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Nevada, Missouri: Building a
Telecommunity
Dealing with the closing of a major employer,
the Nevada State Hospital, Nevada
(pronounced Ne-VAY-da) decided to reinvent itself as a telecommunity. The Nevada Area Economic Development
Commission created the Nevada Telecommunity Development Corporation to
attract small businesses and home-based
workers.
In 1995, the state of Missouri
donated 780 acres and hospital buildings to Nevada.
The community set aside 560 acres for a residential "Televillage"
and transformed the old hospital buildings into a TeleCenter.
The TeleCenter includes two interactive video classrooms, a satellite
downlinked classroom, a multimedia production room, five public access
workstations. The development corporation has also worked
with the University of Missouri to offer entrepreneurial training
programs. Local unemployment has dropped from 10% in
1991 to 2.2% in 2000.
Nevada was named one of seven Intelligent
Communities of 2001 by the Intelligent Community Forum of the World
Teleport Association.
The Smart
Communities Program in Canada also has featured Nevada
in its list of smart
communities from around the world.
For more information, see the Nevada
Telecommunity Web site.
(Back
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Aurora,
Superior tackle incubators:
Rural areas spur high-tech business
By Virgil Larson
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
Rural Nebraska is wiring itself for electronic commerce, and
Aurora and Superior have geared up to link existing businesses to high-speed
commerce and grow tech-oriented enterprises.
Aurora, a city of 4,225 with a history of hustling to build
its economic base, is converting an abandoned nursing home into a high-tech
incubator. It's offering low-rent office space and shared services and is
training people in Internet applications for businesses.
Separately, Superior, population 2,055, has its own incubator
project. It doesn't rent space to startups but teases business people and their
customers into learning computer use and the Web, sometimes by the unusual like
scanning family photos for quilt-making.
While neither city has incubated the next Microsoft, both
have registered small successes - starting businesses and expanding the reach of
existing businesses via the Internet.
Incubators, programs that nurture new businesses, are nothing
new. They've been around for 20 years, said Charles Lamphear, director of the
Bureau of Business Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They went
high-tech in the early 1990s.
"But most high-tech incubators are in much larger
communities than Aurora," he said, citing Austin, Texas, as a classic
success story. It isn't impossible in small towns, but it can be tougher.
"If it's service-oriented, it could work ... it would be
dealing with proven products. Web page development has been around for a number
of years.
"If you get to the high-tech area where you are really
creative, I don't think it would work. Cutting edge takes the complex of a
university community and synergy of a large group."
Superior and Aurora are banking on small-scale synergy.
Next month, Aurora will get its third tenant - an insurance
agency with a new product and projected growth that will require technology,
Angerame said. The first two tenants are not really incubators. One is
Angerame's own business, SenseSeekers, which does Web site development and
maintenance, business plans, grant writing and business training. It also
contracts to run the Aurora Technology Business Incubator. The other is an
office of Loup City-based Central Nebraska Community Services, a nonprofit
organization.
Only one 10-office wing of the 10,900-square-foot, U-shaped
building has been renovated and fitted with high-speed Internet access,
something available to Aurora and other Hamilton County residents since the
early 1990s. The plan is to renovate the rest of the building as it's needed,
and that could be soon. The insurance company moving in next month will use six
offices, leaving just two vacancies among the original 10 that were fixed up. So
far, $110,000 has been put into the structure, a nursing home that had stood
empty for six years.
From the building Angerame operates two incubator programs.
- One takes in companies who get space in the building and
the office services it provides. To get the reduced rent, they take part in the
incubator's training programs.
The businesses can stay three years. "If we've done our
job right, they should be self-sufficient and ready to go on their own."
- The second program is an incubator without walls. Startups
and existing businesses can get into the training programs without becoming
tenants.
Everybody in the two programs has access to lawyers,
accountants and others in the Hamilton County community who provide free or
reduced-cost services to the blossoming businesses.
Another thing people in both programs get is the benefit of
synergy, Angerame said, the energizing effect of the exchange of ideas among the
growing businesses and the county's business community.
Superior creates synergy without walls. It has no space to
rent. Instead, business people, and in some cases their customers, take classes
at the Vestey Center, a former hotel rebuilt into an apartment building for
seniors. In exchange for rehabilitating part of the building, the Superior
Historic Development Corp., which runs the incubator program, got the space
rent-free for five years.
