IE11 Not Supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

Sacramento’s Innovation Chief Sees Tech Growth Feeding Capital’s Culture

Louis Stewart has been the chief innovation officer for the city of Sacramento for about four weeks. He still doesn’t have an office — he goes out to meet stakeholders instead — and will be traveling with Mayor Darrell Steinberg next week. While mapping the city’s business and tech “ecosystem,” he found time to sit down with Techwire and discuss how he wants to help Sacramento tell its own story.

Louis Stewart has been the chief innovation officer for the city of Sacramento for about four weeks. He still doesn’t have an office — he goes out to meet stakeholders instead — and will be traveling with Mayor Darrell Steinberg next week. While mapping the city’s business and tech “ecosystem,” he found time to sit down with Techwire and discuss how he wants to help Sacramento tell its own story.

Techwire: Tell us about your background.

Louis Stewart: For the past 10 years, I was a gubernatorial appointee. Most recently I worked as the deputy director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development. The office is better known as GO-Biz, and my job was to be out in the wild, in California, talking about innovations, economies, workforce development, partnerships around building ecosystems, working with government and academia to foster ideas and to build collaboration so California can compete on the global scale.

TW: What are your goals in this position?

LS: I tell people this all the time, and it became more crystallized over the past couple years before transitioning to this office: I do what I do for kids, my kids and kids that look like my kids, to bring more awareness, to bring more inclusion, to bring more equity to what is actually happening. I did that across the state and now I’m hyper-focused on home, here in Sacramento. One of my goals is to really start uniting some of the efforts that are happening here. You have the different parts of Sacramento that can rally around innovation, whether that’s agricultural innovation or car innovation. We’re doing autonomous car research; how does that help not just transit on main corridors, but also how do you do first/last mile? How does that help in the equity space? How does that help in economic development? It’s important for me to give shelter to new ideas. If it’s a new, innovative idea, let’s hide it under the chief innovation officer, let’s see if it can actually do something before we just say no or it disappears. Let’s truly figure out if the existing funds, from the programs that we’re doing, how do we show public benefit? How do we connect previous grant winners to existing programs and services so we can again help the community at large? My main goal right now is to build a living lab. How do we get Sacramento to be the place companies scale? My main, ultimate goal is to have Sacramento lean in to being the capital of the sixth-largest economy.

TW: You’ve worked for the state; you’ve hung out with the Kings. What else do you do?

LS: I think a lot of what I’m doing right now is figuring out what the ecosystem is. I have a general understanding from working at the state level, but now that I’m super-focused on Sacramento, I want to understand where we are with mobility, where we are with ag. I want to try to understand what entrepreneurs here are actually doing, what do they need, what do they want. It’s really about creating a living lab here in Sacramento where folks can come and scale their business.

Internally it’s focusing on formulating best practices, forming a shelter for good ideas and good concepts here at City Hall, helping foster new ideas and new processes here at City Hall, really trying to figure out what the story is for Sacramento to grow and thrive as the next big city.

TW: You’re building pipelines, and there is a shortage of prepared tech employees. What do those pipelines look like?

LS: What I’m trying to do is build it company by company. Yes, we need more IT people, more tech people, but if we’re really doing a good job of attracting and retaining and expanding businesses, what specifically do they need? What kind of partnerships, what kind of programs can be developed, whether at the UC level, Sac State or at community colleges, to feed the right type of people into those jobs, versus generalists?

TW: Is the Office of Innovation part of the cultural plan?

LS: The food scene here is crazy, which is nice. Now let’s get some live music, let’s get the art scene better and then you actually have a cultural center that people are attracted to. What we hope to do is tie in some of the results from the creative economy grants to the cultural plan that is going to happen in Sacramento. If we can feed into what the cultural plan is, that helps contribute to what arts and culture looks like in the city. And once we have the master vision of what that looks like in Sacramento, based on feedback from the community, that will hopefully take Sacramento to being a destination for arts and culture.

Kayla Nick-Kearney was a staff writer for Techwire from March 2017 through January 2019.