The Field of Dreams analogy is inevitable when people talk economic development, and while more than one person mentioned it when referencing Convergence and Innovation Hall, the more apt metaphor is Matryoshka dolls, those nested dolls you might have found in a curio cabinet at your grandma’s house. “If you build it, they will come” works as an aspirational motivator for many things, but it’s less grounded in economic realities when the real estate is not adjacent to an Iowa cornfield and is instead on the I-235 corridor.
The nested dolls approach better describes the way to understand what’s happening in the Innovation District. The surrounding neighborhood would be the largest doll, followed by the Innovation District, and then Convergence, followed by Innovation Hall and, for the sake of this overview, BioTC. The Tower at Convergence, other amenities in Innovation Hall and Stiles Park are all part of the 5.5 acres that comprise Convergence. And in roughly 2026, they will be joined by a 104-room hotel.
Mark Beffort is the CEO of Newmark Robinson Park, and along with Gardner Tanenbaum CEO Richard Tanenbaum, matched MAPS IV funds in the amount of $10 million to make Innovation Hall a reality, and the two were integral to the development of Convergence.
“The 5.5 acres are home to a 230,000-square-foot research facility, 700 subterranean parking spaces, the 22,500-square-foot Innovation Hall, Stiles Park anchored by the Beacon of Hope, the planned 104-key hotel and another 230,000-square-foot facility on the way,” Beffort said. “We’ll have to add above-ground parking once that final facility is built.”
The hotel will be a soft brand from a major hotelier, and Beffort said they’re hoping for a Curio Collection by Hilton. Groundbreaking is expected to be in the second quarter of this year. Increased costs and interest rates — as much as a 30 percent increase on construction materials since the start of Convergence — slowed the start of construction on the hotel.
The gateway
Convergence sits within the larger Innovation District, which is currently composed of an impressive mix of different STEM-related businesses and organizations, including the Hamm Institute for American Energy, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC) and Cytovance Biologics, as well as less STEM-specific entities like the State Chamber of Commerce.
In terms of Convergence’s purpose, Innovation District President and CEO Jeff Seymour likes to draw on his Chamber of Commerce experience to explain the main focus: “At the Chamber, I entertained a lot of clients and companies who were considering Oklahoma City as a place to relocate a business, and you can’t just point to a green field and say, ‘We’ll build you something there,’ but with this dedicated real estate, you can walk them around Convergence, and it makes the decision-making process easier.”
Beffort talks about the district as a place where ideas can become as concrete as the infrastructure. “You can’t just have an idea,” he said. “You need a physical place, a space where an idea can germinate and grow.”
Mayor David Holt talked about the Innovation District as “a physical gateway project.”
“The district was driven by a vision for a new district that would help us stop punching below our weight in areas like bio manufacturing and tech,” Holt said. “MAPS 4 is really a set of initiatives that built things, and we needed more infrastructure to expand the work we had already started at places like OU Health Sciences Center. I like to say that Convergence is to the Innovation District as the canal is to Bricktown; it’s central focus that attracts people to a place.”
The partnership
Convergence is an idea, a strategy, a cluster of places and a partnership. The name is a finger pointing to the collaborative relationships behind the infrastructure: the public via MAPS, academia, and the public and private sectors — a convergence of all four quadrants built Convergence and will contribute and benefit from it moving forward.
Beffort expands the scope of the partnership by noting the contributions from the four main sectors but also adding county and federal contributions.
“The TIF (tax increment financing district) from Oklahoma County is important to our success, and the training lab was built with a Build Back Better grant from the federal government. Anyone who has purchased goods and services in Oklahoma County has contributed to this project, too. We won’t be successful here without contributions from the public, city, county, state, federal and private sectors.”
Innovation Hall, where the training lab is housed, opened in January, and within the ecosystem that is Convergence, it’s the clearest example of the public-private partnership, and not just because of the matching funds from Beffort and Tanenbaum. The matching funds were critical to Innovation Hall’s creation, but the amenities within the building also offer opportunities to the public at large, beginning with Le Bon Café, a French-inspired eatery in the hall that’s open to the public for breakfast and lunch six days a week and until 7 p.m. on weeknights.
The space also includes two conference rooms available for business or organization meetings, but the Event Hall with a standing capacity of 350 people is the physical focal point of the facility. The Event Hall is a publicly available venue that can seat 200 people for a dinner service or 275 for a theater-quality presentation on the massive screen that dominates the south end of the space.
Overcoming fears
Tucked away almost out of sight inside Innovation Hall is BioTC, the aforementioned training lab. It’s a short-term biomanufacturing training facility with state-of-the-art equipment that works well as a way to talk about some of the cognitive and psychological hurdles the Innovation District is facing. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that Oklahoma lags in STEM education.
“Oklahoma ranks 49th in STEM and STEM-related degrees or credentials held by working age adults,” the State Chamber Research Foundation reports. “The state also scores poorly in other educational attainment metrics, at 43rd in bachelor’s degree attainment and 37th in attainment of high school diploma or equivalent.”
