• Four years ago, Grand Rapids launched an aggressive initiative to make west Michigan a global tech hub
• The goal? 20,000 new tech jobs in 10 years, making tech 10% of the region’s workforce
• So far, about 5,600 jobs have been created, growing tech from 6% to 6.5% of the workforce 

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Zachary Collins tells the kind of story Grand Rapids leaders want to hear.

A west Michigan native and Grand Valley State University grad, Collins left after college to work in the tech industry in Portland, Oregon, only to return home to start a company.

In 2019, Collins and his former high school theater director started Ludus, a Grand Rapids firm that helps organizations sell tickets online. The firm raised $12 million in capital this spring and now employs about 60 people. 

As Grand Rapids this week spotlights and aims to grow its tech scene with its annual Tech Week events, west Michigan just needs a few hundred more similar stories.

Four years ago, Grand Rapids leaders launched an aggressive effort to boost the region’s tech economy. The goal: 20,000 new tech jobs, making tech 10% of the region’s workforce.

So far, the area has added 5,600 tech jobs, growing the sector’s employment share from 6% to 6.5%. 

“These numbers don’t move quickly,” said Randy Thelen, CEO of The Right Place, a regional economic development firm that has spearheaded west Michigan’s tech push.

Manufacturing and health care remain the region’s biggest economic drivers, each accounting for about 80,000 jobs, compared to about half that amount for tech. 

But Thelen and other regional leaders said west Michigan needs to grow its tech sector to remain relevant in the modern economy, continue the region’s population gains and bring in high-paying jobs. Salaries for tech jobs often exceed $130,000 per year, more than double Michigan’s median pay.

“If we’re going to be a dynamic, robust economy going forward, we have to add a greater presence of tech into it,” Thelen said. “That’s been the fastest growth sector over the last 20 years, and we need to be a bigger player in that space.” 

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The region is banking on big job numbers coming from data center projects, though promises from such projects have been inflated in the past.

And west Michigan has plenty of competition for the title of “Silicon Valley of the Midwest.” Wisconsin has launched its BioHealth Tech Hub. Illinois has its Fermentation and Agriculture Biomanufacturing Hub. 

Detroit has focused on advanced manufacturing and mobility tech and has launched a grant program to fund startups. Bloomberg in 2019 named Ann Arbor No. 3 on its list of top tech communities after the city produced a “unicorn” — a startup quickly valued at at least $1 billion — in the firm Duo Security, which was eventually bought by the tech giant Cisco for $2.3 billion.

In west Michigan, The Right Place and its partners want to integrate tech throughout the economy by not only supporting startups but also by integrating more tech into existing companies. They envision programmers working with manufacturers on automation, for instance, and AI specialists working with retailers to manage supply chains.

The Right Place launched a Tech Council  that networks and works with a Manufacturers Council on bringing more tech to non-tech companies. West Michigan tech firms have launched AI meetups and Women in Tech Coffee Circles. In 2022, Grand Rapids hosted its first Tech Week, an annual conference that both highlights the region’s tech scene and trains up-and-coming techies to participate in that scene. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is headlining this year’s conference. 

To grow the talent pipeline, west Michigan’s Grand Valley State University recently launched a new College of Computing and bachelor’s and master’s programs in AI and has integrated tech and AI into every discipline. In 2023, the university launched its Blue Dot initiative, which this year got $1.6 million from the state to support tech startups.

“We’ve created a bit of a buzz,” Thelen said. “We’ve created some energy. We’ve got to keep that momentum going.” 

Collins, the Ludus co-founder, said he thinks west Michigan is on the right track, but he cautioned that the region needs to spend more time building companies and less time talking about it.

“There are things you can join in Grand Rapids and you end up getting pitched on consulting services,” Collins said. “If we want to be like the Silicon Valley of the Midwest, that’s not how it operates in Silicon Valley. We need to be building the software here in Grand Rapids, and we are not fully there yet.”

‘Is there going to be a unicorn … here in Grand Rapids?’

Chad Paalman grew up in Caledonia, so it was a no-brainer for him to launch his first company, NuWave Technology Partners, in west Michigan.

