Can Michigan become the Silicon Valley of mobility? Ford Motor Company executive chairman Bill Ford seems to think so. He’s calling for policy reform to make this happen, pointing at the integration of communications and vehicle technologies as key to solving urban mobility challenges while creating more high-tech Michigan jobs in the process.
These aren’t just any ‘green’ jobs. The need to build on Michigan’s manufacturing history while diversifying the state’s economy is also important, says Ford. He points out that no other sector of the economy creates as many spinoff jobs as the auto sector, with every auto job created resulting in nine more jobs to support it.
That leads to the new Motor City Innovation Exchange – a collaboration between Ford, TechShop Detroit, AutoHarvest, and Wayne State University's TechTown – that seeks to encourage Michigan innovators and help entrepreneurs commercialize their creations. It will provide affordable ‘work/hacker’ space (their words, not ours) and a showroom for innovators to show off their creations to peers and potential customers.
Bill Ford points to the pressures of a growing global population and the new challenge of global gridlock – the potential that the world will face a never-ending traffic jam that wastes time, energy, and resources. He shares that we will once again need new technologies as well as new ways of looking at the world to overcome this, such as viewing the automobile as one element of a transportation ecosystem. Of course, integrating the automobile with this new transportation ecosystem will require a great variety of high-tech and policy jobs, which he feels should be based in Michigan, of course.