By: Stephan Erkelens
TL;DR: Orange County’s small and mid-sized businesses face two connected transitions: sustainability and AI adoption. Advancing Clean Tech Innovation is a public-private pilot designed to connect businesses with modernization resources. The opportunity is to turn that first step into a durable regional modernization market, with corporate partners helping expand its reach and demonstrate its value.
—
We’ve written before about how Orange County has all the ingredients required for the next generation of economic growth. We have manufacturers, logistics companies, entrepreneurs, top universities, capital, and active public institutions.
Our conclusion is simple: to become the innovation economy Orange County is positioned to lead, we need a durable market that incentivizes and equips businesses to modernize by connecting them to the wealth of resources we already have.
Yet over the last few decades, there has been a radical shift in how we define “business modernization.” Better equipment is still part of the answer, but businesses also need to use data, adopt AI and automation, and improve environmental performance. These decisions increasingly shape productivity, resilience, and the ability to compete.
For Orange County’s small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), this shift presents several complex challenges:
- Costs are changing. Energy, labor, materials, maintenance, waste, logistics, and aging equipment all affect margin. Better equipment, energy systems, software, and operating practices can unlock productivity where older models are no longer enough.
- Customers are changing. Large buyers increasingly care about supplier performance, traceability, resilience, data, emissions, and operating standards. An excellent product may no longer satisfy changing customer requirements.
- Technology and workforce are changing together. AI, automation, data-measurement, and cleaner technologies are creating operational efficiency. Simultaneously, businesses need a skilled workforce to support and maintain those systems.
- Capital and policy are changing. Incentives, financing, procurement expectations, energy programs, and regulatory mandates increasingly favor those businesses that already have the scale and capital to modernize operations, while many SMEs miss out on the potential upside.
For smaller businesses, including those in underserved communities, limited staff, time, and relationships can put modernization further out of reach.
Without a coordinated way to connect businesses to the capital, technical assistance, incentives, and implementation support already available, many SMEs risk failing to remain competitive.
Modernization as an economic growth strategy.
This is the opportunity behind Advancing Clean Tech Innovation (ACTI), a public-private pilot initiative led by RevHub in partnership with the Rancho Santiago Community College District Foundation. Launched with a $1.031 million federal NIST seed investment championed by Congressman Lou Correa, the pilot will initially focus on manufacturing, food and beverage, and logistics and distribution in California’s 46th Congressional District.
ACTI aims to help small and medium sized businesses identify needs, prioritize improvements, connect with qualified expertise and financing resources, and support new technology adoption while measuring results in order to establish a defensible business case for modernization as a competitive strategy.
The bigger opportunity: modernization as a regional economic growth driver.
The opportunity extends far beyond helping individual businesses become more competitive. By accelerating modernization across Orange County, we can create a robust regional market that generates demand for new technologies, attracts investment, and drives business formation and job creation.
Consider the economic chain reaction.
When businesses modernize, they need equipment, financing, energy solutions, specialized services, and skilled workers. Collectively, these needs drive demand for the companies capable of meeting them.
As that demand grows, existing businesses gain new customers and opportunities to scale. Entrepreneurs launch new ventures to address unmet needs. Investors gain opportunities to deploy capital. And the resulting companies become suppliers, customers, borrowers, and employers themselves, generating further downstream economic activity.
The result is a self-reinforcing economic growth cycle: modernization creates market demand; market demand stimulates investment, innovation, and business formation; and a stronger regional ecosystem makes modernization more accessible to the next generation of businesses.
For Orange County, the opportunity is to deliberately accelerate this cycle by connecting businesses with the technologies, capital, and partners they need to modernize, while equipping our regional workforce with the AI and technical skills they need to remain productive, relevant, and competitive as their industries evolve.
Together, these efforts can create a stronger regional market that drives business growth, workforce advancement, and new economic opportunities.
Build it with us.
The ACTI pilot establishes proof that accelerating modernization is possible, showing what works, where support falls short, and what is required to scale the larger economic vision.
But to build the next economy, we need corporations, financial institutions, and technical experts with a stake in Orange County’s future to partner with us.
If your company buys from, sells to, lends to, or hires from Orange County’s industrial base, you already have a stake in whether this market gets built.
There are three ways to be part of it:
- Invest in the infrastructure. Federal support funds the pilot. Corporate sponsorship can help extend its reach, expand technical assistance, and build the evidence needed for replication.
- Lend your expertise. Your engineering, operations, AI, and/or workforce experience can join the advisor network working directly with these businesses.
- Bring businesses in. Nominate companies from your supply chain or customer base into the program.
The pilot runs twelve months. What comes after it is being decided now.
To explore a partnership or refer a business, contact Juan Carrillo at juan@revhuboc.com.