That makes a science lab scary to most of us. Seymour echoed the sentiment.
“I’m not a scientist either, so I go into BioTC, and my brain is saying, ‘Don’t touch anything!’” he said. “It’s a daunting space for anyone unfamiliar with biomanufacturing.”
But that’s the point of an educational facility: to help us overcome our fear of things.
“When I was a kid, I thought I wanted to be a pilot,” Seymour said. “I didn’t know what that looked like, not really, so my uncle took me up in his Cessna 150. I loved it, and I was hooked from that point on.”
Kelley Dowd, a University of Pennsylvania (B.S. biochemistry) and OUHSC (Ph.D. Microbiology and immunology) educated scientist from Oklahoma City, is the director of operations for BioTC. Finding an Ivy League-educated scientist in the city isn’t a daily occurrence, and Dowd is unintentionally — and perhaps intentionally, given her role —another component of the Innovation District’s mission: An Ivy League-educated kid returned to Oklahoma and found a career in a STEM field. She’s basically an ad for the Chamber of Commerce.
“I came back to Oklahoma to regroup after a brief stint in Colorado Springs after Penn,” David said, “and I was thinking about pharmacy school, but I missed the application deadline, so I applied at OUHSC and then took a job at Cytovance while I finished up my dissertation and ended up working there for 12 years.”
It’s important to note that Dowd came back with a plan to leave again, but along the way, via community groups like Rotary and friendships, she found reasons to stay. This is another aspect of the partnership that gets overlooked, and it fits nicely with Mayor Holt’s “gateway” metaphor: We can build all the best, highest tech, most amenity-loaded infrastructure in the country, but it’s the culture of the place that will keep people here, not just the jobs or opportunities.
Dowd oversees the operations at BioTC, and the simplest way to explain the task is that it offers students a hands-on training program of up to three weeks that will prepare them for a biomanufacturing (or other STEM) career without a college degree.
“Essentially, we do a biomanufacturing bootcamp,” Dowd said. “There are two pathways. In the first, an entity like Cytovance contracts us to train a cohort of six to 10 people, so we’d act as outsourced training. In the second, we would work with open cohorts, sourcing students from around the city, with a focus on the historically underserved communities like northeast OKC, veterans, underfunded schools, etc. The training prepares them for a STEM job that pays well above minimum wage with no college required.”
The outreach
That nod to northeast OKC isn’t an off-the-cuff reference. Beffort and Seymour mentioned it, too.
“We want to be part of a team that helps steer a built environment in Central Oklahoma that provides spaces and places for innovation to occur, with a specific focus that ensures as much of that happens in northeast OKC as possible, but in a way that is engaging and thoughtful with the community that is already here, respecting their history and culture,” Seymour, speaking of the district’s overall role, said. “We want to make sure we don’t push people out.”
To extend the mission, both Dowd and Seymour talked about programmatic solutions to help potential students lead over the hurdles of fear and unfamiliarity. That includes programs in schools, tours of the facility and summer camp-style encounters with the space and technology of the district at BioTC.
Madison Jackson is a consultant for the OKC Chamber of Commerce, and she acted as project manager on the Build Back Better grant process.
“When we were looking at what to do with the funds, we knew we wanted a space operated by an independent third party where other parties could convene under one roof to have these conversations, but we also looked at what successful model cities had done, and the missing piece from our plans was workforce. We needed talent development because we were getting many inquiries from companies asking if we could supply a workforce if they relocated here.”
BioTC is tasked with a portion of that workforce training, and they, like Convergence and the wider district, are still developing outreach strategies.
The industry
The Tower at Convergence, one of Beffort’s large projects in the district, is next to Innovation Hall. The eight-story building has an average floor size of 29,000 square feet in a 230,000-square-foot facility. The second floor will be home to Venture Studio, a business accelerator and collaborative space that will also be home to the Innovation District’s offices. The unencumbered, panoramic view of downtown across I-235 will make the studio popular real estate, and the mix of businesses already reflect the core industry clusters the district is seeking to attract, develop and expand: aerospace, defense, academia, biotech, biomanufacturing, IT and financing, the latter represented by CrossFirst Bank.
“We have the OU vice president for research and partnerships on the top floor, along with Boeing,” Beffort said. “CrossFirst, on the ground floor, has been with us from the beginning, and they want to be a resource for some of the entities and entrepreneurs moving into the district. Wheeler Bio is on the first and third floors. Tinker’s 76th Software Engineering Group has a space, too.”
For Seymour, one of the district’s tasks is to foster economic mobility, and building a cooperative, collaborative ecosystem of specific STEM clusters is important to that task.
“As a city, we’ve out-kicked our coverage on civic innovation, but we lag being in important innovation metrics,” he said. “As I see it, part of my job is to hold up a torch and say, ‘These are the kinds of investments we need and these are the kinds of programs we ought to use, and Convergence provides venues for entities to do those things.’”
This article appears in The OG Food Issue 2025.