At Maryland’s first-ever Governor’s Business Summit in Baltimore today, Larry Hogan announced a new initiative designed to capitalize on recent industrial growth in Maryland from the last couple years.
The initiative, called Excel Maryland, will specifically aim to accelerate growth in Maryland’s life sciences and cybersecurity fields, “sectors where Maryland already leads,” Hogan said in prepared remarks.
“Excel Maryland will help pool the talents of our state agencies, our universities, and our private sector industry experts to help us create an environment in Maryland where more companies can start up here, and never stop growing here,” he said.
To direct the effort, the governor’s office has asked more than a dozen education leaders, tech entrepreneurs and other business heavyweights from around the state to sit on the Excel Maryland steering committee.
The leader will be Susan Windham Bannister, founder and CEO of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, which successfully brought life sciences companies and jobs to the state up north. University System of Maryland Chancellor Bob Caret and Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels will serve as co-chairs.
Some other notable members includes Plank Industries CEO Tom Geddes, Lockheed Martin vice president and general manager Stephanie Hill and Ron Gula, president of Gula Tech Adventures and co-founder of Tenable Network Security. Officials from Maryland’s Department of Commerce and Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, as well as the Maryland Economic Development Corporation, will also take part.
The committee’s task will be to come up with a strategy for positioning the state as the “epicenter of cybersecurity and [advance] Maryland’s leadership position in biohealth and life sciences.”
The governor said he’s expecting their roadmap at the end of August.
Hogan has budgeted for tech growth in Maryland for years, with efforts to fund more startups since his first year in office.
His first officially announced Democratic challenger for the 2018 election, Baltimore entrepreneur Alec Ross, yesterday announced a different kind of plan to better the state: coding education for public school student. In an eight-page report, Ross writes of how Hogan’s administration has left students behind by not pushing for more computer science education in the state. Read the full argument here.
