MINNEAPOLIS — The Biden administration on Monday designated the Twin Cities and Minnesota as a "Regional Tech Hub," offering a boost to the state's economy with the promise of millions in federal funding.
Greater MSP, an economic development partnership agency headquartered in St. Paul, led the application effort to become a tech hub. The White House granted the status to a total of 31 areas across the U.S., with different focuses ranging from renewable energy to industrial manufacturing.
In Minnesota, the hub designation will center on the state's well-established medical industry, which is powered by institutions like Medtronic, United Healthcare, the University of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic, and many others. Whether they're headquartered here or not, 15 of the largest medical device companies all have footprints in Minnesota, according to Greater MSP President Peter Frosch.
"This is what we do. Health care and Med-Tech is Minnesota's business," Frosch said. "The designation is like planting an official flag from the U.S. government, that says this is the place in America to build medical device companies and scale your technologies. And that's immediately useful, as we're going across the country and the world."
The hub designation also allows Minnesota to compete for up to $75 million in federal funding through the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Biden signed last summer.
Frosch plans to highlight Minnesota's hub status during a trade mission to Australia next month.
"We're going to be able to go there with a story and a plan, and make a strong invitation that they join us in North America," Frosch said. "This is about helping our existing Fortune 500s stay Fortune 500s, and innovate into the new century. It's also about spurring a new generation of start-ups that could become our next Fortune 500s, and it's about attracting investment from around the country and around the world."
Medtronic CEO Geoff Martha said the "Regional Tech Hub" status helps not only his company, but even his top competitors in town.
"We've got the opportunity to bring in additional technologies beyond traditional biomedical engineering, in terms of digital technologies, computing, cloud computing, edge computing, AI, deep learning models, and robotics. It's just all these things coming into the medical technology space," Martha said. "No one company can do this alone... We compete out there in the marketplace, but when it comes to this ecosystem, we're all really invested to build this out."
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