PROVIDENCE – The agency formerly known as the R.I. Economic Development Corporation will be hosting an additional session today, Jan. 6, as part of its efforts, in collaboration with the Rhode Island Foundation, to identify and map targeted market opportunities for Rhode Island’s future economic development.

The decision to add another session – focused on health-related market opportunities, which had been “omitted” from the choices of future targeted marketed opportunities – was made by Marcel Valois, executive director at Commerce RI, at the conclusion of four sessions convened on Dec. 8 and 9 at the Rhode Island Foundation offices, according to participants.

That decision to hold an extra session was reached, in part, as a result of the Dec. 9 article in ConvergenceRI, which raised questions about the omission and apparent flaws in the process that led to it. [See link to story below.]

Valois asked Chrstine Smith, executive director of the R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council, or STAC, to convene the additional meeting.

The sessions in December had been planned as the culmination of a three-month process, funded by a $75,000 “investment” by the Rhode Island Foundation and facilitated by The Fourth Economy, an out-of-state consulting group.

At the December discussions, participants were tasked to identify and reach consensus on “action plans” that could be translated into an agenda when the overall plan will be made public on Jan. 23, as part of broader effort by CommerceRI and the state to map out the state’s future economic development activities and assets.

An unplanned bump in the road map
Beginning at the end of September, a select group of business leaders had been invited to discuss eight potential future market opportunities. By the end of November, those opportunities had been winnowed to three choices – “Food Value Web,” “Marine and Water As an Economic Driver,” and “Manufacturing Revolution,” with a broader sector, the “Business Ecosystem,” also included.

The results had been shared in a PowerPoint deck of 13 slides prepared by the consultant, The Fourth Economy, and distributed in an Nov. 27 email from Valois and Neil Steinberg, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation, as reported in the Dec. 9 edition of ConvergenceRI.

Inexplicably, health care, biotech, academic medical research, brain research, and public health were left out of the final targeted opportunities, as ConvergenceRI’s story pointed out. Jessica David, who was coordinating the effort for the Rhode Island Foundation, and Chris Barnett, the Rhode Island Foundation spokesman, did not respond to questions from ConvergenceRI about who was responsible for making the decisions regarding the narrowed choices for market opportunities.

Numerous participants in the ongoing conversations told ConvergenceRI that they were puzzled by the exclusion of health-related market opportunities. They cited well-known facts: that hospitals are the state’s leading private employer, that academic medical research brings more than $120 million a year into Rhode Island, that Rhode Island is emerging as a global hub of talent and research in neurosciences, and that there are broad-based collaborative research initiatives now underway with promising commercial applications – from the personalized medicine and vaccine-on-demand work being done by EpiVax to the emerging success of neuroengineering platforms of BrainGate.

Other community and business leaders, who had not been invited to participate in the process, were equally surprised by omission of Rhode Island’s national leadership in innovations in health care reform and, in particular, the widespread adoption of patient-centric primary care model. More than 200,000 Rhode Islanders currently receive their primary care through patient-centered medical homes under the R.I. Chronic Care Sustainability Initiative, or CSI-RI, and with planned expansion of the program, that number is expected to grow to more than 500,000 – half of the state’s population. The Rhode Island Foundation, ironically, is the current “home” of the initiative. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island has invested more than $60 million in the PCMH model.

Another participant, puzzled by the inclusion of “water” as a targeted market opportunity, attempted to drill down during the conversations in December to find out exactly why water was a priority. What the participant discovered was that the real – but unspoken – focus was Rhode Island’s ability to respond to the threat from global warming and climate change. But the consultants were apparently afraid to say it out loud publicly.

The extra session, a significant change by itself, may not yield substantial changes to the overall plan already being mapped out. The Jan. 6 gathering will not add any new participants in the conversation; participants will be the same select group of business leaders who were “invited” originally, according to agency officials. CommerceRI refused to make the list of participants public, despite the fact that it is a “public” meeting.

And, instead of broadening the focus to look at an array of opportunities in the health care sector, the subject has been narrowly defined as “biotech,” according to Barnett at the Rhode Island Foundation.

Meet the new agency, same as the old agency

The agency’s name may have been changed to the R.I. Commerce Corporation, or CommerceRI, but old patterns of arrogance, obfuscation and a lack of transparency that bedeviled the R.I. EDC with its bad investment in 38 Studios and management of its small business loan funds still appeared to be the standard modus operandi.

The new session was not an extra or “additional” session, insisted CommerceRI spokeswoman Melissa Czerwein, in an interview with ConvergenceRI, despite all evidence to the contrary.

