by Neil Munro
April 1, 2009

The name Automation Alley is read and heard more and more often in connection with new businesses and jobs in Southeast Michigan, for which we are especially grateful in these alarming times.

Yet many of us seem to have only the most vague notions of what the Alley is.

To start with the basics, the physical aspect of the enterprise is a building in the Oakland County city of Troy. Built in 2004, the appropriately very modern one-story structure serves as a meeting hall, school, headquarters and more for the 501(c)6 corporation; meaning it’s nongovernmental, nonprofit and tax exempt.

Plans already are underway to expand the organization’s floor space. Membership increased 17 percent, to more than 1,000, in just the last year. The entrepreneurs and corporations this enterprise attracts are, by definition, ambitious and creative.

Before the Troy building, Automation Alley occupied space loaned by the Oakland County government, headed, of course, by County Executive L. Brooks Patterson. It originally had been Patterson who, inspired by a conversation with a constituent, decided to explore the economic growth potential of high technology business in the county.

The result was the call in his 1997 state-of-the-county address for a new organization that would “leverage the technical prowess” Patterson discovered locally to create new jobs in the county.

To launch the effort, Patterson turned to Deputy County Executive Ken Rogers. A longtime area Realtor, Rogers now occupies the corner office in the Alley’s Troy building, where he typically spends most of his week as Automation Alley’s operating head. There also is a member-based board of directors to establish policy.

Bills mainly are paid by membership dues and federal, state and local economic development grants.

Initially, the focus naturally was on development in Oakland County by assisting members’ projects there. The ideas continue to come from both first-time inventors with a dream and venerable corporations with new ideas.

The main point of such development is, of course, for members and the community in general to profit from the result. To that end, the Alley has been leading two overseas sales trips per year for the last four years. They’ve generated much of the Alley’s news coverage.

The name surely will be as closely associated with high technology as Boston’s Route 128 and Silicon Valley in California.

It also is promoted by an Automation Alley-based magazine called X-Ology, which is available online, of course, but also in hard copy. And there is another traditional way to discover what the enterprise has to offer, a resource-center phone number: 1.800.427.5100.

The Alley’s most recent sales call was on the nation of Brazil. It’s the fifth largest in the world and obviously a huge potential customer. So far, the international effort has resulted in 200 new jobs here and initial sales of more than $130 million by Alley members. That helped Automation Alley win the presidential E-for-Exporting Excellence award in 2008, the first given to a Michigan enterprise in 38 years.

The Alley also steers government grants, mainly state, to existing local enterprises, where they provide seed money for turning members’ new technologies into the commercial items they sell locally and around the world. To date, Alley investments have resulted in launching 22 new companies and technologies, and some of the original investments have been repaid for reuse. Thus, Automation Alley’s nest egg for launching new products and businesses gets larger and larger!

Inevitably, it became apparent that the economic development approach begun in Oakland County needed to be expanded beyond its borders. Now the Alley’s business development and expansion services also are available in the seven adjacent counties and Detroit.

They include 311,000 technology workers and 7,300 technology businesses, more than any other region in the state. The expansion of the Alley will help keep this unique resource from being lost.

The organization, of course, doesn’t take the continued local availability of skilled workers for granted. Rogers points out that the Alley hosted 10,000 young people in the Pontiac Silverdome, where 80 businesses introduced them to the benefits of a technical education. The Alley also specifically stresses the value to all vendors of not overlooking an important local advantage. U.S. military facilities in the nearby Macomb County city of Warren, as the local contact point with the Pentagon, represent $30 billion in annual purchasing — certainly not an inconsequential sum.

But the key to Automation Alley’s success has been the growth of its membership and the creation of activities and programs the members find essential in sustaining and enlarging their businesses.

Think of it! Rogers concludes that within the next three years, here in Southeast Michigan, we will have created the world’s largest dues-paying technology organization, and will have done that when our economy was becoming knowledge-based.

Great timing!

Neil Munro is the retired editor of the Oakland Press in Pontiac.