By: Stephan Erkelens

Orange County has nearly everything a region needs to build a thriving innovation economy.

A $351.8 billion GDP. Nearly 107,000 businesses. World-class research universities. Globally competitive industries in medtech, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy. Deep private capital. Deep philanthropic capacity.

We have thirty-four cities and dozens of chambers, agencies, CBOs, and institutions all doing real, meaningful work. Our cities run economic development programs. Our chambers and business councils show up for their business communities. Our universities are producing some of the best research in the world. And our entrepreneurs are building impactful companies.

Given these near-ideal conditions, we have a remarkable opportunity to expand our impact, attract more capital, fuel innovation, and usher in even greater economic growth.

Capitalizing The Orange County Opportunity

The regions experiencing the greatest economic growth are the ones attracting the greatest investment.

Public investment –the hidden engine behind nearly every innovation success story in recent history– is fueling clean energy, biotech, and applied AI innovation; categories which Orange County leads. Yet, today, Orange County captures roughly $4,100 per resident in federal funding, while San Diego gets over $5,200 and Los Angeles gets nearly $6,000.

Likewise, when California deployed $125 million in Jobs First grants, we received “planning money.” Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Inland Empire received multimillion-dollar “implementation awards”.

Private investment follows a similar pattern. Since 2020, Los Angeles has captured roughly 66% of Southern California’s total venture capital, with Orange County and San Diego splitting the remainder at about 15% each (PitchBook/Stifel Bank). If private markets treat Orange County and San Diego as peers, the public funding disparity (~$1,100 per capita) suggests a coordination problem, not a quality problem.

To that end, Orange County has an opportunity to attract and capture more of those dollars by strengthening our connective infrastructure through a coordinated strategy for clear regional impact.

Learning From Our Neighbors

If economic growth follows investment, then investment follows coordination.

Our neighbors figured that out decades ago.

San Diego’s CONNECT built connective infrastructure between their universities, military installations, biotech companies, and civic institutions with the goal of attracting capital. Los Angeles did something similar with the LAEDC. These connective infrastructures are not centralized control, but rather a system that helps a region’s existing leaders, institutions, and programs show up together with a shared vision, strategy, and goals.

A systematic review of twenty years of research on San Diego’s innovation ecosystem tells a compelling story. Over four decades, the region grew from a military town into one of the top life sciences and wireless technology clusters in the world.

Their pivotal moment came in 1985, when civic and business leaders founded CONNECT, a privately funded platform hosted at UC San Diego. Its purpose was simple: link researchers, startups, investors, and civic institutions so the region could show up as one front instead of a thousand fragments.

The research highlights three factors worth noting (and emulating).

• Coordination attracts capital. Federal dollars, venture investment, and corporate partnerships all flowed more readily once San Diego presented itself as an aligned region.
• Private sector led, university hosted, government supported. Government played a supporting role, but the connective infrastructure was funded and driven by business leaders who saw regional coordination as being in everyone’s interest.
• Culture matters. People who succeeded locally reinvested (both financially and through mentoring), creating a cycle where success fed back into the ecosystem.

It worked.

By 2009, San Diego’s five major research institutions were capturing over $700 million annually from the NIH alone. The research shows that capital didn’t arrive because the region asked for it. It arrived because decades of coordination made San Diego the easiest place to invest.

Building Together

Orange County has the leadership, vision, and proven capability to do the same, but this opportunity requires proven experience of making bold ambition into a tangible reality.

This is the work RevHub was built for.

We’ve spent years building ecosystems of disparate stakeholders aligned on a guiding vision and a unified strategy. We know what it looks like when everyone is rowing together, and we know how to create those conditions: the shared systems, the coordination frameworks, and the bridge between strategy and execution that turns regional potential into regional outcomes.

The ingredients are there. Let’s build the system that makes them work together.

If you believe in a greater Orange County and want to be part of building it, we want to hear from you. Reach out to me directly to explore what collaboration might look like.