Business and Technology

Making Boise a City Where Innovative Business Can Thrive

By Jill Kuraitis, 6-04-09

Boise’s summer is about to enter its annual phase of desert heat, but it’s already blazing with business events and ideas to promote innovation.

In his State of the City speech this week, Boise Mayor Dave Bieter announced that the city will open a building downtown called Green House, designed to help entrepreneurs get up and running.

The Watercooler, a nonprofit project which opened in 2008 in the growing Linen District, is already open. Its stated mission is “to create a building and community to house a business development center for synergistic, emerging businesses and interests in Boise’s creative economy.” Boise City is one of the investors in the Watercooler, and Bieter doesn’t think the Green House competes with the Watercooler.

Last week, local nonprofit coalition Kickstand held its fourth annual IdaVation conference on innovation and have more similar events coming up. Kickstand’s stated mission is “to empower entrepreneurs and innovators by providing access to a community of peers, resources, industry leaders and critical information to help emerging and high-growth companies network, learn and grow.” Lt. Gov. Brad Little attended the conference and even Tweeted the event while it was happening, a “very encouraging sign,” said board president Chris Volk.

Another ideas coalition which calls itself a private-public business development organization, Idaho TechConnect recently held a TechLaunch event to help technical start-ups present to the community. TechConnect’s mission statement says it exists to “build an entrepreneurial culture, promote industry-university collaboration, facilitate commercialization, and encourage investment in infrastructure to support an innovation-based economy.” Boise start-up Adrenity Media Networks won a prize of $10,000 in the TechLaunch competition. 

And the second Ignite Boise event is on July 16, following a wildly successful debut in April. It’s a volunteer organization which puts on what they call “3 hour-ish feeding frenzies that bring together artists, geeks, entrepreneurs, academics, government officials and others to share their ideas in fast, bite-sized presentation.” Their goal is to “spark a blaze of creativity” in the Boise business community.

At all these events, local entrepreneurs traded ideas and contacts, swapped skills for each other by providing advice or help in their area of expertise to another entrepreneur, met possible investors, met their competition, listened to local and national experts on everything from finding office space to how to apply for grants to how to conduct an internal audit, and shared their enthusiasm and energy with each other.

Business conferences are as old as the hills – so what’s different about these kind of gatherings?

President of Kickstand Chris Volk thinks one reason is volunteerism. “We’re a nonprofit, all-volunteer group dedicated to helping the community and each other make Boise the place for new and creative businesses.” That kind of community, he said, is a place where art, science and business intersect and innovate together.

There was a time, Volk said, where innovation hit a slump in Boise. “There were the great start-ups like Micron who went before us and set an example, but the big guys made it hard for small start-ups because of the difficulty of finding top talent who didn’t go to them first.”

It’s ironic, he said, that the shaky economy is now providing more “density of talent” in Boise, and that necessity is causing a renewed interest in entrepreneurship. But, he said, “things are a little messy because governments and independent initiatives don’t yet have a united vision.”

At the recent Idavation conference, entrepreneurs chatted about their shock when Gov. Otter disbanded the state’s Technology Advisory Board in 2007 because they made a public statement advocating tax incentives and stimulus spending. (Otter said the board should have advised him, not acted publicly.) Otter has since appointed an Innovation Council under the state department of Commerce, but what they termed its “limited mission” disappoints entrepreneurs who talked to NewWest.Net. In a February news release, Otter said, “The Innovation Council will be charged narrowly with identifying and clearing obstacles to commercializing Idaho-born technology, primarily arising from the state’s universities and the Idaho National Laboratory.”

A no-incentives, no-subsidies approach to business development isn’t likely to help Idaho compete with other states for new business and attract young entrepreneurs, Volk said.

Gov. Otter’s spokesman, Jon Hanian, said the governor was unavailable to comment.

Local marketing company Balihoo’s CEO, Pete Gombert, was a presenter at IdaVation. In an interview with NewWest.Net, he said, “There’s no quick fix here. We can’t expect to transform our economy in Idaho from agriculture- based to tech-based in three to five years.” It’s a 15-to-20 year problem, he said, and the government and private sector could do a lot to move that along.

Education, Gombert said, should be the focus. “Are we going to turn BSU into the next Stanford? No, but we have some of the raw element here to improve a lot.  Education in our state is going to be critical in transforming our economy over the long term.”

Of innovation initiatives, Gombert agreed with Volk that Idaho is unorganized. “We don’t have a unified effort that is being led by someone. Could it be led by the office of the Governor? Absolutely. Look at Utah and Colorado, who have had government officials working with the private sector.  We have good-intentioned people who are trying hard, but it needs to be coordinated.”

Check with BoiseEvents.Net for upcoming business events.

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