Sponsor Spotlight: South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership
Interview by Stephen Kabele, enFocus Second Year Innovation Fellow and project leader
Leighton, tell me about your relationship with enFocus and how you have worked together to drive innovation in the region?
One of the goals of the LIFT Network is to make the South Bend - Elkhart region’s resources more accessible for our manufacturing businesses, and drive innovation through increased collaboration between them and universities and workforce development providers, creating a regional innovation ecosystem.
South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership turned to enFocus, a key partner, when we identified a need to create the South Bend – Elkhart Digital Innovation Hub (“The Hub”). The Hub is a dynamic asset map that aggregates our region’s innovation assets tied to workforce development, business innovation, and entrepreneurship, and tailors them to the specific needs of businesses and individuals in our region.
Throughout the project, enFocus provided essential hands-on support to the South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership by aggregating and organizing these resources and working with our technology vendor to develop a best-in-class platform with a dynamic user experience.
In addition to technical and project management support, in what other ways did enFocus support this project?
enFocus conducted best practice research which provided insights on other regions with strong innovation ecosystems—identifying successful elements of different regional platforms and initiatives. After this discovery phase, we were able to reach back out to more than sixty-five organizations in our region to collect information on over 250 assets for workforce development, R&D, and entrepreneurship.
From there, we worked side-by-side categorizing and tagging resources, as well as mapping out user journeys for our web platform to ensure that users of The Hub find the resources best tailored to their needs. At the end of 2020, the South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership launched a tool that we feel is very user friendly and tailored to the needs of business in our region. The launch of The Hub even generated state-wide media attention via an Inside Indiana Business article – Innovation Hub Launches in Northern Indiana.
What impact has the Digital Innovation Hub created for your organization/community?
The Hub connects businesses and individuals to the resources they need. It is a tool that supports the transformation of companies and their employees to an increasingly digital and automated future. By enhancing our current manufacturing base with new business models, technologies, and tailored workforce training programs, we are accelerating an emerging high-tech sector in our region.
What is the greatest value enFocus has delivered to your organization?
enFocus provided great project management support to help see this project through from conception to completion. What has been especially refreshing is to have critical and thoughtful insights and approach from someone outside our organization, as we have been entrenched in this work.
How would you describe your future partnership/opportunities for collaboration?
We consider enFocus key partners in the LIFT Network. They share the South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership’s vision of an advanced manufacturing sector and are working to deliver a key component—talent and more than that, talent teams that deliver innovation through their sponsored project work!
Since the completion of the Digital Innovation Hub, we have continued to work with enFocus on developing advanced industry internship programs. We look forward to continuing our collaboration as, together, we create a more productive, resilient, and talented region.
Learn more about enFocus' work with regional organizations in our next Sponsor Spotlight.