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Mayors across the U.S. are investing significant resources to develop what the Brookings Institution calls “innovation districts,” in an attempt to accelerate urban and economic development, catalyze job growth, and shift their cities’ reputations toward being incubators for change.
These districts are also providing a new type of idea collision space during meetings and conferences for visiting organizations to engage local tech and creative thought leaders in different growth industries.
According to the House of Logistics & Mobility in Frankfurt: “The city of the future is an interdisciplinary knowledge sharing machine.” Innovation districts, then, are designed to be the engine powering the machine.
But what are they exactly? You can’t always see innovation districts physically in their entirety, beyond the buildings they inhabit, anymore than you can “see” Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, although people are attempting to do just that.
Rather, like Silicon Valley, innovation districts are a packaged network of public and private organizations intentionally located in close proximity for the purpose of sharing knowledge generated across a wide range of fields.
Another example of the concept in action is Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard and MIT are surrounded by a vibrant startup community and hyper-caffeinated neighborhoods full of creative spaces for brainy people. Much of the city is basically one big creative space that benefits from the convergence of multidisciplinary research and development within its environs, far exceeding the sum of its parts.
Innovation districts come in a variety of forms, and not every neighborhood with a couple co-working spaces should be defined as such. So for our purposes here, we need a working definition covering the broad strokes.
In a nutshell: Innovation districts are defined geographic clusters consisting of academic and scientific research institutions, startup and enterprise companies, and business incubators located in amenity-rich, mixed-use urban cores. Representing a new platform for economic development, they provide a highly networked ecosystem designed to accelerate growth across a region’s scope of creative and advanced industry sectors.
Now imagine copying that vision, resembling the Silicon Valley and Cambridge model, and plunking it down in Middle America.
That’s exactly what many U.S. mayors, including Chattanooga , Tennessee mayor Andy Berke, are attempting to do in collaboration with their growing startup and research communities.
“The Innovation District of Chattanooga has really propelled our city to the next level, where companies are continually growing in our community,” said Berke, who spearheaded the development of the district. “We have businesses like Skuid, Bellhops, Southtree, and others that were startups a few years ago, and now they have more than 100 employees here in Chattanooga. In addition, it’s bringing more people downtown. By the end of 2017, we will have doubled the number of people who live in our downtown since I became mayor in April of 2013.”
As an example of how these innovation clusters drive growth, Access America Transport was a logistics startup that helped establish the Innovation District of Chattanooga in 2013 as one of its first tech company tenants. In 2014, Access America merged with Coyote Logistics, which was then acquired by UPS in 2015 for $1.8 billion.
Previous to that exit, the Access America founders had launched their second startup in the city, a venture accelerator called The Lamp Post Group, which to this day occupies numerous buildings in the district.
Likewise marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk opened his fourth Vayner Media office in downtown Chattanooga in 2015 to capitalize on the city’s growing talent pool, expanding his footprint beyond New York, Los Angeles, and London.
And for emerging startup talent working downtown, the Tomorrow Building is a new micro-unit, co-living apartment complex designed specifically for tech people who often don’t sleep a lot. The shared-space living model is evolving as a growing trend globally, and therefore, the Tomorrow Building was developed as an urban living laboratory to test the success of its design strategy in relation to its innovation district environment.
The Rise of Gig City
A lot of eyes are on the Chattanooga Innovation District. Many cities throughout the Midwest and South suffered the decimation of their manufacturing economies in the late 1900s, and now they’re trying to leverage their innovation economies to resurrect their downtown cores and re-establish their corporate job growth rates, local tax base, and civic pride.
Most importantly, they’re attempting to pivot their cities’ brands from images of the 20th century rust belt to a 21st century brain belt.
Chattanooga is emerging as a new model for economic development, and earning an inordinate amount of national media attention, based on the development of its innovation district. Supplementing that, the city’s 10-gig Internet service is ranked among the fastest in the country, which earned Chattanooga the nickname, “Gig City.”
Furthermore, the city developed a whimsical Chattanooga is Literally Perfect marketing campaign this year, with the tagline “The Tom Hanks of Cities,” designed to attract young tech and creative talent to the city who want both a good job and a home they can afford.
