On this episode of Municipal Equation. I felt like we were doing all this terrific work being able to build these local entrepreneurial ecosystems in these communities, but starting to realize where the connection points were in order to really, truly foster a healthy innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem that really was driving the local economy and having tremendous impact in the local communities.

Hello, everybody. My name is Durham. Guess you didn't think a city could talk. That a city has troubles and hopes and dreams and things to be proud of? Well, maybe there's a whole lot of things about a city that you hadn't thought of.

One is how do we help to foster this entrepreneurial talent pipeline, and we work with a variety of different partners and organizations to be able to make that happen, some of which are different hats that I wear. So I'm an innovation and entrepreneurship fellow here at Duke. I'm also the, innovator in residence with the Center for Creative Leadership, and I'm an an advisor for a foundation called the Sullivan Foundation that supports 70 universities across the American South focused on social innovation and entrepreneurship. So I've been focusing a lot on the talent pipeline question. But camp coming out of that work felt like we could put all of this energy into this talent pipeline and really equipping this next generation with both the entrepreneurial mindset and skill sets to do great things in the world. But if we weren't creating the enabling in environments in communities to harness that talent and energy, especially here in North Carolina, that that talent would either move to more fertile territory like a New York or a Boston or Seattle or San Francisco, or they would never take root, never be able to reach their full entrepreneurial potential. So Forward Impact's focus in a lot of the work we do now is being able to create those kinds of enabling environments to be able to connect these emerging problem solvers and entrepreneurs with the resources and relationships that they need to be as successful as possible. So we've started a network, that has now become the largest entrepreneurial coworking community in North Carolina called HQ. So we have HQ Raleigh, which is a 20,000 square foot entrepreneurial coworking space in the warehouse district of Raleigh. We've got HQ Greensboro, which we've developed in, partnership with a set of developers, Andy Zimmerman in particular in Greensboro, which is a beautiful 13,000 square foot space. And we've just partnered up with the Packard Place in Charlotte to launch HQ Charlotte at Packard, which is a 90,000 square foot space. So right now, we got about a 123,000 square feet of entrepreneurial co working space, supporting about 300 companies.

end quote. Could you break that that down for us? Why is the local government level so important in this context? Yeah. And so this will speak a little bit to the work of Forward Cities and the work that, that really grew out of a lot of the work we were doing in Forward Impact. So by context, I felt like we were doing all this terrific work being able to build these local entrepreneurial ecosystems in these communities, but starting to realize where the connection points were in order to really truly foster a healthy innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem that really was driving the local economy and having tremendous impact in the local communities. And you realize that there are, a set of actors and stakeholders that play to be able to foster that. And one of them is government. Obviously, the charge of government is the well-being of the citizens, but also the economic well-being of the citizens. And if we look at economic development, there are a few different levers that we can pull. Traditional economic development is about trying to recruit companies into, cities or communities. But part of the argument, I think, needs to be that local economic development in local municipalities can also be major stakeholders in fostering a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem and to be able to create a set of economic and community development policies that further foster the growth of the emerging entrepreneurial economy.

So let's first understand that we're in a global war for talent. Right? So that as we as companies and organizations are looking to pull talent into helping grow their, grow their respective enterprises, they're looking all over the world. And we have a tremendous resource here in North Carolina because of the high quality and the abundance of our terrific universities. The Triangle is a perfect example of that. Right? So we not only have NC State, UNC Chapel Hill, and Duke. We also have NC Central. We've got Shaw University. We just got a really nice mix of universities here. So I went to Duke as an undergraduate in 1993. And I as I often share, there was a greater chance of people moving to Ecuador than staying in Durham back in the early nineties in Durham. That's changed. And it's changed for a variety of different reasons. It's changed in part because we've got so many terrific physical assets. We still have Duke pumping out a lot of, a lot of really high energy talent. But importantly, the city and the stakeholders within the city have become much more intentional about trying to create that dynamic environment so that more young people are attracted to it, and wanna be part of it. And Durham has emerged as one of the creative capitals of the country because of that intentionality. One huge move was that Duke decided to, as opposed to turning inward onto itself and basically having a whole bunch of security protocols, which really discourage students from even venturing outside of Duke's walls to becoming much more outwardly focused. Where we are today is a perfect example of that. Right. We're in one of the cornerstone buildings of what's gonna become the Innovation District because Duke is really investing heavily in terms of, Durham's revitalization. And you've had some real pioneers in the in the in the corporate commercial development space like, the Goodmans, for example, with Capital Broadcasting that saw the vision behind American Tobacco and turned that really ramshackle of a tobacco warehouse that at one point was used by sharpshooters for SWAT team practice into a very dynamic, very vibrant, cool cultural hub and was able to attract a lot of creative types. So Durham here has been a great example of how a city's been able to turn it around through intentional investment and great partners like Duke taking more outward approach, being, a catalyst for some of those kind of work. But I think importantly, Duke is an example of a universe sorry. Durham is an example of a university city where the university is an important part of it, but it's not the totality of it. Chapel Hill struggles with that a little bit because the university is so prominent, and there's so many restrictions around zoning that's been hard for them to be able to develop and create better spaces. Raleigh is now primed, to be a true destination for millennials and young talent, and you see it all over the place. There's now predicted to be 4,000 new housing starts in Downtown Raleigh right now because of this young energy wanting to come into the city. Maybe think about what millennials are looking for. They're looking for these cool urban environments, lot of walkability, access to great local food, access to good music, within a hip cool environment. And so the cities that are becoming intentional and thoughtful about that and are still able to compete on the cost of living, which is why I think North Carolina is so primed on this. Because as cities like San Francisco and New York and Boston even are becoming more and more expensive, they're basically pricing that population out. Right. And so we have an opportunity to not only recruit all of these all of these amazing talent through our universities, but have an opportunity to really keep them here because the cost of living is so much lower. The quality of life is terrific. So for a young millennial, either looking to launch their own venture or being plugged into the creative entrepreneurial scene, this is the place to be.

