Chicago boasts trailblazing companies. Let's adapt their innovative ways to every sector across the city.

This is a moment of opportunity to bring about a transition in the direction of the Chicago region’s economy. The direction we choose will dictate the future growth of the region and the well-being of all who live here.

Leadership transitions are occurring at World Business Chicago and Choose Chicago, the city’s top agencies for economic development and tourism. Recent years have seen big shifts in our region’s corporate landscape — Caterpillar, Citadel and Boeing moved out, while Google, Kellogg’s and Mars have invested more resources and placed bigger bets in Chicago. And the spotlight on our city will be magnified in a whole new way when the Democratic National Convention arrives this summer.

We have the most diverse regional economy in the country. The top two full-time MBA programs in the nation are here, according to U.S. News and World Report. We’re home to 23 “unicorns” — billion-dollar tech startups. And we proudly claim 59 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Illinois. There’s growing momentum in transportation, quantum computing, food manufacturing, battery development and artificial intelligence.

But these disparate strengths need an overarching idea to tie them all together — something that every business and non-profit initiative can put into play to move forward together. I contend that this unifying idea is to fully embrace the power and spirit of innovation.

Innovation is not a buzzword. It’s a commitment that every organization can make by going through the process of identifying unmet customer needs and developing new products and services that address these needs in unique ways that create new value in the marketplace.

Embracing this concept at a macro scale would mean taking one of the most powerful drivers of the region’s economy — innovation — to an entirely new level. That’s the challenge for our leaders in every sector.

The power of innovation has been revealed over the past 22 years by the Chicago Innovation Awards. Out of 399 organizations that have won the Chicago Innovation Awards since 2002, 98% are still in business. Seventy have been acquired with exit values exceeding $156 billion.

Chicago companies making billions set an example

Award-winners have emerged in the public, private and non-profit sectors among organizations of all sizes. They include Livongo, a diabetes management system that employs wearable sensors on patients with telehealth so doctors can respond in real-time when patients need help, which was sold to Teladoc for $18.5 billion in 2020. Or SpotHero, a startup that disrupted the traditional parking industry through its mobile app that lets anyone reserve parking spaces in advance in over 300 major U.S. cities.

Let’s expand the impact of innovation in a focused way.

Innovation should be emphasized early, by reaching school kids. Each year, the Illinois Student Invention Convention teaches the principles of innovation to students in kindergarten to eighth grade. Over 29,000 students have participated to date.

Innovation should be taught in every school, alongside reading, writing and arithmetic. At its core, this entails systematically teaching every student the seven-step innovation process: Identify a problem, understand why the problem exists, come up with potential solutions, design and build an original prototype, test your prototype, observe its results and communicate your findings.

To truly move the entire region forward, innovation should be emphasized in Chicago’s historically underinvested neighborhoods. Chicago Innovation’s The Ladder program brings together Black and Latino innovators as full participants in the larger innovation community. The same goes for the emerging generation of women as leaders with an innovation mindset.

It’s time to take the innovation mindset to the next level through recognition and activation by each sector of the economy — public, private, nonprofit, high tech, low tech and no tech.

It would lift recognition of innovation to the fore. We should be able to ask every leader the same question: “What’s your innovation?” and expect an answer that shows an understanding of its power. Innovation, regardless of the kind of enterprise a person is engaged in, is a skill that can be taught, learned and put into practice in ways that would advance each area of endeavor.

Chicago’s leaders should develop metrics to track how well innovation is advancing the region’s economy.

If we could do these things and more, people would turn to Chicago and ask, “What made the difference?” We would answer that we recognized, developed and put into action the power of innovation.

Luke Tanen is president and CEO of Chicago Innovation.

The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds. See our guidelines.

The views and opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Chicago Sun-Times or any of its affiliates.