Business leaders and entrepreneurs across industries gathered at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News Wednesday to talk about Hampton Roads’s bright future and already-bright present.
“There's so much that is happening, but yet it's difficult for a lot of people to see because we're in it and we're living in it,” said Tim Ryan, executive director of Innovate Hampton Roads, an organization that helps support and grow local startups.
The theme of the event was “From Deep Space to the Deep Sea” to highlight the region’s unique strengths.
“We have shipyards that build the most complex vessels on Earth, an Air Force base that flies the most technically-advanced fighter jets, one of America's biggest and deepest ports, NASA Langley Research Center, which is enabling human life to become multi-planetary, and a federal lab that is the primary facility to smash electrons here in the United States,” Ryan said. “For decades, that has been our identity. Today, it’s our launch pad.”
Doug Smith, CEO of the Hampton Roads Alliance, presented on the organization’s economic playbook, which calls for the region to lean into defense, energy, aerospace and logistics.
“Technologies developed in defense are now powering energy systems,” he said. “Autonomous platforms are transforming both aerospace and maritime operations. Supply chain innovation is bridging commercial logistics and military readiness. This is what modern innovation looks like. It's not isolated breakthroughs.”
The backbone of this innovation is energy, said Chelsea Olivieri, managing director of the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center and founder of COSLOVE, a consulting firm.
Without secure and reliable energy infrastructure, she said, everything falls apart.
“Demand’s rising, technology’s evolving and uncertainty is increasing while relying on infrastructure that was largely designed 50 to 70 years ago for a completely different kind of economy,” she said. “So, this isn't just about energy. It's about whether Hampton Roads can compete and lead the next generation of innovation.”
She said the region is in a great starting position, pointing to the offshore wind project, the state’s nuclear power plants and low-cost natural gas. The Secure Energy Future Center at Virginia Tech, a research hub for scalable energy solutions, opens April 22.
But Olivieri said the region is still behind.
“Other regions are moving, and they're moving much faster and with a lot more capital,” she said. “The regions that are winning are answering the question, ‘Can you deliver power quickly, reliably and at scale?’”
She said that requires faster permitting, affordability and a less fragmented, more coordinated energy strategy.
Ryan said the ultimate goal is to build “unicorns” in Hampton Roads, a term from the tech world referring to a private company valued at $1 billion or more. He wants one in each of the region’s seven cities, but just one would have a massive economic impact, creating hundreds of direct and indirect jobs and generating hundreds of millions of dollars for early investors once the company goes public, he said.
“We really want the local people to benefit from those kinds of returns, as opposed to an established (venture capital) firm in Silicon Valley somewhere,” he said.
Fred Pasquine, president and CEO of Fairlead, a company in Portsmouth and Newport News with expertise in shipbuilding and advanced manufacturing, said these unicorns don’t have to be software companies.
“It could be a shipbuilder that's successfully integrating all the technology into its processes,” he said.
Ryan said a few companies in the region are on the brink of reaching unicorn status. Innovate Hampton Roads compiled a list of the 200 most important local startups. Next steps for leaders include understanding what those companies need to grow, he said.
