Tech boom highlights need for regional collaboration

The North Texas region, including the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area and surrounding communities, has boomed with a massive influx of companies and people in recent years.

In towns and cities that had traditionally been associated with oil and gas, changes are afoot. For example, McKinney and Frisco are leaning hard into sports and financial technology, as well as artificial intelligence. Arlington, too, is investing in fintech, while Dallas itself is embracing biosciences.

Residents are taking advantage of these opportunities, too, regardless of where they live. Around 40% of the people who live in the area cross at least one county line every day, according to local officials. And when they do that, they want services and traffic signals to function.

That’s where the nonprofit North Texas Innovation Alliance has stepped in. Founded in 2020, the group brings together dozens of members, including local governments, academia, businesses, chambers of commerce and other organizations. NTXIA looks to solve these kinds of issues on a regional basis, rather than leave it to individual jurisdictions.

Led by executive director Jennifer Sanders, the alliance has helped push for better broadband connectivity and places for startups to develop products. It has has brought together people from across the region to work on some of its biggest challenges. With soccer’s World Cup set to come to the region next year, there’s plenty left ahead to do.

Route Fifty caught up with Sanders recently to discuss NTXIA’s work and what’s to come for the organization and the region.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Route Fifty: What does it mean to be a smart region for you guys?

Jennifer Sanders: I think it really looks at how we are utilizing technology and new solutions as a catalyst to improve quality of life, access to opportunity and economic development. How are our daily lives improved through new solutions that didn't exist five, 10, 15 years ago or six months ago, with as fast as things are moving? It's changing every day.

Route Fifty: Are you guys having a tech boom? You've got the World Cup coming next year, and all sorts of things. What's going on down there right now?

Sanders: We're seeing huge economic growth, jobs growth, and I think from a technology and innovation space, what I'm certainly seeing is there are clusters that are linked together throughout the region. You've got northern suburbs like McKinney and Frisco that are heavily into sports tech, fintech, a lot of AI work. You're seeing Arlington with growing financial tech. Dallas proper has got a lot of bioscience clusters that are popping up, which are really driven by this major investment in Pegasus Park. Telecommunications too, with AT&T based here that permeates strongly throughout the region and nationally too.

One of the things Dallas has a challenge with is who are we, and how do we communicate that in a finite way? But the reason for that is good. The reason for that is, after the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s, there was a real effort to make sure the economy was diversified from an industry perspective, which means that we are exceptionally strong in lots of ways. Picking one thing is a challenge, so I'm trying to help elevate the innovation that's happening here, because I don't think Dallas is thought of as being forward thinking and really having this movement. That's part of the brand challenge. We’ve got J.R. Ewing, oil and gas, and [the Dallas Cowboys], and we love that. That's part of the charm and the history. But how do you translate that to wildcatters and pioneers in the next century?

Route Fifty: You mentioned that you have these clusters. How do you get people working together, not just kind of hoarding all their findings for themselves? It has the potential to be quite siloed.

Sanders: A lot of peers around the country were like, “Good luck getting everybody in a room working together when everyone's fighting for the same relocations or whatnot.” Honestly, I genuinely haven't found that to be true. In fact, economic development is the first bucket that gets it right. They know that the dependency on innovation and selling the region and making sure that's communicated is extraordinarily important. Direct, cross jurisdictional collaboration around innovation has been happening, and last year there was a lot of exciting movement towards that.

My favorite thing is not only are there over 50 different organizations that are members, but most of them bring different department representatives to the meetings, so you've got departments sitting in rooms that are not often, if ever, sitting in the same room. You see these connection points, in terms of, I didn't realize sustainability could so closely be operating with public safety or transport too. You see these really cool ideas, and then follow up out of those conversations.

Route Fifty: How often are you doing those meetings? What are they like?

Sanders: We do monthly convenings, which are open to everyone. We did a really great kickoff workshop last month, where we utilized ChatGPT to help them get to not just the end-game headline that we want to see written about the region, but how do we work back and what are the integrated themes?

From that, we're designing the rest of the year from a thematic standpoint. Which ones are actionable? Which ones do we just need more? Do people just not know what they don't know? Then I'll find smarter people than me to come in and talk to them. We based the programming off that initial kickoff consensus.

Route Fifty: What are some of the initiatives and efforts that you're proudest of?

Sanders: One that we really supported getting over the finish line over the last couple of years is Frisco and McKinney, those two fast-growing suburbs working together to land a plug and play incubator and accelerator, and normally that is not done that way. They have different focuses that share the same project and different pieces like that. That one is a good example of working together. On broadband, we've developed a comprehensive infrastructure direct to human access program that comes together called Internet for North Texas. That’s a regional coalition on how we are solving broadband infrastructure and access as a region.

We launched five initiatives last year, which was kind of wild. One is called the Urban Resilience Fellows Program, where we work with capstones across universities and disciplines, so you have students working together that normally don't see that synergy and working with the city or corporation to solve a problem. This was the second year we had a big booth presence at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. Part of that is telling the story, part of that is really bringing those learnings home. But at the event this year, we did a Smart Cities Global Startup Challenge, which was essentially a pitch competition where the finalists, who came from 16 countries, pitched at the conference. They have pilots guaranteed in Peachtree Corners in Georgia as well as North Texas, so that was really fun.

Route Fifty: Do you get the sense that we're going to approach things in a lot more of a regional basis? It feels like a lot in the past cities were on their own, doing their own thing. Is it that regional is the way forward at this point?

Sanders: I think it has to be. Especially with technology, if they're not interoperable across jurisdictions, it helps no one, and you're going to have to go back and redo it later. Resources — natural, human and financial — are more limited for these huge capital projects, so we must come together for collective purchasing. Everyone is more transient in general in where they live and work. We've all got to be talking and taking learnings across the country as well.

Route Fifty: What does the future hold? What are you excited about in the next 12 months?

Sanders: Some is obviously a little bit in question, but there's still a lot of federal funding coming down around infrastructure, and a lot of the projects, as they're getting deployed, are being deployed through learnings or add-ons. Leveraging those investments to benefit the whole region is something I'm really excited about, and we certainly feed into and support that directly or tangentially behind the scenes as we can.

I am looking to the expansion of these calls for innovation pilots that we can bring in and help facilitate, with things changing so fast. One of my favorite pieces of this is that we can be nimble. If we find that something pops up in April, we can bring in programming in May and be able to say, “How the hell do we do this? We didn't even know this existed.” That was relevant after we had that big winter freeze in Texas a couple of years ago and were concerned the whole grid was going to go down. Afterwards, we had a session where everyone came together and said, “I didn't even know this was going to be a problem.” Or we were able to call in resources from our adjacent cities. We were able to take that and say, “Okay, how generally do we look at fuel supply across sectors? How are the school districts working with cities, what does that communication system look like in the case of an emergency? How can we use tech to elevate that?”

There’s also the World Cup. Cities around North America, we keep in close contact. Sitting on working groups this time, where I hadn't during the Super Bowl, and some of the other global events that Dallas has, the lift of these things is wild. What's interesting about this World Cup is how spread out the host cities are. How are we going to handle the game host city transportation when people don't know until that day where their team is going? The work of the airport systems and others is fun to watch. Anytime there's a push like this and getting ready for this, you see great ideas and things happen quickly and collaboratively. It's a great leverage point to really get some great things done.