When Chicago, Illinois lost the bid for Amazon’s second headquarters in 2018, the city was devastated. But rather than retreat, leaders leveraged the moment to build something bolder for the region’s future: a regional identity rooted not in attracting a single company, but in cultivating and forming an entirely new future industry. While Chicago is but one case study, it is one of many regions, states and cities aligning themselves around “deep tech” or “future industry” economies, leveraging innovation and investment to bring new growth to communities.
The development of “deep tech,” or new technologies rooted in fundamental science and engineering advances, has the power to reshape industries, providing substantial societal benefits and engines for new economic growth. Today, there is a whole field of deep technologies, such as artificial intelligence, fusion, quantum computing, biotechnology, and space, that are being invested in and developed for their potential to spur future industries and remake regions. Because of their boundless potential to shape the future economy, it is vital for policymakers to understand the opportunities and tradeoffs that come with these industries and how to best prepare communities to take advantage of such growth. At the end of the day, deep tech isn’t just about the science in laboratories, but about an ecosystem of players. It is ultimately about who has the ability to shape the future economy and who does and doesn’t benefit from it.
This past spring, Harvard Kennedy School students created and participated in a Reimagining the Economy study group to investigate how these deep tech sectors develop over decades of collaboration across the public, private, academic, and social sectors; how innovations drive long-term economic change; and their crucial economy-wide spillover effects, including workforce upskilling, infrastructure upgrades, and adjacent industry development. The semester-long study group was guided by conversations with federal policymakers and national security strategists, philanthropists, local economic development leaders, entrepreneurs, and experts in workforce development and manufacturing supply chains. It culminated in a capstone trip to Chicago, Illinois to see some of these ideas in practice, learning about the region’s emerging quantum ecosystem and the policies and practices that are shepherding billions of dollars of new investment into the region.
Developing Breakthrough Technologies
The advancement of deep tech requires decades of investment before a research idea becomes a technology ready for commercialization. The government often has to play an active role in agenda setting to determine which technologies are even worth investing in, situating their interests within global competition and national strategy. The federal government has a role in identifying what is critical for national strength and ensuring that domestic technologies and capabilities are being developed and kept competitive on a global scale. Recent signals, including on semiconductor production, quantum innovation, drones and autonomous systems, and frontier energy technologies, have kicked off massive private investment and jockeying from regions to compete. As such, public-private sector scientific collaboration is vital to center societal goals and to advance a technology that is critical for the country.
The models that have traditionally underpinned American science and technology development are also changing. While the federal government has historically played an outsized role in funding foundational research and emerging technologies, an increasing share of technological advancement is now being driven first by the private sector and private capital. Furthermore, the growing complexity and cost of moving breakthrough technologies from discovery to widespread use has blurred the lines between science policy, industrial policy, and economic development, while giving rise to new models in both the public and private sectors. Federal initiatives developed across both the Biden and second Trump administrations have increasingly sought to connect scientific research to commercialization, production, workforce development, and regional economic growth, including by directing resources through new structures outside traditional university research models, such as focused research organizations (FROs). In parallel, new philanthropic and nonprofit institutions have emerged to fill gaps in the traditional innovation system and accelerate promising technologies toward real-world use.
From Discovery to Adoption
Once the technology has been chosen, the hard work begins to generate private sector interest, capture investment in the region, and sustain momentum through development cycles that rarely fit the timelines of traditional markets and political administrations. Deep tech often demands philanthropy and patient capital willing to fund research and development the government can’t always prioritize and markets are too afraid to touch.
Beyond financing, deliberate policy choices are critical to ensure that there are aligned supply chains, pilot-scale projects, and public-private partnerships to support deployment and commercialization. This includes addressing the hard tension of training people for jobs at companies that probably don’t exist yet. As such, governments need to invest in workforce skills that are transferable across adjacent industries and build talent pipelines before there is demand. Because there
are limits to the ability of government, prioritization matters and sectors need to talk to each other.
Growth that doesn’t reach everyone isn’t a success. The geographies of innovation are stubbornly unequal and often it is the same clusters that keep winning, both in private and public sector investments. And the spillover effects that policymakers rely on don’t always materialize for the communities closest to the advancement of the technology, which makes it even more vital for future policymakers to understand how to change that pattern for inclusive regional economic development. So how can policymakers ensure that the wins are spread equitably and that regions can credibly stake a claim in a technology?