Anita Stone's mission is to improve people's technology
skills, and not just those of aspiring entrepreneurs. As director of Superior's
technology incubator program, she has organized Internet classes on genealogical
research, how to buy and sell on eBay and how to scan photos onto quilt squares.
Only the quilt square photo class would seem to have a
Superior business benefit: the quilt-makers patronize a downtown textile shop.
But immediate benefit is not the point for Stone.
"Anything we can do to tap into somebody's interest and
show them how the computer can make something faster or better, that's what we
do," she said.
She preaches using the tools of technology to make businesses
more efficient.
One of the first things the development corporation did was
run a fiber-optic loop that connects its Vestey Center offices with city
offices, school buildings and the hospital. Stone runs the business planning and
management classes, and her daughter, Kris Stone, teaches the technology
classes, in groups or one-on-one.
The centerpiece of Stone's efforts in the incubator program
is the Stateline Business Development Association, which she organized under the
Rural Enterprise Assistance Project. It is supported by the Center for Rural
Affairs at Walthill, Neb.
With its first anniversary approaching, Stateline has 18
dues-paying members and two startup businesses. It features a revolving loan
program that starts businesses with a $1,000 loan and lets them work their way
up to bigger loans as they build a credit history.
Like Angerame in Aurora, Stone has her own technology-based
business. Believing she should lead by example, she organized Bostwick Books and
Collectibles. She searches library and garage sales for used books and sells
them online at bostwickbooks.com.
A year into the effort, she has an inventory of 2,000 books.
"I don't think we've sold a hundred yet, but we're sure having fun."
Even so, her business has made a point about using the World
Wide Web as a way to expand: One of her customers is a book store in Maine.
This article is reprinted with
permission of The Omaha World-Herald.
No other use is permitted without such permission.
(Back
to Success Story Index)
Aurora: Youth's Savvy Lands Growth at
Airport
Aurora has had several economic
successes related to information technology. The following
article illustrates how information technology can assist traditional
economic development efforts.
by Kurt Johnson, Aurora
News-Register
Trevor Bair
doesn’t consider himself a high-tech ambassador, but it’s hard to
describe what he did in any other terms. Now in his fourth year of
studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Trevor is getting real
world experience many economic development professionals would envy.
He’s majoring in information systems management with a minor in
economics, and his resume already suggests he’s got a bright future
ahead of him.
Nobody paid much
attention back in 1996 when a then 16 year old took it upon himself to
design and post a Web site for the Aurora airport. He was facinated
with HTML coding long before the Internet was hip and his family was
among the first in the area to go online with a 14.4 dial-up
connection. He also had a flare for aviation, and the combination
seemed a perfect fit for an airport Web site.
Knowing that a
Web site is only as valuable as the exposure it generates, Trevor
linked the site to two major airport databases -- airnav.com and
landings.com. He loyally continued to maintain the site and forward
any e-mail messages to the Aurora Airport Authority, never asking for,
or receiving, any compensation or recognition.
In July of this
year Trevor’s do-it-yourself economic development project began to
pay off. While enrolled in a four-week exchange program at Mansfield
College in Oxford, England, he checked his e-mail and discovered the
following inquiry:
“To whom it
may concern: I am looking at hangar space in different municipal
airports near Grand Island. Who would I talk to about possibly either
1) renting space in a hangar or 2) building a new hangar at the
airport. Regards, Clayton McNeff.”
Trevor said he
found it ironic that he was half way around the world when he first
read the message. He quickly forwarded the information to City
Administrator Mike Bair, who just happens to be his father.
“It’s funny
that I could be in England and still help land this business, so to
speak,” he said. “Once again, this shows you the power of the
Internet. With a simple click of a button, now this company is coming
to my hometown. I just think that’s really neat.”
The elder Bair,
Mayor Ken Harter and “Mr. Aurora Airport” Al Potter took the lead
from there and convinced SarTec officials to build a new hangar
estimated at around $250,000. That’s the second new hangar planned
there in a year, by the way.
As bright as
Aurora’s red carpet may have appeared, this opportunity didn’t
just fall out of the sky. It took a little ingenuity from a “middle
man” to open the door and start the conversation.
“When I
built this page I never foresaw getting as many hits as it has or
having an impact on the community,” Trevor said. “It really is
rewarding.”
