Northwest Indiana’s steel industry provided 70,000 good-paying jobs as recently as the 1970s, but employment in the industry has dwindled to around 20,000 workers today.

The Region lost around $2 billion in income over that period, but no longer relies solely on the old guard of companies like ArcelorMittal, BP, Cargill, Praxair and U.S. Steel Corp., said Donald Babcock, NIPSCO director of economic development.

Now there’s a new crop of high-tech companies like MonoSol, Green Sense Farms Fronius USA, Urschel Laboratories, Dawn Foods and Hoist Liftruck that are also investing in the Region.

“These companies are the future of Northwest Indiana,” Babcock said at the Leadership Innovation Convening at Purdue University Northwest, in Hammond, on Thursday. “We need to understand their stories and tell them more and more. We need to share them and the creativity in Northwest Indiana.”

Purdue Northwest and the The Society of Innovators of Ivy Tech Community College collaborated to stage a panel discussion on innovation at the Purdue’s Commercialization and Manufacturing Excellence Center in Hammond. Tri-State Automations Founder and CEO Don Keller, Methodist Hospitals President and CEO Raymond Grady, Cimcor Inc. President and CEO Robert Johnson III, and LaPorte County Career and Technical Education Director Audra Peterson discussed “Thinking Differently: The Fuel for Taking Flight.” The hope was to inspire Northwest Indiana leaders to be more creative and innovative, so as to better compete in the global economy.

“There is greatness in Northwest Indiana,” said O’Merrial Butchee, director of the Gerald I. Lamkin Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center at Ivy Tech Community College.

Keller for instance discussed how he searched for a decade for an automation company to make his contract manufacturing plant more efficient, and then started his own when he couldn’t find one. He stressed the importance of salesmanship.

“I started seven companies and the three that failed were because they could not sell the product,” he said.

Grady, whose firm provides online data security to the U.S. Army, NASA, IBM and Toshiba, said Northwest Indiana business people should not fear failure.

“You shouldn’t be afraid to fail, but fail quickly and move on to the next thing,” he said.

Peterson launched the first Energy Academy in Indiana to address the “silver tsunami” of aging workers at NIPSCO, while Grady is working on getting Northwest Indiana’s first trauma center certified.
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