The Ad Astra event on April 30 will attract industrial experts from all over the country and Canada.
They'll use WNY's economic attributes - shipping, power and advanced manufacturing - to surface new solutions that could turn into startups.
“Western New York may be the most strategically undervalued corridor in the country.”
Thus began a recent social media post by Anhthu Nguyen, the founder of Ad Astra Group.
And it’s a major reason Ad Astra is bringing its Industrial Hackathon series to Lewiston from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on April 30. The event is sponsored by the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation’s Springboard NY program.
Cohosts and supporters also include the New York Power Authority, New American Industrial Alliance and Jack Greco.
Check out the event details here
The hackathon will convene operators, engineers, policymakers and investors from across the U.S. and across the border, including reps from the Canadian Consulate. They’ll spend the day working through bottlenecks shaping America’s industrial economy.
The goal is to surface solutions to real problems that can then become projects and even startup companies.
“These hackathons are meant to span multiple critical supply chains and the reason is that we want to tackle problems no company or industry alone can solve,” Nguyen said. “We want to get to the most upstream bottlenecks in the economy, because if you solve them you unlock billions in downstream outputs.
This is the third hackathon in a year-long series. Previous versions in Texas and California have been sponsored by the likes of Texas Nuclear Alliance, Oracle and the Center for Industrial Strategy.
Based in Austin, Nguyen started her career in venture capital then spent several years working for defense and transportation contractors. This experience gave her the insight that the U.S. was falling behind in investing in its critical infrastructure, threatening the competitiveness of its overall economy.
She formed Ad Astra to tackle that issue.
The event, hosted by the New York Power Authority at its Niagara Power Vista, is relevant to WNY because Western New York has all the pieces of a modern industrial system, Nguyen said. They just don’t always work in concert.
Power. Access to the Great Lakes and cross-border trade. High-capacity transmission infrastructure. A legacy base in chemicals, materials, and advanced manufacturing that still runs deep.
But within those attributes lie important questions: how energy moves, how materials are processed, how goods are transported.
“When you bring people who hold part of the system into one room, you realize these are connected problems that just show up in different places,” Nguyen said. “We want to focus on removing the constraints and allowing the entire system to improve.”