The airport site
has logged more than 8,000 hits since its last upgrade in 1999. The
recent exposure prompted Trevor to revamp the page, though more
importantly, he brings a new passion to the process knowing what an
impact it can have.
“This has
really motivated me,” he said. “It kind of gives me an
appreciation of something you think is seemingly insignificant, but
here it has this impact on quite a few people.”
Something tells
me Trevor Bair’s impact on this world has only just begun.
This article originally appeared in
the Sept. 12, 2001 Aurora-News
Register and was reprinted with permission.
(Back
to Success Story Index)
Ainsworth:
Local Efforts Result in Business Expansion, 60 New Jobs
In
1990, when the community was dealing with the aftermath of the ag
crisis, a group of dedicated people called a town hall meeting to
develop a strategic plan. What
were we going to do to survive? We
determined we wanted to be a “perfect place to die.”
We wanted to recognize the people who settled in the region,
those who built the towns, the schools, churches, and had faith that
there would be a future. We believed that we had wonderful businesses and people who
deserved the best services the community could offer from birth to
death.
Following that
meeting of over 100 people, committees were set up around the issues
identified in the strategic planning process.
One of those committees dealt with economic development. From that committee came the idea for a North Central
Development Center (NCDC), a place to promote the area for business
development. A CDBG
Business Development Technology Center proposal was submitted and
granted. The matching
funds for the NCDC came from across the region: the City, the Chamber
of Commerce, Northeast Community College, Brown County, Ainsworth
Community schools, and the City of Long Pine.
With each entity contributing small amounts, the office could
be funded. The
communities involved recognized the growing importance of computers in
business. It became
important to teach people how to use the computer for business and
personal uses. Northeast Community College began teaching three day long
classes on weekends, one per month, repeating courses in computer
operating systems, word processing programs, speadsheets, and
databases. People came from four counties and the classes always had a
waiting list. The NCDC
also provided Internet training classes taught by a local “techie.”
An electronic
community bulletin board was set up to encourage computer use, listing
events, community news, and items of interest including a “for
sale” page. Perhaps the
most active users of the bulletin board were the youth, who played
games via computer or chatted with each other via keyboard rather than
calling on the phone. Some
chess games were played lasting for days, involving people from all
age groups. Some of funds
for the bulletin board system came from the City’s sales tax
dollars.
NPPD helped set up
and host a countywide web page in 1995, which included tourism
information, a calendar of regional events, and a map.
A local Internet provider set up toll free phone line Internet
access. Fifty subscribers
were needed to make the service work.
An ad in the newspaper drew enough subscribers.
The Information
Technology Committee was made up of people who could see the need for
IT development, business owners who were using IT, and the “techies.” The committee organized a regional technology fair at the
high school, which included the implement dealer bringing a tractor
with a GIS system to the school.
Students demonstrated applications of computers from tracking
school alumni to teaching senior citizens how to use the Internet for
researching health or financial issues.
The IT Committee
worked with Community Builders to present IT in Ainsworth during the
visit. The school,
airport, sheriff, library, county solid waste, and others demonstrated
the uses of computers for their work.
Everyone was amazed at the amount of IT in use.
State resources were demonstrated such as the page of unclaimed
property. One person even
found money!
To continue the plan
for the future and providing services to those who chose to live and
die there, the community built an assisted living facility with only
local funding. They voted
to tax themselves for community betterment to build a $3.5 million
addition to the school and a much needed community center, which also
serves as a gym for the nearby school.
The Senior Center has been expanded three times with local
funding.
As a result of this
community effort, Advantage Receivable Solutions, an Omaha IT firm,
decided to expand to north central Nebraska.
A local development group was willing to make a main street
building available very quickly.
A labor force was ready with basic computer skills.
The rest is history. ARS
is happy to have expanded in Nebraska.
Alan Fredrickson, CEO, frequently tells the story about the
people coming to work during a snow storm on snowmobiles and tractors
to make sure they arrived at work.
Nearly 60 jobs with benefits have been added to the region.
For more information,
contact Jo Lowe at the Nebraska Rural Development Commission, jlowe@mail.state.ne.us,
402-471-2698
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If you would like to suggest a success
story, please e-mail abyers@notes.state.ne.us
12/23/2003
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