Month: February 2014

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connected places matter for those who create innovation

makehaven in action

No surprise that the report published by Endeavor, a unique global entrepreneur support system, points to the availability of talent as the number one factor that guides where fast growing companies locate their businesses. Ultimately they choose that place for personal reasons, often, and end up staying to build their companies.  I would imagine many were originally also employed by other innovation companies, and once settled, stuck around.   http://www.endeavor.org/blog/endeavor-insight-report-reveals-the-top-qualities-that-entrepreneurs-look-for-in-a-city/ issuu.com/endeavorglobal1/docs/what_do_the_best_entrepreneurs_want?e=10838786/6740745

They did mention/imply that great places are the thing that retains great talent–and investments in places that support talent will benefit people directly, and then indirectly (as new wealth is created) will boost the retention of talented individuals. This is supported by the growth in popularity of cities that have invested in education, public parks, arts & culture and other quality of life measures.

What the report points to, as more valuable than any other infrastructure for business growth, is connectivity–access to infrastructure like airports and highways.   These features keep businesses and talents connected to other markets (for customers/services, as well as more talent), but more importantly provide easier accessibility to building relationships with additional professional and business networks/suppliers further expanding a company’s potential for development and growth. The  influx/outflux of residents/talent, perspectives, experience and points of view are key to the innovation economy–this ‘churn’ and mixing are important ingredients to innovation–allowing fresh ideas in and out of a localized system.

What they didn’t mention, but could be identified as great place features: collaborative spaces.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2014/02/what-cities-really-need-attract-entrepreneurs-according-entrepreneurs/8349/

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Parallel Communities to Collaborative Occupation

ricefields
Cities with an increasingly globally mobile population, or significant influx of people from another place,  suffer a unique condition–that of parallel communities co-existing. Both types of communities co-occupy, but generally rarely integrate. They benefit from eachother’s existence, but know how to extract value from eachother, just see ‘conflict’.  These communities will increase the ‘spread’ of different socio-economic, and often cultural/ethnic, groups, often pushing out the ‘poles’ of equity from each-other
For New Haven, and similarly places like  Phnom Penh, Cambodia, this is a critical issue to solve in order to provide more equitable futures for citizens. At a municipal level, you can have long-term residents with short-term residents, there for a couple of years (such as New Haven, and Yale students).  Typically characterized by ‘town-gown, ‘ which implies the friction often seen (result of these parallel communities bumping into eachother), these are populations whose timeframes might be different, their capacity to be engaged in the city can be aligned.  At a micro-level, we also see this in the situation of rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in urban centers.   In an international developing world situation, you see this in new influx of wealthy populations looking to find opportunity –both the throngs of NGO’s that rush in to aid a developing and struggling society, as well as corporate/financial interests who look to utilize resources in a place for their home-benefit.
In my own work, at a micro level, I have found that hands-on spaces for project based collaboration and exchange are the most productive towards allowing different communities of people to interact. Instead of ‘town halls,’ online one-way portals, and educational opportunities (all of which are great resources of communication and information), spaces like Makerspaces, Incubators (especially ones that include and curate deliberately diverse populations), and ‘cohorts’ of interest groups are the most productive. Community development ‘place’ initiatives–like new community gardens, taking over plazas with programing, and pop up stores in abandoned storefronts, and other such ‘collaborative occupation‘ also provides activity as a means of integration.