As tech hubs across the country jockey to be the center of climate innovation, Alaina Harkness, executive director of Chicago-based water innovation hub Current, thinks the city on the banks of Lake Michigan could have a competitive advantage moving forward.
When Current was first founded in 2016, the organization had three employees and a million-dollar budget. This year, Current expects to hit 15 employees with its budget reaching $10 million, coming off what Harkness called its biggest win to date.
Current will coordinate Great Lakes ReNew, a six-state coalition led by Harkness that has won a grant of up to $160 million over 10 years from the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of its Regional Innovation Engines program. The initiative will support the development of water-based innovation in the region by finding new ways to recover and reuse water, energy, nutrients and critical materials from water and by attracting new American manufacturers to the area to reuse these materials for things like batteries and fertilizers.
On Tuesday, Harkness joined Junhong Chen, co-principal investigator of Great Lakes ReNew, at a City Club of Chicago event to further discuss what the future of water innovation will look like in Chicago moving forward.
"This whole project was about regional innovation, and the Great Lakes provided this natural, convenient frame to pull in partners from Wisconsin and Ohio," Harkness said. "In the first two years, we've got $15 million down payments toward the total $160 million over 10 years, and we're working to train youth and STEM programs to start to build towards these blue-economy careers. We'll be working with dozens of startups and helping them on their commercialization journey."
Current will help local innovators and entrepreneurs bring their ideas to market through accelerator programs that are sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration. Initial cohorts are expected to launch in 2024 and 2025.
"The first announcement will be within the next couple of months," Harkness said. "Most of our companies need places to test their technology. It's often hardtech — it takes a long time to scale and they need partners that are invested in giving them a space to trial and evolve their technology."
Just this week, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson held a business roundtable to attract businesses in sustainable development, transportation, water management and green energy to the city.
"Chicago's proximity to one of the largest bodies of freshwater in the world is a competitive advantage that has been historically underutilized," the mayor said in a statement.
Chicago's "green economy" has grown by nearly 180% between 2016 and 2022, according to Current.
"Our interest is seeing water, food and energy all linked, and that strategic vision has yet to be made as forcefully as it needs to be in the region and we've got a massive opportunity to do that," Harkness said.
