(upbeat music) Since we began our Future of Work Town Halls, we've heard that higher education and design are integral to Michigan having a strong economic future.

Like when former Crain senior editor, Chad Livengood, said this.

- Don't go to college.

You need more people to go become plumbers.

We only need so many plumbers.

I mean, there is a max on plumbers at some point in the economy but right now, like, we cannot get enough people to write software code in this state right now.

- [Will Glover] Or when CEO of Tech Town, Ned Staebler, said this.

- Instead of incentivizing production facilities that pay 15, 16, $17 an hour, we should be incentivizing Ford to build out the train station or Rivian, which was here but left because they couldn't get the talent, because those are the types of jobs that are gonna power our economy.

Those are the types of jobs that Minnesota and Virginia and Colorado are stealing from us.

The production jobs, yeah, they're going to Kentucky, but Kentucky's getting poorer too.

That's not really working anymore.

- [Will Glover] Or when Vice President of strategy and communications at the College for Creative Studies, Olga Stella said this.

- We have the highest concentration of commercial industrial designers in the country.

It is very much part of every industry in, you know, the region and in the state, and there's a long history here.

- So I wanted to know how higher education and design turn into products that need to be made by the employees that fuel our economic success.

Enter Centrepolis Accelerator.

A company best explained by the man who runs it, Dan Radomski.

- Centrepolis Accelerator is located in Southfield, Michigan.

It's on the campus of Lawrence Tech University.

Funded by Lawrence Tech, City of Southfield, Michigan Economic Development Corporation, as well as many other organizations and foundations.

Our mission is, despite being here in Southfield, is to support the entire state of Michigan and helping people develop physical products and get them made here in Michigan.

This is an example of one of the products we brought to market.

It's the magnetic buttons that I was mentioning.

- Tell me how you found this hole in the market that you guys are currently occupying and what makes simply creating a product and getting it to a shelf, more complicated than it seems?

- Yeah, I think it might seem odd to a lot of people, with this being a manufacturing state, that we didn't have a incubator or accelerator program focused on developing physical products and manufacturing them here in Michigan, because that's our bench strength.

Right?

That's what we're really good at.

Not just manufacturing but the product development process to prepare a product for manufacturing.

We're really the best in the world at it.

I mean, I would compare Michigan and the Detroit area to any place in the world that is innovative.

Germany, Japan, and other areas in designing, engineering, testing, and driving costs and complexity out of products and ensuring that they're gonna be durable and reliable.

We're really the best in the world at it.

- [Will Glover] And he would know because he's been in this field most of his life.

- What he did here is he actually created a clutch, that when you pull on these, gives 300 pounds of resistance which is amazing.

Yeah, I was really born and raised in the manufacturing.

I grew up as a machinist.

I've been in manufacturing and product development my whole life.

My last job in private industry was running an international vehicle design engineering firm.

- Tell us what the impact of Centrepolis has been because this is the only place that's helping people with the nuts and bolts of how to manufacture a product and get it to market.

- Yeah, so we've been an operation centropolis for five years now, and the impact we've had has just been amazing.

Every company that has come in here that has had an idea for a physical product that we've made an investment of time and money in, has officially got their product to market.

That's almost unheard of, even for software companies, and very difficult to do with hardware or physical products.

So we've been able to launch over three dozen businesses.

We've had the opportunity to get 50 new physical products out to market, and more importantly, is we help these people with their ideas, finally get a product to market that's made in Michigan.

It's also having a trickle effect to those in the local supply chain.

Many of those companies are not manufacturing themselves.

We connect them to local suppliers.

Our clients alone over the last five years, have contracted 366 contracts to Michigan manufacturers, amounting over $24 million.

- [Narrator 1] Wow.

- So, the economic multiplier of our work is rather significant to the local manufacturing community.

- In your opinion, what is it that Michigan needs or what direction should we be headed in to reinvigorate the manufacturing that Michigan, maybe once had in the past?

What do we need to be doing to breathe life back into this sector of our economy?

- So one thing I'll say is, one of the most valuable parts of our manufacturing value-chain is the product design and engineering part of, you know.

So you have to set that aside from the actual manufacturing of making things.

The actual value of designing and engineering and testing and prototyping, we're still best in the world at that.

And there's literally thousands of firms here, in Michigan, that do that today.

And, largely, what we've done is harness that power and that talent that's already here.

- What I'm hearing you say is that they might have the reputation on the coasts, but we are backing up that reputation with our brain power and ability, when it comes to product design and manufacturing and that kind of thing.

- Yeah.

So as people learn, as investors learn, as startups have learned about Centrepolis' capabilities, they have been working with us and some have actually moved here.

We've had about a dozen companies move from Silicon Valley area to Michigan, very specifically to work with Centrepolis to help them design and engineer and develop their products.

- [Will Glover] For more of our coverage on the Future of Work, go to OneDetroitpbs.org.