A Video Conversation with Tami Howie, CEO of the Maryland Technology Council - Part II

3/7/17

Tami Howie

Click here for Part IPart IIIPart IV

A new organization built by Maryland’s leading technology and life sciences innovators

Tami Howie is the CEO of the Maryland Technology Council, an organization formed from the recent merger of the Technology Council of Maryland, Inc and the Chesapeake Regional Tech Council. As the largest association of its kind in the state, the MTC represents hundreds of regional companies active in the life sciences and technology sectors. Previously executive director of the CRTC, Tami transitioned to become head of the new organization following its establishment earlier this year. Prior to serving Maryland’s technology community in her current capacity, Tami practiced as an attorney.


EDWIN WARFIELD: What led to the merger between the Technology Council of Maryland and the Chesapeake Regional Tech Council?

TAMI HOWIE: Well, my second day on the job I met with Secretary Gill, who was at an event, and he walked right over to me, and said, “Nice to see you. When are you merging these two organizations?” I got the message from the top. And, at first, I said to him, “I wouldn’t do that. Why would I do that? The Chesapeake Regional Tech Council deserves its own identity.” And the more I thought about it and the more I started talking to other people about it, it made complete sense. What I didn’t know on that day is that the tech councils had already gotten together and talked about ways to partner, because they had realized that there was a huge disconnect between the perception outside of the state of Maryland and the perception inside of the state of Maryland. And I was guilty of that same perception, because I spent my whole career in DC and Northern Virginia and always thought, “Maryland has really low-end companies, and they don’t grow great companies. They have great ideas, but they don’t grow great companies.”

When I got into it, and I really started digging around, Maryland has everything that you need to be the tech hub of the United States. I was shocked. The longer that I served at CRTC, the more I realized that the problem was we weren’t all together. We weren’t acting as a united front. You had great incubators, you had great biotech, you had great startups, you had great cyber, but they were all in groups of a hundred people, and so they weren’t making the big news, and they weren’t coming together to feed off of each other and to become a greater organization or a greater image than what each of them individually represented. The more I thought about that, I thought Secretary Gill was right. We really need to bring these together.

What really helped is that the CEO of Tech Council of Maryland stepped down. I called them instantly and said, “Hey, it might be a good time to talk about getting these two organizations together, because together we represent 750 companies and are really the bulk of the tech in the state.” They talked, so we started talking, and kept going, and here we are today.

Q. What does the merger represent in terms of opportunities for Maryland’s tech companies?

A. I think in the past, everybody’s been trying to do it alone and trying to compete with each other. What I view the new Maryland Tech Council as is an umbrella organization that makes sure all of the companies that are members of the Maryland Tech Council have all the resources that they need. We don’t need to do everything but we need to partner, and if you look around the state there’s amazing things going on. We have amazing incubators at the ETC and Betamore. We have amazing industry-specific events that are unbelievable. We have the Cyber Association of Maryland, which is out there selling cyber companies. And we don’t need to compete with all of those organizations—we need to join forces with them.

We plan to partner in everything that we do, and the only things we won’t partner in is if there is a hole in the resources out there for companies. I think that really will bring everybody together.

We plan to have a triangle between Annapolis, Gaithersburg, and Baltimore. That gets a lot of the really big assets. That pulls in Howard County also. But we are planning to partner with everybody. For instance, we’re doing a government contracting seminar series with Howard County, we’re talking to Betamore about doing a joint education front, and we have a rural liaison to do the types of things that aren’t done in the city—so, environmental tech is going to become really big to us. We’re going to partner with the Maryland Environmental Service, with Roy McGrath, who is the new head there. We’re really reaching out to partner with people, and I think that’ll make all the difference.

Q. Can you tell us about the new brand? What’s the focus there?

A. We’re really excited about rebranding, because in the past—we were just talking about how to bring everybody together—there wasn’t a convergence of tech and biotech as there is today. There’s no longer this divided line between bio and tech. All biotech companies need to have data, and they need to be able to have fast-paced websites, and they need to be able to have companies wrapped around them. And, even in medicine, there’s technology now. When we were doing the rebranding, which was led by Todd Marks at Mindgrub, we put together an interdisciplinary committee made up of representatives from MedImmune and representatives from the tech side, and made sure that we went for something that brought both of them together. So, our rebranding on the actual logo is a mix of connectivity and biotech and technology, all in one. We were lucky that our colors were the same.

But, bigger than just the logo that we did is a new brand. We really want to brand ourselves as the hub of technology in the United States, and we’re going to do that by showing our strengths in biotech, and our strengths in cyber, and our strengths in med-tech, and all of the other areas that are in between. We’re going to show that we’re not just concentrated in one small area—it is throughout the state. There are assets all over the state. You have Aberdeen Proving Ground up in northeast that is doing amazing things in 3D printing; you have Baltimore, which is just exploding on every front of tech with incubators and companies that are getting financing from outside the state; and, obviously, by NSA in Fort Meade, you have the grouping of cybersecurity companies; and then biotech, out in Gaithersburg.

Connect with Tami on LinkedIn

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