“The city I grew up in was dying because we were a steel and foundry town where the companies had picked up and left to where labor was cheapest, which was overseas,” said Berke. “Just a few years ago, no one thought of Chattanooga as a technology city. But because of our ultra-high-speed broadband and innovation district, we’ve been all over national media about how we’ve evolved as a collision space for new ideas.”
According to Berke, innovation districts are designed to increase density because talent and money follow talent and money. Once a city can establish a geographical environment as a place for academic, business, and creative innovators to collide ideas, — — and the city council can support it with the necessary funding and political will — then momentum can follow.
“Innovation occurs most often where there’s density, so we want visitors and our people to be interactive, to exchange ideas, because that breeds creativity and leads to innovation,” said Berke. “When we launched the innovation district, it was a signal to the market for companies and creatives to come to a specific area of density to start their businesses or shop their new ideas. We’ve really seen that happen. That kind of density is growing our city.”
Another consistent in successful innovation districts, many of them have a headquarters building or complex that performs like a physical anchor and portal into the district’s ecosystem. Boston’s District Hall and Cleveland’s Global Center for Health Innovation are examples.
In Chattanooga, The Edney Innovation Center plays the role of the central public gathering space for meetings, events, and general information about the district and all of its actors. The Center has three anchor tenants: CO.LAB, Society of Work, and The Enterprise Center, the latter of which is a public-private partnership stewarding the direction of the district.
Ken Hays, president and CEO of the Enterprise Center, said the non-profit organization he oversees has three goals, as outlined in the organization’s 2016 report: development of the downtown innovation district to catalyze the local innovation economy; advancement of Chattanooga’s potential as a research laboratory and test-bed for gigabit and smart grid enabled applications; and promoting digital equity and diversity for the benefit of all Chattanoogans.
“Inclusivity is a huge conversation for us because it’s so integral to the future success of our city,” said Hays. “That’s the digital equity component of our strategy where basically we’re trying to break down the barriers between the haves and have-nots. If we’re going to be a leader in the innovation economy, we’ve got to provide for more people.”
In terms of research and application development, The Enterprise Center is involved in bringing companies together that are active in 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to prepare services for a world when bandwidth is no longer an issue. Those products and services could be highly exportable when 5G infrastructure is ready in three to four years, and the city is eager to develop itself as a living laboratory to test new developments in IoT for locals and visitors alike.
“Part of what we’re trying to do is blend the innovation economy into every aspect of the city, now and in the future, and share what we’ve learned with as many people as possible,” Hays said. “We now work regularly with the Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau to show how people coming here can use the entire city as a convention experience, for example. People can now use different venues like The Edney Center, which couldn’t have happened a year ago.”
The Edney even has a dedicated “collision floor” with what Hays calls “state-of-the-art Web casting ability” to attract groups seeking a non-traditional event space.
The next step in the evolution of the Chattanooga Innovation District is an attempt to quantify its impact on economic development. The Enterprise Center is collaborating with the Metro Ideas Project, a local research think tank focused on public policy, to evaluate and identify key performance indicators for the district.
The project will be rolled out in two phases, scheduled to be completed by the end of the year:
- Phase 1: Evaluation of the effects and impacts of Chattanooga’s innovation district internally. The primary objective of this phase is to develop a core set of measurable indicators to measure the economic, place-based, innovation, and civic engagement effects of an innovation district.
- Phase 2: Preliminary analysis of the external effects and impacts of Chattanooga’s innovation district on the rest of the city and county. The primary objective is to establish a baseline for measuring impact in the months and years ahead, with a secondary objective of gaining an understanding of the effect the Innovation District has had upon resident perspectives in border neighborhoods, community stakeholders across the county, and significant firms within the region.
Berke emphasized that a big return on investment for developing the district revolves around how people view Chattanooga. The challenge is continually getting more people to visit the city, so they can experience the district and feel the energy downtown, and ultimately see the city in a new light.
Driving more conference business to Chattanooga is one way to accelerate that brand repositioning nationally.
“One of the most important things for me to do as mayor is to build a brand that attracts companies and talent and residents,” said Berke. “Meetings and conferences establish our brand around the world. We want to see people come here and have a great time, because someday they might come back to build a new branch for their company. So, the building of our brand is a central part behind the success of our city, and right now, the district is telling the world that we’re a place for innovation.”
Source: skift.com