So Wilson is a smaller, more rural community, but it's got this really they've got a few cool assets to it. One, their their downtown is beautiful. They've got a lot of, these historic brick buildings that just are, are are are spectacular assets that are now being developed or redeveloped into these cool lofts and to workspaces, into makerspaces, at a very affordable price. So that's one key asset. They've also got a great park downtown, called Whirligig Park, which has all these cool mobiles that attract tourists to come check them out, but also, I think, attract artists who are interested in being part of this artistic scene. So they're trying to cultivate this arts, environment as well. And then they've been very, I think, had a lot of foresight in investing in their own gigabit of fiber called the Greenlight Project. Mhmm. And so all of a sudden, you have an opportunity as an emerging entrepreneur and artist to be able to have very inexpensive, very cool housing with access to walkable office areas next to a cool arts district forty five minutes away, not even forty five minutes away from Raleigh with, high speed Internet connection. So I think you're finding cities like Wilson recognizing the fact that they can play in this economy. But I will say one thing, Ben, is that for North Carolina's economic future to really be, vibrant and dynamic and, and and position ourselves as really one of the top economies in the country, I think we're gonna have to continue to invest in our metro areas and make sure that our metro areas are really robust and strong. Because if Raleigh is not strong and The Triangle is not strong, then Wilson's not gonna be strong. Wilson can't do this on its own. It's gonna be part of a broader ecosystem. So I think what's gonna have to happen is that you're gonna have to have cities like Elizabeth City, Greenville, North Carolina, Wilmington, The Triangle, The Triad, Charlotte, Asheville really be these economic hubs, with that have great satellite relationships with the local communities that can tap into that, build their own charm, their own ecosystem, and Salisbury, and Rocky Mount, and Gastonia, and New Bern, where there's some really cool things that are going on, but they will thrive, if they're built into a broader connected ecosystem.

number one, build. What what does that mean? Yeah. So how do you build your talent pipeline? How do you home grow it? How do you recruit it? How do you retain it? So importantly, the k 12 system and the university and community college system need to critical aspects of this work. For our economy to really thrive going forward, we need to be preparing the next generation of problem solver, and innovator, and somebody who's able to have a vision for where a problem needs to be solved and go through a process of successfully executing against that problem within a team based environment. In fact, through the Center for Creative Leadership, there's a terrific paper, called Expanding the Leadership Equation that interviewed, surveyed 465 business executives about the top 10 leadership skills that need to be, embraced by this next generation and be and be expressed by this generation in a meaningful way. And it's precisely around this idea of this entrepreneurial mindset. And we need to make sure that we're investing in our k 12 system and our universities and our colleges to be able to home grow that town. So that's one big piece. And then again, how do you recruit and retain that talent? So that's that's the build component to it. And the second lever you said was enable. How do we enable? What do we enable? Yep. So as this as I mentioned earlier, this entrepreneurial talent is emerging. We need to create the enabling environments to be able to connect these, emerging innovators and problem solvers with the resources and relationships they need to be successful. So how do we create the spaces, the networks, the access to sets of relationships that will help them be able to advance their career, provide access to capital, access to the broader business community to essentially create this enabling layer so that as they're emerging, as they're trying to think about where they're gonna go next, that they have this supportive environment there to be able to help them along. That's precisely what we do, within the HQ network, for example.