“Are you saying that it was planned?” ConvergenceRI pushed back. Isn’t the new session a course correction, attempting to address an omission in the targeted market opportunities? Czerwein remained adamant, refusing to characterize the extra session as “additional.”

When ConvergenceRI pointed out that the PowerPoint deck of 13 slides that was sent out by Valois and Steinberg in late November, which identified the targeted market opportunities and the process for moving forward, did not indicate any plans for an added session, Czerwein said that she was not familiar with the slides or the process.

Further, Czerwein said that Valois would not be available to talk with ConvergenceRI about the additional Jan. 6 meeting, saying that it was Valois’s decision to withhold any public comment until after the final plan was issued on Jan. 23.

When told that Valois had personally invited ConvergenceRI to meet and talk with him at the Dec. 9 meeting, asking ConvergenceRI to call his assistant to set up a meeting, Czerwein repeated her answer that Valois would not talk with anyone publicly until after Jan. 23.

When asked about arranging an interview to talk about the future directions that CommerceRI intended to take as an agency, Czerwein responded by saying that Valois was very busy and she would have to check to see when in the next month he might be available for an interview.

When self-interest intersects with opportunity
The launch of Food Innovation Nexus, a startup venture that includes Kenneth Levy, senior vice president at Johnson & Wales University, Stephen Lane, co-founder and chief venture officer at Ximedica, and Providence business strategist Michael Allio, was recently announced.

The new endeavor, set up both as a nonprofit research enterprise and a for-profit, limited liability corporation, recently opened up its new offices at 1 Park Row in Providence, with “seven figures” in financial backing from Johnson & Wales University.

Word of the new venture was first revealed by Laurie White, president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, at its annual meeting on Nov. 24, as a way to highlight the Chamber’s efforts to promote and market “intersections” of industries such as food and medicine through the business organization’s new website.

Sound familiar? Levy, Lane and Allio were all participants in the Rhode Island Foundation/Commerce RI process of identifying targeted future market opportunities, according to Levy. It was not planned, Levy told ConvergenceRI, but he did share plans for the new startup at the sessions he attended. His description of the opportunity, he said, did seem to resonate with the Fourth Economy consultants. Did it influence the outcome in the choice of targeted marketed opportunities? Levy said he didn’t know and couldn't say.

In October, Lane, as part of a Health Care Showcase organized by the Brown University Technology Ventures Office, moderated one of the three panels, entitled “Medical Nutrition: Treatment of Disease and Conditions Using Nutritional Strategies.” The panel featured David Berry, CEO of Pronutria, and Jim Currie, director of Marketing Strategy and Insights at Nestlé Health Science-Pamlab. The premise behind the panel was that “the principle of good health care is nutritional abundance.” Levy sat behind ConvergenceRI at the showcase.

Lane is also one of the founders of MedMates, an organization of biotech and medtech companies in Rhode Island. As an outgrowth of the Rhode Island Foundation’s Making It Happen initial convocation, MedMates received $50,000 in funding, coordinated by Jessica David at the Rhode Island Foundation.

As promising as the convergence of these developments may be to the Rhode Island innovation ecosystem, the question remains whether or not the process led by Steinberg and Valois was flawed by self-interest of both the participants and the conveners of the process.

Following the money trail
A far more provocative question – and how it relates to the overall mapping process underway of Rhode Island’s assets – was raised in an op-ed by Kyle Hence in the Dec. 18, 2013, issue of ecoRI. [See link below.]

“If money makes the world go around, what’s it doing in Rhode Island?” Hence asked. “That’s the billion-dollar question that should be asked by every resident, voter, state representative and official concerned about Rhode Island’s economic future.”

Only by illuminating the money trails in Rhode Island – of business loans, government grants, pension investments, deposits of public revenues, can a solution be found to the financial and economic malaise that has plagued the state, Hence continued.

The RhodeMapRI project, Hence said, has a dangerous blind spot – the absence of a multilayered map of the state’s money trails. Such a transparent accounting would reveal how the liquid assets of state revenues and investments move in and out of, and within, the state. It would also show “ how they are vulnerable to, or subject to, unnecessary risk, veiled conflicts of interest and hidden inflated fees.”

Hence asks: “What good are big plans if hard-earned and increasingly scarce dollars leave the state in the form of profits to foreign-owned banks and businesses? What good is a comprehensive plan that requires stretching every dollar when out-of-state consultants squeeze the state for millions in rapacious fees? What good are the plans if so-called alternative investments better serve New York’s Wall Street than Rhode Island’s Main Street?”

Good questions. The problem is: how can we get the answers?