When a 25-year-old airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh walked into St. Louis in 1926 with an audacious plan to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, he found a city willing to bet on him. Lindbergh, who flew mail between St. Louis and Chicago, convinced a group of local businessmen — led by Harold Bixby, a banker and president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce — to put up the money for a custom-built plane. The budget was set at $15,000. The aircraft that emerged from a San Diego hangar, a modified Ryan monoplane, was christened the Spirit of St. Louis in honor of the city's backers. On May 20-21, 1927, Lindbergh flew it across the Atlantic and into history, capturing the $25,000 Orteig Prize and changing aviation forever.
Nearly a century later, organizers of the Innovate USA Summit and Expo are invoking that same story of civic belief in a young innovator. The event, running October 13-15, 2026, at The Post Building at 1190 Cole St., will launch the first-ever Missouri Innovation Week, a three-day gathering that its founders frame as a direct heir to the Lindbergh moment. "Nearly a century ago, nine leaders gathered in St. Louis to fund The Spirit of St. Louis because they believed in a 25-year-old pilot with an ambitious dream," reads the event's own framing. "This October, leaders will gather once again to help the next generation with bold ideas take flight."
The summit's morning program is built around keynotes and panels featuring leaders from Gateway X, Amazon Web Services, Google, NVIDIA, Overture Maps Foundation, WEKA, World Wide Technology, AMICSTL, 39 North, the Danforth Plant Science Center, BioSTL, the Taylor Geospatial Institute, the Lindbergh Foundation, and the City of St. Louis. The opening keynote comes from Jesse Pujji, followed by two featured AI panels. The first, "Harnessing AI Infrastructure for Good," will convene founding members of the Spirit of St. Louis AI Innovation Center, including confirmed panelist Devin White, Geospatial Segment Lead for NVIDIA Public Sector. The second panel turns to regional innovation hubs and research institutions, examining how advanced AI can address challenges in agriculture technology, advanced manufacturing, bio and health sciences, and geospatial work.
That AI Innovation Center is itself a fresh development with deep ties to the summit. Announced in September 2026, it was established by the local nonprofit GeoSTL alongside founding tech members NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services, Google, WEKA, Overture Maps Foundation, and World Wide Technology. The center is named, again, for Lindbergh's aircraft, and it aims to give researchers, governments, startups, and others access to high-performance computing and AI resources that smaller firms often cannot afford to build on their own. GeoSTL director of strategy and operations Peter Tchoukaleff described the constraint bluntly: "These companies are increasingly in need of high-performance compute, not necessarily capital." The center has committed 20 percent of its resources and capacity to civic projects benefiting St. Louis and the surrounding region, and plans a series of "Spirit of St. Louis AI Innovation Competitions" once fully operational. Mark Munsell, GeoSTL's executive director, called the center's creation "a pivotal moment for our region and the broader tech community."
In the afternoon, hundreds of students will attend an interactive expo featuring emerging technology demonstrations and hands-on exhibits designed to pull young people toward STEM careers. The event's stated mission is to make innovation accessible to everyone and to inspire the next generation of innovators in St. Louis.
Accessibility is baked into the structure in several ways. The Civic AI Hackathon, presented by Scale AI and UMSL, is free and open to everyone, from first-time builders to experienced teams. It kicks off at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, October 13, at the close of the summit, with teams building at T-REX, at UMSL, and virtually. City of St. Louis leaders will present real community challenges, and builders compete across three divisions — K-12, University, and Community. The hackathon runs 33.5 hours, a deliberate nod to the flight time of Lindbergh's transatlantic crossing, and finishes at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 15, with a Hackathon Finish Line Celebration hosted with RECF. Jason Feifer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine, recorded a message for participants tackling the community challenges.
For those who cannot attend in person, live and recorded panels held in the Press Hall, plus Virtual Expo Booth videos, are available online at no cost. In-person networking and hands-on AI training time are reserved for ticket holders on site, and attendees who complete the AI training session receive a virtual completion badge — not a formal certification, and not issued by a credentialing body.
Tickets start at $99 for the summit and $49 for the expo, with a promotional code (TEAM) offering $50 off any summit or expo ticket through September 25, 2026. Organizers say the discount exists specifically to keep the experience affordable for the whole community. The week also includes a Saturday community event on October 17, and a Champions of Innovation awards program recognizing business, civic, corporate, and university leaders who have strengthened the region's ecosystem.
The event's broader pitch leans on a pair of anniversaries: it bills itself as a celebration of "100 Years of Innovation and 250 Years of American Ingenuity," tying the centennial of the Spirit of St. Louis flight to the nation's semiquincentennial. Missouri, organizers note, is the Show Me State, and they argue the Midwest is the best place to build the technologies of tomorrow. Whether the next Lindbergh is a hackathon coder in a K-12 division or a graduate student fine-tuning a model on shared compute, the summit's bet is the same one Bixby and his fellow St. Louis leaders made a century ago: that backing a young person with a bold idea is worth the investment.