Louisville Metro Government has hired a director of innovation.
Eric Burnette, former senior policy advisory at Louisville Forward, was appointed to the newly-created position at the start of the year. Previously, the responsibilities of the role fell to Grace Simrall, chief of civic innovation and technology, but as the city's innovation work has matured and expanded, there was a need for another person dedicated to the efforts.
In his near decade-long career with metro government, Burnette was the director of labor market intelligence at KentuckianaWorks before joining Louisville Forward, the city's economic development arm, in 2018. There, he aided in the creation of LouTechWorks and the Future of Work Initiative, a first-of-its-kind Microsoft partnership that aims to make the city a regional hub for artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things and data science.
Burnette and Simrall began working more closely together in the weeks leading up to the launch the Future of Work Initiative, they told me in an interview Tuesday. The duo drafted the digital alliance agreement with Microsoft in an hour-and-a-half long phone call on Mother's Day 2019.
"I always think back to that moment because that's the level of commitment that we had to getting it right," Burnette said. "We needed to get it right and we needed to do a lot of work quickly."
Simrall said it was that very commitment to the fast-paced, ever-changing environment of innovation work that made Burnette a great fit for the new role.
"Innovation does not rest; it does not wait for business hours," she said. "The expectation of this role is that there's a great sense of urgency and we need to be nimble. In fact, what makes Louisville so attractive to so many of our partners is that we are small enough to get things done that we can cut through a lot of bureaucratic red tape and make sure that we actually execute on a timetable that our partners need us to be able to execute on."
One of those timetables is a quickly-approaching deadline for the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge. The Louisville region is one of 60 finalists that are vying for an investment of $50 million to support regional innovation projects.
The coalition behind Louisville's proposal won $500,000 last month, and is planning new workforce development, entrepreneurship, research, innovation and commercialization programming and supports centered on digital health care and artificial intelligence. The deadline for finalists to have their plans submitted is March 15.
"This is a great example of how this kind of innovation work can build on itself," Burnette said, noting that kind of funding could be a "game changer" for the region. "It's all cumulative — like the data analysis, LouTechWorks and the partnership with Microsoft and Brookings now could all result in Louisville getting tens of millions of dollars to help build out an equitable AI and data economy."
Burnette referenced Daniel Burnham, who was the project manager for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, who had a sign above his desk that said "RUSH." He said the sign in his office would say, "WIN."
"I really want to win all the money we can for the city," he said. "I want to broker as many partnerships as we can. I want to get as much federal money and win as many of these competitive grants as we can."
Simrall and Burnette said new partnerships will be announced in the coming months, but in the meantime, the city's innovation team will also prioritize broadband efforts outlined in the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in November. The law authorizes $65 billion in spending to expand broadband in rural areas and in low-income communities, in addition to investments in transportation and clean energy.
"I think that the very beautiful thing about innovation is, it's imperfect," Simrall said. "It is urgent, timely and practical in the sense that it solves real problems and it takes real risks. So as we continue to institutionalize this culture, we would hope that Louisville as a city itself would be known for innovation and can embrace this cultural mindset change."