When it came to starting another company, this one to help firms with cybersecurity regulations, he wanted to go where the tech scene was booming. So he headquartered Prescott in Florida, alongside some of the biggest players in the aerospace industry.

But over his first few years there, “not one time did I ever hear from a legislator or a business economic person,” Paalman said. “Not one time. But consistently I kept hearing from Jen Wangler and The Right Place about how they could help us.”

So, a couple years ago, Paalman moved Prescott to west Michigan. He now serves on The Right Place’s Tech Council.

That’s illustrative of the kind of ecosystem west Michigan leaders are trying to build, a holistic approach in which future techies are trained and recruited at the same time current techies get the help they need for their businesses to thrive in the region.

Philomena Mantella, the GVSU president, put it this way: “So our growth is growth of the talent pipeline, but it’s also growth of the solutions that are going to support all of this transformation that’s happening so quickly.”

But the effort faces significant headwinds. 

Despite years of investment, Michigan’s K-12 students lag their peers nationwide in math and reading, putting them behind the curve on the math-heavy tech jobs west Michigan’s trying to build. College enrollment hasn’t boomed despite state initiatives to make it so. And, though the state has made population gains a priority, growth has been slow, meaning fewer people to fill those 20,000 tech jobs west Michigan hopes to add.

The region has about 9,500 open tech job postings, The Right Place’s Thelen said. Several tech leaders told Bridge Michigan the talent pool is lacking in west Michigan and that any hires at one company probably come from other west Michigan companies.

And the very nature of tech, in which remote work is easy and a product built in Washington state can easily be launched in Michigan overnight, makes it difficult to build a true hub anywhere.

But the region’s leaders remain optimistic. Thelen said west Michigan grew its manufacturing base when it set out to do so in the 1980s (though times have been tougher in recent years). It grew its health sciences industry when it set out to do so in the late-1990s and into the 2000s.

“We’ve got to find the next hot, enduring sectors to get us to that next level of growth,” Thelen said, “and it can happen.”

Collins, of Ludus, said the region can consider itself successful when techies start moving to west Michigan for work and when the region produces big companies with staying power.

“It’s, is there going to be a unicorn, as they put it, here in Grand Rapids?” Collins said. “And if we can prove that we’re able to build a company like that here in Grand Rapids, we are that much closer to being the Silicon Valley of the Midwest. I don’t know if we’re doing leaps and bounds in the right direction, but we are moving in the right direction.”

‘Everybody cares about each other’

Stacy Paul, a northern Michigan native, went to college in Florida and spent time working with NASA in Houston, but decided to leave Texas when she saw the writing on the wall about the end of the space shuttle program. 

She and her husband looked around the country for a new place to live where they could continue their work in tech. They settled on west Michigan to be close to her family farm Up North.

About a decade ago, Paul was ready to start a new engineering company. She and her husband reached out to Keith Brophy, who had been involved in the creation of multiple tech firms, for advice, and he and others helped her launch Array of Engineers in Grand Rapids in 2018. 

“We just felt that this environment was so collaborative and unlike any other environment that I had ever seen working, you know, in Houston or in Florida or out on the East Coast,” Paul said. “Everybody cares about each other.”

Brophy, now the CEO of Grand Rapids’ Mentavi Health, which provides online mental health treatment to patients nationwide, has leaned on others, as well. With the advent of AI, Brophy and other Mentavi Health leaders had questions about how to implement the technology in their firm while protecting patient privacy. They reached out to some Silicon Valley experts but found the most help talking over coffee with leaders of another west Michigan tech firm, Atomic Object. 

“I mean, a lot of it you can leverage remotely, but the core comes from relationship, and that’s the ecosystem that exists today in west Michigan,” Brophy said. “It’s a connected, approachable, relatable community.”

West Michigan leaders and the heads of west Michigan tech firms said it’ll be important for the region to maintain those characteristics as it works to make itself a tech hub. It can’t replicate Silicon Valley, they said. It has to make itself something unique and uniquely west Michigan.

“If you say that you’re going to be the next Silicon Valley, well, we really should be the next Grand Rapids,” Collins said.

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