Texas Foundation for Innovative Communities

The Texas Foundation for Innovative Communities (TFIC) is an independent, non-partisan organization focused on identifying, advancing, and deploying the world’s best practices and policies for strategic economic growth, focused on high-performance innovation ecosystems.

Economic growth is the most powerful tool for reducing poverty, reducing income inequality, and ensuring a future of shared prosperity.

Innovation is the primary currency of economic growth, and while the contributions of heroic entrepreneurs and pioneering companies are important, economically relevant innovation — on a regional scale — is mostly the product of robust and efficient innovation ecosystems.

Such ecosystems allow individuals and firms to multiply their productivity enormously due to the rich array of assets and relationships, supported by resources for facilitated navigation.  Among industrialized nations, the ability of each region to swiftly create new ideas and transform those ideas into high growth companies is the key determinant of regional wealth creation.

TFIC identifies leading research into this phenomenon, contributes original research and methodologies, and produces demonstration projects to enhance the effectiveness of designed innovation ecosystems.

TFIC's work is based largely on the work of Dr. George Kozmetsky, credited as the primary architect of the Austin “Technopolis.”  Together with TFIC Chair Pike Powers, they and their colleagues built the “Austin Model” innovation ecosystem, and recruited Microelectronics and Computers Corporation (MCC), Sematech and large swaths of the semiconductor industry to Central Texas, resulting in one of the foremost global examples of economic transformation.

Their initiatives include the Innovation Ecosystem Reference Model, the MassChallenge Texas accelerator which connects the disparate ecosystems of Texas to more effectively resource and scale entrepreneurial ventures, and projects to attract venture capital and to accelerate research funding.