andel Institute, a Big Ten medical school and a life sciences base that employs thousands. Moreover, it sits on ground where an ageing manufacturing economy might otherwise have declined.
So a place like that understands something a lot of places don’t. An economy is a thing you build on purpose, over and over. In short, today’s innovation scene is just the latest version of a very old local habit.
The players
The range of it is the first thing you notice. For example, The Right Place has spent decades on the unglamorous work of business attraction and retention. Meanwhile, Start Garden and The Factory back and scale early-stage founders. Similarly, the Michigan SBDC advises thousands of small businesses a year, free of charge.
Then there is the research engine. The MSU Research Foundation and Spartan Innovations turn university research into companies. Van Andel Institute runs world-class biomedical research, and the spinouts follow. Michigan Capital Network and its angel groups fund the ventures that are ready. For instance, BAMF Health is building AI-enabled molecular imaging downtown. Finally, the universities keep it all supplied with talent, among them Grand Valley, Calvin, Davenport, Ferris and Aquinas.
The problem with a lot of organisations
That is a lot of organisations. But left to their own devices, they have a habit of not connecting. They form committees. Then they duplicate each other. Everyone contributes something, yet nobody quite owns the result.
We have written before about how that exact failure kills university spinouts. Likewise, an ecosystem suffers from the same disease on a bigger scale. That is, unless something deliberately holds it together.
What the Chamber actually does
In Grand Rapids, a lot of that something is the Grand Rapids Chamber.
Of course, it is easy to underestimate a chamber of commerce. Most amount to a networking breakfast and a ribbon-cutting service. This one, however, is a different animal. Under Rick Baker, it has grown into the connective tissue of the region. Still, the substance backs it up.
Because more than 800 members shape its advocacy priorities through the Government Affairs committees, the business community speaks to government with one clear voice. Its leadership programmes, from Emerging Leaders to Women in Leadership, are building the people who will run these institutions next. In addition, the Chamber Foundation backs work well beyond business, from Silent Observer to the Downtown Pathways Project. So it was named a national Chamber of the Year finalist in 2025, and it isn’t hard to see why.
Closing the distance
In particular, the Chamber shrinks the distance between people who need each other. Take a founder looking for a first customer, a university that wants a commercial partner, or an investor chasing deal flow. The Chamber is where those paths cross. None of that is soft work. Because in deep tech, distance is the real enemy. Every month a decision waits for the right two people is, in the end, a month of options quietly lost.
Why we joined
So we joined the Grand Rapids Chamber to be inside all of this, not standing next to it. After all, our working lives are spent getting engineering and commercial reality into one room at the right moment. Grand Rapids has built a whole region around the same idea. In the end, the Chamber is a big part of why it holds.
We are proud to be members. To everyone doing the work, the Chamber team, The Right Place, Start Garden, the universities and the founders: thank you for building something worth being part of. In short, we are looking forward to getting started.
