Innovation Phila. aims to boost, brand creative economy
BYLINE: Peter Key
After changing leaders and passing most of its programs to other organizations, Innovation Philadelphia is re-launching itself.
The economic-development nonprofit formed by the city of Philadelphia in 2001 is setting out to make the region a global hub for the creative economy.
"Philadelphia is as well-positioned as any city in the country to become identified as the creative center of America," said George Burrell, who replaced Richard A. Bendis as Innovation Philadelphia's president and CEO last June.
Innovation Philadelphia plans to focus on developing businesses that are in creative fields and that make use of technology. These include architectural, communications, design, engineering, film production, graphic arts, information technology, marketing and media companies.
The organization also intends to try to make the area more attractive to young, well-educated workers and to technology and knowledge-industry businesses, and to help foster new ideas for the region's future.
One of its first tasks will involve surveying the area's creative economy so it can get a benchmark against which to measure the effect of its efforts. Innovation Philadelphia hopes to complete that by early June.
The organization also has begun holding what it calls Innovation Forums, which are meetings with area workers, executives, students and others to get ideas that can help the region grow.
Innovation Philadelphia was founded to make the region a center for the knowledge industry, which includes any individual or organization working with intellectual assets.
Under former leader Richard Bendis, it undertook a variety of efforts to do that. The most notable were the Mid-Atlantic Angel Group Fund I LP, which raised $4.4 million, mostly from individuals, to invest in area startups; and CareerPhilly, a program to convince college students to stay in the region after they graduate by connecting them with internship and job opportunities.
The organization also hosted the Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit last June. The creative economy involves the types of companies and their workers Innovation Philadelphia hopes to help grow, as well as organizations and individuals that do similar things in the nonprofit and academic sectors.
After Bendis left the group for a private-sector job, Innovation Philadelphia turned control of the MAG Fund over to the Science Center, which runs an incubator for technology and life sciences companies in University City. It also moved responsibility for running CareerPhilly over to Campus Philly, a nonprofit that tries to get college students to stay in the area after they graduate.
Innovation Philadelphia's decision to focus on the creative economy makes sense, said Robert M. McCord, a venture capitalist who chairs its board of directors.
"The board and the new leadership did a gap analysis and noted that there were different gaps now than there were" when Innovation Philadelphia was founded, he said.
The organization is getting $2.5 million in funding from the city in the city's current fiscal year and is slated to get the same amount in the city's next fiscal year.