Before staking a claim in a technology, a region needs to honestly assess what its assets are, including its institutions, workforce, infrastructure, and political will. Not every region has aligned assets and it will be critical to acknowledge what the regions are lacking and what needs to be elevated. This includes centering communities and their needs and wants when it comes to long-term development. While there is no easy answer, it is important to acknowledge the honest tension around the excitement of a “big bet” and community engagement becoming an afterthought. Just as importantly, the economic opportunity should be understood more broadly than the companies or researchers developing the technology itself. Breakthrough technologies can create demand across manufacturing, supply chains, infrastructure, and related industries, opening pathways for a much wider set of firms, workers, and communities to participate in their growth. Mapping and communicating these opportunities is essential to both bolstering the surrounding pieces that determine a frontier industry’s success, and maintaining widespread support for these efforts.
“The Big Bet”: Chicago’s Emerging Quantum Ecosystem
While many places are still debating what their “big bets” should be, the city of Chicago and the surrounding region have already placed theirs in the quantum computing ecosystem. With strong leadership from state and local officials, technology depth from two world-class national laboratories, several workforce training programs at surrounding universities, and a growing investment and innovation ecosystem, the region is positioning itself as a quantum capital eager to demonstrate not only that the technology is feasible, but that it can serve as an economic engine for the city’s next generation. As such, the city’s mission is to turn quantum from a research field into a full economic and industrial ecosystem, bringing together the various public and private assets and stakeholders for broader deep-tech growth.
While the “Big Bet” is being supported by a multitude of actors, the story of quantum in Chicago can’t be told without the leadership of Penny Pritzker, former U.
S. Secretary of Commerce, alongside the Mayor of Chicago and other civic and business leaders, who proposed the quantum ecosystem vision and began mobilizing stakeholders around it. The Pritzker Traubert Foundation has played a “lead from behind” role: holding a 10-year vision of getting people into good jobs, funding one or two strategic players in the ecosystem at a time, and deliberately avoiding the urge to own it all.
Underlying this “Big Bet” was a formidable scientific foundation with Argonne and Fermilab, two Department of Energy national laboratories in the Chicago region, providing the ecosystem with a research anchor. These assets are leveraged alongside world-renowned colleges and universities, including the University of Chicago which advances commercialization at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and the University of Illinois’ engineering program. The Chicago Quantum Exchange links universities, national labs, and industry partnerships around a shared agenda of building innovation pathways and growing applied tech jobs beyond just the companies working directly on quantum.
Governor J.B. Pritzker and the state have committed approximately $750 million to the quantum ecosystem. Illinois’ Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity provides business support, innovation vouchers, and matching grants to help companies access federal funding. The state created a Quantum Enterprise Zone, a tiered incentive structure modeled on enterprise zone tools, and in 2023, Innovate Illinois launched as a statewide public-private coordination body, with a mandate to support the Chief Quantum Officer in the Governor’s Office, identify legislative champions, and serve as a liaison to the business community.
The startup and innovation layer has grown around these anchors. P33, founded in 2019 by civic and business leaders, focuses on building world-class startups and talent pipelines, with three objectives: making Chicagoland home to top-tier, diverse tech talent, attracting and cultivating startup and venture founders, and positioning 
the region as a deep tech leader that delivers societal benefit alongside economic returns. Portal Innovations offers seed capital and lab space for early-stage ventures, mHUB convenes the hardtech manufacturing ecosystem, and Hyde Park Labs rounds out the infrastructure for founders moving from research to product.
The capstone of Chicago’s quantum ambition is the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), a multibillion-dollar campus being built on the site of a shuttered steel mill on Chicago’s Southeast Side, a statement about where this economic growth is intended to land. The 400-acre campus will include the country’s first utility-scale quantum computer and a Department of Defense quantum proving ground, with projected economic impact of 10,000 jobs and $20 billion for the region.
A North Star for the City
Will Chicago’s quantum bet fully pay off? Nobody can say yet, and some in the study group came away convinced that that’s almost the wrong question to be asking. The act of making the bet has already changed the region’s trajectory. As one of our speakers put it, “even hitting 75% of the target is enough to make an impact.” What has made Chicago’s approach work so far isn’t quantum-specific. It requires holding a long-term vision, aligned leadership inside and outside government, an honest assessment of the region’s assets, and building an ecosystem before the technology has fully arrived.
There are many unanswered questions and Chicago continues to wrestle with hard questions, including: who is missing from the ecosystem? Do people know this is happening? What happens in a city without a philanthropic anchor, or a state government that isn’t willing to partner? These are the questions at the frontier of this work, and the ones that will determine whether Chicago’s quantum bet can serve as a model for others. But one lesson has remained true: regions need a North Star and a coalitional discipline to pursue it.
