Combination of factors drives Boulder’s innovation ecosystem

BOULDER — City of Boulder economic vitality coordinator Liz Hanson couldn’t help but join in last month at the Code for America Summit where she heard multiple members of a panel refer to their various cities as the “innovation capital of the world.”

Naturally, she raised her hand during a question-and-answer session with the panelists and introduced herself as being from the world’s innovation capital as well, drawing chuckles from the crowd.

“It was sort of an interesting sign that everyone is sort of branding themselves around innovation,” Hanson said Tuesday morning.

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Hanson was participating in BizWest’s CEO Roundtable discussion on innovation sponsored by accounting firm EKS&H and law firm Berg Hill Greenleaf & Ruscitti.

Despite all of the branding competition, Hanson said Boulder maintains a unique convergence of circumstances that have helped keep its own innovation ecosystem vibrant and a standout in the crowd. From the national labs to the outdoors opportunities to the University of Colorado to the educated workforce, she said creating an innovation economy like Boulder’s isn’t easy for other places.

“It’s the unique combination of these factors that make us what we are, and it’s very hard to emulate,” Hanson said.

The local environment, in particular, multiple participants said Tuesday, shouldn’t be underestimated.

MinuteKey’s chief executive Randy Fagundo oversees a company ranked the 11th-fastest growing in the nation this year by Inc. magazine. He said the fact that people are willing to make sacrifices to live here helps drive the talent level available to local startups.

“If I look at the people we have in our company here, all these young bright people that come from all over the country, if not the world, to be here … If I were in San Francisco or New York or Chicago, I couldn’t afford to hire these people,” Fagundo said. “But because I’m here, the quality of the talent we’re able to attract is significantly better than elsewhere.”

Loren Burnett, founder of Boulder startup e-Chromic Technologies, has co-founded and been involved with many startups in the Washington, D.C. area and said he’s always impressed at the mutual support those in Boulder’s entrepreneurial community have for each other as opposed to what he called more of an “I win, you lose mentality” in Washington.

“In this area it’s much more of a ‘Hey, a rising tide rises all boats, let’s work together,’” Burnett said. “And it’s not just words. It actually happens.”

All of that said, the area’s entrepreneurs are still faced with some challenges, the most mentioned of which always seems to be access to capital, or lack thereof, when compared to the coasts.

The keys to rectifying that issue, however, don’t lie simply in just trying to woo dollars from the coasts but also in continuing to nurture the entrepreneurial talent here.

Boulder Chamber CEO John Tayer said the chamber hosted a roundtable with venture capitalists recently to discuss just that issue of what can be done to attract more capital to the area.

“They said we need to do more mentorship with our startup leadership to help them understand how to best pitch their companies to the folks who have the resources,” Tayer said. “They talked about how too often (entrepreneurs) come in to talk about how ‘Gee, we have this wiz-bang new product and it’s really exciting.’ They don’t do enough selling the economics of this, the basic math of how’s this thing going to be successful from a business standpoint.”

Participants of Tuesday’s roundtable included Loren Burnett, chairman and founder, e-Chromic Technologies Inc.; Randy Fagundo, president and CEO, minuteKEY; Eric Gricus, program manager, Innovation Center of the Rockies; Liz Hanson, economic vitality coordinator, city of Boulder; John Tayer, CEO, Boulder Chamber.