November 27, 2006 in Business

Web sites that grow on you

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Kelly
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Christopher Kelly

Spokane writer and computer-industry consultant

My primary interest is in finding ways Spokane can develop a robust economy, a place with brain gain, where college students want to stay and where graduates from all over the world want to move. You can find almost anything you need to know simply by searching in Google. That’s how I found many of these sites.

Economic Development

Economist Paul Romer has fascinating suggestions that could help Spokane grow, at www.stanford.edu/~promer/ pubs2005.html. Some articles by him are listed. Check out his article on economics and an interview from Reason magazine. One of his suggestions is to make it as easy as possible for new ideas to form by recombining old ideas.

The place where this happens best is, quite simply, Silicon Valley. Back before the Internet boom, the Valley was afraid it was losing its competitiveness, so leaders from business, academia and government formed Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, hoping to find out why the economy was only booming instead of exploding. At www.jointventure.org, you’ll find an instruction book on how to create a thriving economy, with the indicators they track to assess progress. Among their observations: A great economy arises from having a strong, dense knowledge base and a free flow of ideas, while allowing people to rise as fast as their ability allows.

Entrepreneurs

Not far from Silicon Valley, a young professor at UC-Davis has been studying how breakthroughs happen and how to build an innovation factory. Andrew Hargadon (www.andrewhargadon.com) believes that recombining existing ideas leads to great products like Post It notes.

Vinod Khosla has been called the greatest venture capitalist on Earth, so what better place to find out how VCs think? Go to www.khoslaventures.comand check out the entrepreneurial resources.

Technology/Business

For great ideas on new businesses and musings about technology, go to Robert X. Cringely’s site and read through the archive (www.pbs.org/cringely). Every now and then you’ll come across some brainstorm he had that someone else eventually turned into a billion-dollar company.

For the latest info on venture capital deals and startups, the best sources are Good Morning Silicon Valley (sign up at www.siliconvalley.com) and Dealbook http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/ from the New York Times.

Local Growth

A great idea that we could replicate here is San Francisco’s Writers Grotto, at www.sfgrotto.org. Now that we’ve spawned a National Book Award winner and a finalist, we can put together our own Grotto to build the next generation of famous writers. The best description is at Po Bronson’s site — www.pobronson.com/ index_the_grotto.htm.

And finally, my favorite site, because it takes ideas from all these other people and turns them into a way to make Spokane into a great city, is the Phoenix Project site (http://phoenix.efgn.org/). The Phoenix Project would take a rambling warehouse complex in the University District and turn it into a cross between Seattle’s Pike Place Market and a mini-Silicon Valley. You could buy fresh vegetables at the farmers market, see a great foreign film, and bump into the 20-somethings working on the next Google. How much more creative could you get?

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