Louisiana State University

Louisiana is ranked third among all states in manufacturing’s share (22.6 percent) of Gross State Product. Based on Brookings Institution research, advanced industries including manufacturing, energy, and services sectors together employ 255,920 fulltime workers, produce $60.6 billion in output, and account for 27.3 percent of all output in Louisiana in 2013. The average advanced industries salary is $81,070 compared to $45,210 per year for all industries. South Louisiana is internationally known for its chemical manufacturing. The “chemical corridor,” spanning 200 miles from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and Lake Charles is the home of hundreds of chemical manufacturing facilities and refineries worth billions of dollars.

The LSU-IIC plans to build its success on an industrial innovation model with two specific strategies: a) to leverage an existing broad industrial partnership established through the Louisiana Chemical Manufacturing Initiative (LCMI), comprised of 90+ local partners representing stakeholders from different sectors of Louisiana’s large chemical manufacturing ecosystem, as a US DOC designated Investing in Manufacturing Communalities Partnership (IMCP) community; and b) to expand and enhance the capabilities of a successful 28-year old innovation and small business incubator, the LSU Innovation Park and Louisiana Business and Technology Center (LBTC). Our proposed innovation approach is to work with our industrial partners, as technology users, to identify their technological needs; and then to match up every need with an innovator to develop the technology.

If successful, this innovation model is expected to have two transformational potentials: a) to demonstrate how to build industrial cooperative partnerships for solving problems facing the industry; and b) to significantly accelerate the process of developing and transferring new technologies to the marketplace. When industrial users start brainstorming their problems and actively pursue better solutions, it will be the beginning of a new era of chemical manufacturing - version 2.0 for the region.