Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012

Entrepreneurs draw up wish list

Raleigh should be stylish, less cliquish and connected to the West Coast, they say.

How can Raleigh establish an identity as a sexy, edgy place with a culture that attracts entrepreneurs and encourages investors to take risks on new businesses?

That provocative question was the focus of an all-day summit Wednesday aimed at helping the city embrace the startup scene and promote itself as a hub for innovation.

The event brought together 175 business executives, tech professionals, marketers and government officials – a mix of older men in suits and young people in blue jeans and sneakers – who spent the afternoon jotting down ideas on easels while seated around tables in small groups.

The groups didn’t produce a neat list of recommendations, but instead came up with rough suggestions to help Raleigh carve out a niche among mid-sized cities with strong startup cultures.

A few of the highlights:

An innovation center planned downtown should be designed with an open floor plan to promote interaction.

The center is envisioned as a space for startups to network, make pitches to investors and brainstorm ways to expand.

Rather than resembling a typical office building, the space should have dramatic touches such as a rotating color scheme or pull-up windows that open to an outdoor area, participants said.

Billie Redmond, a Raleigh real estate executive and former mayoral candidate, led a small group discussion to generate ideas for the center.

“People said it needs to be evolving and changing – not static,” Redmond said in an interview. “It should not be a predictable space.”

Redmond has been in discussions with Red Hat about placing the center in the software company’s new downtown headquarters, the former Progress Energy tower on Davie Street.

Creating a splash with the center would bolster Raleigh’s credentials as a place that supports startups, Redmond said.

“We have all the pieces to really brand ourselves as the innovation capital,” she said. “The space could tie into that. It’s really a part of being able to create that brand.”

A direct flight is needed from Raleigh-Durham International Airport to the West Coast to better connect the startup community to Silicon Valley.

Though it has come up in the past, the suggestion is “maybe not so much pie-in-the-sky anymore, but a key plank in the economic development platform,” said Joan Siefert Rose, president of the CED, a nonprofit organization that supports entrepreneurs.

The city, along with business and civic groups, should do more to counter the perception of Raleigh as a cliquish, clubby community. That perception isn’t limited to the older generation, said Greg Behr of GBW Strategies, a local marketing firm that helped facilitate the summit.

“The creative class can also be a clique that is not as welcoming as we’d all like to assume it is,” Behr said. “There’s a barrier that sometimes leaves a lot of people feeling alienated.”

In the ultra-competitive world of startups, Raleigh can no longer promote itself simply as the City of Oaks and expect businesses to show up, several participants argued.

That’s where talk about a new, edgier identity for the city came up.

Maybe the timing is right for a new phrase, City Councilman Bonner Gaylord said.

“There’s nothing sacred about the City of Oaks (as a nickname),” Gaylord said. “There are many cities that have multiple brands.”

While Raleigh already plenty of assets – colleges, universities and an educated workforce – the perception is that the talent is too spread out, said Mitch Silver, Raleigh’s planning director.

“It’s there,” he said. “It’s just spread throughout the region like peanut butter.”

A report outlining ideas from the summit will be released by Feb. 13.

The discussions were designed to be messy and open-ended, said David Burney, CEO of New Kind, a branding agency that also helped organize the event.

“It’s the dialogue continuing that’s important,” he said.