September 30, 2025 How Innovation Hubs Drive Tangible Economic Growth

Strategic Innovation Centers offer a model for sustained, inclusive economic growth - and New Jersey is putting that model to work.

By: Kathleen Coviello, Chief Economic Transformation Officer, NJEDA

For decades, New Jersey has been synonymous with innovation—home to Bell Labs, the birthplace of the transistor and groundbreaking inventions that have shaped modern technology, and a thriving pharmaceutical industry that has helped define global health outcomes. Today, that legacy is evolving into a rapidly growing innovative economy, built not around single breakthroughs or inventions but ecosystems of entrepreneurship, research, and public-private collaboration.

Through the New Jersey Economic Development Authority’s (NJEDA) Strategic Innovation Center initiative, hubs across the state are anchoring this transformation by creating new jobs, attracting investment, and expanding opportunities across various sectors, including life sciences, hard tech, aerospace, and fintech. These centers are more than just physical spaces; they are launching pads for long-term economic strength.

Why Innovation Centers Work

Unlike individual development projects, strategic innovation centers are designed to integrate key elements of growth:

• Proximity to Talent and Research: Companies—from startups to Fortune 500s— benefit when they locate near research institutions and talent pipelines. Ideas move faster from lab to market, and employers gain quicker access to a skilled workforce.
• Shared Infrastructure: Facilities like wet labs, high-speed data, testing equipment, and compliance resources are often too expensive for early-stage firms to access alone. Shared environments reduce barriers to entry and encourage continued growth.
• Cross-Sector Collaboration: When industry, academia, and government are co-located, partnerships form more organically — leading to breakthroughs that wouldn’t happen in silos.
• Regional and Sector Diversity: New Jersey’s model doesn’t rely on clustering all innovation in a single corridor or sector. It’s spreading capacity statewide, ensuring that innovation is both place-based and purpose-driven.

The success of an innovation center depends not just on placing startups and lab space together. A thriving center requires intentional design and execution, beginning with a clear alignment between regional strengths and emerging industries.

Access to funding, mentorship, and commercialization support is crucial for transforming ideas into viable businesses. By connecting founders to investors and facilitating collaborations between industry and academia, these components can significantly influence the difference between slow growth and substantial scalability for early-stage companies.

Proof in Performance

The New Jersey Bioscience Center Incubator (BCI) in North Brunswick has demonstrated what sustained investment in innovative infrastructure can yield. Since 2002, BCI-supported companies have generated more than $9 billion in economic output and $4 billion in labor income. In 2023 alone, they contributed $32 million in state and local tax revenue and supported over 2,700 jobs.

The facility, located within a broader research corridor that includes Rutgers and Princeton, offers shared wet labs, educational programming, and long-term support.

Graduates include high-growth firms like Genewiz, a leading global genomics solutions provider, and Amicus Therapeutics, a biotech company on the forefront of advanced therapies to treat rare diseases, which both have roots in New Jersey and demonstrate how localized innovation support can lead to global impact.

Innovation that Lifts Communities

Innovation as community infrastructure is central to New Jersey’s strategy. The newly announced Aerospace Innovation Center (AIC) in Atlantic County is one strong example of this. Positioned near the Federal Aviation Administration research campus, the $19 million center is designed to attract aerospace and defense firms with access to federal resources, high-speed connectivity, and collaborative R&D spaces.

Even before its doors open, AIC delivers value. Moody’s and S&P reaffirmed Atlantic County’s strong bond ratings shortly after the project was announced—an early indicator of how targeted innovation investment can strengthen fiscal health and local confidence.

Other centers are leveraging this same model in emerging areas. The HELIX in New Brunswick will bring together healthcare research, private-sector innovation, and academic talent under one roof—attracting companies like Nokia Bell Labs, which will relocate its HQ for better access to AI and healthcare collaborators.

And in Camden and Mullica Hill, a new Strategic Innovation Center in partnership with Rowan University, affiliated with Cooper University Health, and operated by Plug and Play will focus on medical technology. The facility will support device innovation and digital health tools. Situated in South Jersey, it extends the innovation ecosystem into a new geography—proof that these centers aren’t just about industry clustering, but also about geographic diversification.

A Model for Other States?

No one center or program holds the answer to solving complex economic challenges. But when these efforts are linked—strategically, geographically, and inclusively, they can become a durable foundation for growth. States across the country are watching how models like New Jersey’s play out: not just in terms of job numbers, but whether they truly support innovation ecosystems that can evolve with the economy.

Around the country, states are experimenting with different models—often centered around research universities, tax incentives, or federal funding. Massachusetts, for example, has built a dense innovative corridor around Kendall Square and MIT, while North Carolina has used its Research Triangle Park to scale both life sciences and AI.

What distinguishes New Jersey’s approach is its deliberate effort to balance density with distribution. Instead of concentrating innovation in one or two elite zones, the state has strategically placed centers in diverse geographies— from urban cores like New Brunswick to regions like Atlantic County and South Jersey, often overlooked in traditional tech growth.

By taking a deliberate, inclusive, and sector- diverse approach, New Jersey is showing how innovation can be used not just to grow an economy—but to shape one that is resilient, equitable, and built to last.

Kathleen Coviello is the New Jersey Economic Development Authority’s (NJEDA’s) Chief Economic Transformation Officer. In this role, she oversees the Authority’s strategic sector, economic transformation products (corporate tax credit programs, clean energy and offshore wind products, innovation and venture products, and strategic innovation centers) and the Product Operations departments. The Division provides value-added business engagement and products targeted at commercial businesses within the state’s strategic sectors. As a leader across these departments, she works to support high-quality job creation, catalyze private investment, and build a diverse innovation ecosystem in New Jersey.

Kathleen most recently served as the NJEDA’s Executive Vice President for Technology, Life Sciences & Entrepreneurship, where she was responsible for working closely with the state’s emerging technology and life science companies and investors.

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