About Us

The Regional Algae Initiative has been formed to help the San Diego - Imperial Valley - Northern Baja regional algae industry develop, compete, and thrive. Working in collaboration with a broad based set of organizations and institution we have begun a concerted, focused, coordinated, and energized effort to secure our region's long-term algae leadership role.

The Regional Algae Initiative is lead by several primary entities: CleanTECH San Diego, the San Diego Community Development Foundation, the Cali Baja Bi-National Mega-Region, and the Imperial Valley Community Development Corporation.

The Regional Algae Initiative has a focus on the economic development issues associated with growing the nascent regional algae industry. Our activities include:

Driving Regional Economic Development Strategy:

Through ongoing engagement with our broad based stakeholder community, we are testing and defining the value proposition of a regional algae industry.

Catalysing and Coordinating Targeted Region Economic Analysis:

Again, through ongoing engagement with our broad based stakeholder community, we are working to identify the analytical requirements necessary to formulate an economic development road map for the emerging regional algae industry. This includes considering the economic development issues and choices about around how to best take the discoveries made in the labs of San Diego and elsewhere and scale them to large, cross-regional, agricultural commodity operations to allow us to fully realize our region's combined competitive advantages.

Empowering Regional Champions and Advocates:

We are working to provide our emerging algae leaders and supporters with the salient information they need to engage vital public and private sector decision makers about economic development opportunities for our emerging regional algae industry.

Branding and Promoting the Competitive Differentiators of the Regional Algae Industry:

A quiet, yet determined, race is underway across the country and the world to try and secure the benefits of growing the coming algae industry. Fortunately the San Diego / Imperial Valley / Northern Baja region has both a head start and many unique and compelling competitive advantages for this race. From the Obama administration to leaders in Sacramento, we are already working aggressively to raise awareness about the dynamic algae leadership of our region from discovery to innovation to commercialization.