Mapping the assets of the Innovation District Ecosystem: BIO

Oklahoma City has worked to build a regional bio growth cluster for decades. Since the establishment of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) in 1946, the region has witnessed unprecedented growth and reinvestment in bio capabilities, expertise, and resources, and now the Oklahoma City Innovation District, as its role as a convener, has set out to map those resources.

Conveners bring people together. They unite groups and individuals around issues, problems and opportunities to address them, solve them or capitalize on them, and one of the new ways the Innovation District is playing its role of convener is through asset mapping. The District is using The Nucleus, its Cognitive City from the Exaptive Studio platform, to create complex networks of the industries, organizations, services and professionals that make up the District’s ecosystem and how each of those resources and assets are connected. 

The Innovation District’s ecosystem is made up of thousands of professionals, more than 100 organizations and several key industries, each with its own specialty or expertise. It’s impossible to network with each professional and organization or to even know which ones to connect with, but with the industry-specific asset maps the District is building, connecting the dots between the ecosystem’s industry assets moves from impossible to easy. 

One of our newest asset maps is the bio asset map. Biomedical, bioscience and biotechnology are some of the most upcoming industries in Oklahoma, and Central Oklahoma specifically has demonstrated a willful and strategic focus on growing the region’s bio presence. Alongside OMRF, the Stephenson Cancer Center, only established in 2001, achieved NCI-designation in 2018 and now boasts the highest patient accrual in clinical trials of all cancer centers in the nation. The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC), established in 1971, is now one of only four comprehensive health centers in the United States with seven professional colleges, and specialized research centers (Harold Hamm Diabetes Center & Dean McGee Eye Institute, etc.) are doing world-leading research and work.

The bio asset map was built with a simple, mental-model schema geared to pull the data needed for the project, along with each data sets’ connecting points.

The known industries, services/resources and organizations affiliated with our ecosystem’s bio sector were pulled from the Innovation District’s Nucleus database (a small sample of Oklahoma’s large bioscience sector), and the schema reflects the relationship organizations have with one another, the services/resources they provide and the industries they are associated with or related to. Most importantly, the schema is also built to reflect the shared services, resources and industries that each organization may have in relation to another.

For example, Bio Manufacturing is a shared service/resource among several of the Innovation District’s bio assets. 

As the Innovation District’s bio asset map stands now, it is a network of ~40 services/resources provided by 20 organizations across three similar industries, and the map will only continue to grow as data is entered by the professionals working daily in these industries.

If you are in any bio or bio-affiliated industries, we invite you to engage with this asset map by signing up for The Nucleus where you can begin virtually connecting with other innovators. The asset map and other views can only grow as users onboard and engage, so invite your co-workers and other professionals to join and get connected. Think of it like growing your Facebook friend group, only based on industry and innovative ideas. 

Join the Nucleus