actively measuring the economic and community impact this entrepreneurial economy is having on our local communities. We have a dearth of data about that right now. We don't often know how many new businesses are getting started, how many employees that they're, bringing on, how much capital they're attracting, how much revenue that they're, providing into the community, what kind of impact they're having on the community in terms of, being healthier, more vibrant, communities in terms of housing and, the school systems themselves. So we need to be able to correlate, in a very clear way, a set of investments that go into the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the kind of economic and community impact it's having. And some cities are doing that really well. Data, Detroit, for example, has data driven Detroit. New Orleans is the New Orleans community data center. Terrific, areas of of of data richness. And when you have good data, you can make good decisions about how to invest resources to be able to have greater impact, and and we don't do a good enough job with that yet. Advocate was number four. What what are we advocating? Goes back to our conversation earlier about the role of policy makers and, elected public leaders to recognize foster these entrepreneurial ecosystems. And so there's a terrific tool, called Citi, citie,.org that was developed developed by Deloitte and, Catapult and Nesta, which basically allows municipal, policymakers and cities to be able to audit their innovation resources and assets, and see how well they're doing against those assets and where there are gaps. So it's something I recommend policy leaders take a look at. But I think all cities need to take some, a stock on what their current policy alignment is. Are they aligned? Our city is doing the best job they possibly can to help foster this local innovation ecosystem. And the last one was share. Is that storytelling? And if so, what kind of story are we gonna tell and how? That's right. So this is a narrative. Right? So you wanna ultimately be able to start to tell the story of how these cities are coming back, or are new hubs of innovation and entrepreneurship. Durham is actually doing a pretty good job of that right now. It just came out of Moogfest, for example. And one of the key things that came out of Moogfest was that Durham is this cool entrepreneurial hub. And when you when you are able to establish a very attractive narrative, then you're able to start to create a flywheel effect. Because if the narrative is good and can't people get excited about what's going on in this particular community, it's gonna attract more talent. Talent more talent will attract more capital. More capital will make it a more robust policies will be aligned with that. There'll be better data data to be able to prove it, and so you get this nice flywheel effect that's going on. So often, though, these stories are not being told. I have a colleague and friend of mine at the New York Times that talks about David Bornstein who has this great line that basically says that problems scream while solutions whisper. And so we've gotta do a better job amplifying these solutions, amplifying the cool things that are happening in these communities. Right. It's one of the reasons why, I co author a biweekly column in the News and Observer on doing better at doing good, because we wanna try to help shine a light on some of the amazing things that are going on in these local communities and lift them up and celebrate them with the hope that we can create more.

Yeah. So let me give you, an example of how cities are recognizing they need to move in this direction. You mentioned Forward Cities at the very beginning of this podcast, and that's a multinational multi city learning between Detroit, Cleveland, and New Orleans, and Durham focused on inclusive innovation and helping these cities learn from one another as they try to advance their work around not only creating these very robust, healthy entrepreneurial ecosystems, but also do it in a way that is truly inclusive, specifically growing more locally owned minority owned enterprises and more women owned enterprises as part of the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. There's a lot of good information that, your listeners can get at forwardcities.org. Based on the success of that, we decided to bring that model. I'd help wanted to bring that model to North Carolina, and so we launched something called innovatenc.org in partnership with the Institute for Emerging Issues that came out of the Emerging Issues Forum two years ago focused on innovation. We've got now 10 partners that are part of this. But the whole idea is to be able to help communities in North Carolina accelerate their local innovation ecosystems, recognizing the fact that we've got a lot of energy right now in the Triangle in Charlotte, but in other parts of the community, the innovation, the the rate of acceleration, and the rate of innovation is is lagging behind. So we put forward a request for proposals last July for communities to be able to participate in this statewide multi city learning collaborative. And it was not an insignificant application process. They had to demonstrate very significant community buy in from a number of stakeholders. They had to develop a fairly significant plan of action, and they needed to put 15 commit $15,000 to this initiative. We had 18 communities across North Carolina apply to become part of Innovative NC. We ultimately had to select five of them, and those five are Greensboro, Wilson, Pembroke, Greensboro, and Asheville. Mhmm. But we're gonna be having a convening of all of the cities that applied because there is such an appetite to try to do this work locally in these place based innovation ecosystems, but be connected to a broader conversation, and and to a network of resources that can really help them advance that work. How do we find more details about that? At innovatenc.org.

we are also on Twitter, and you can just follow me at at c ghergan on Twitter, where I put a lot of this kind of information out. And on the Forward Cities website, especially for municipal policy leaders and anybody interested in this kind of work, we have a whole resources page for people to be able to check out some of the cool things that are out there. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ben.

Hello. I've been around here a long time. Seen a lot of changes in my day, and maybe I have a right to be proud. Proud of my thriving industries. Proud of my flourishing businesses. But most of all, I'm proud of my people.