Economic Health Office promotes innovation, sustainability

Sustainability is an integral part of day-to-day operations at the city of Fort Collins, particularly when it comes to integrating the triple bottom line into all that we do. City Council has approved a strategic plan that gives equal weight to the environmental, economic and social health of our community. In 2015, the city’s Economic Health Office took that commitment a step further with an updated strategic plan with five key themes: Community Prosperity, Grow Our Own, Place Matters, The Climate Economy and Think Regionally.

While sustainability is woven throughout the plan, “Grow Our Own” is a commitment to truly nurture our entrepreneurial spirit and innovation across the spectrum of companies and to support the development of new, creative industries.

Innovation is the heart of sustaining the local economy, a fact our City Council recognized in May when it identified fostering an Innovation Community as a priority. Our entrepreneurial spirit caught the attention of Fast Company when it ranked our patents per capita in the top three in the world in 2007; we produce roughly 10 patents per 10,000 residents annually. It’s what led to our inclusion in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as a “Place of Invention” in 2015. It’s what drives the popular annual Blue Ocean Challenge that attracts emerging companies and entrepreneurs to compete for prize money and national attention.

So what is the city’s role in innovation? We serve as a funding agency, collaborative partner and advocate for a thriving economic ecosystem. Collaboration with the business community ramped up in 1998 when the city launched the Fort Collins Technology Incubator Program, which would later become Rocky Mountain Innosphere. The city’s Economic Health Office continues its financial support of Innosphere, and more recently, in 2006, the city began financial support of Targeted Industry Clusters to catalyze new technological innovation into the development of successful startup businesses and products.

In the 2015-16 budget, as part of the city’s Budgeting for Outcomes process and the Keep Fort Collins Great Enhancement, City Council allocated $400,000 for Targeted Industry Clusters through a competitive funding process. In total, the city has $175,000 available for allocation each year, and received $377,000 in funding requests in 2015. An additional $25,000 was reserved for the purchase of board seats and programmatic support.

The city also remains a formal partner with Colorado State University and the Colorado Clean Energy Cluster in the ongoing programs of FortZED, which grew out of the UniverCity Connections Initiative in 2007. Initially a zero-energy district, FortZED is an ongoing unique partnership for developing and testing energy-saving technologies that has attracted national and international attention.

Knowing that small businesses add the majority of jobs in our community, in 2014, the city financially supported Fort Collins Startup Week, which showcased local entrepreneurs and matched state funding for a CSU Ventures grant program. We also worked to assist businesses at the state and federal level by participating in the State Sector Partnership formation and financially supporting the Larimer Small Business Development Center for 2015-16.

Those partnerships for our Innovation Community continue to evolve. In 2016, CSU and the city will map the assets of our local innovation ecosystem, in an effort to identify regional strengths, address industry challenges and develop a pipeline of impactful community investments. Measuring and tracking our performance in this area will give us a baseline and also help us compare our progress with other communities.

We exist in the Economic Health Office to provide business support, specifically to:

ensure alignment of resources across the community to incubate new businesses and support entrepreneurs,

promote the concept of a local economy through support of emerging clusters,

work with partners to identify barriers to spin-out, new business formation and conversion of intellectual property to economic activity, and

encourage the city, large employers and partners to procure required resources locally.

Need assistance? Let us know how we can help.

Josh Birks is director of the Economic Health Office at the city of Fort Collins. Contact him at 970-416-2170 or jbirks@fcgov.com.

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