The Phoenix Project will become a place where founders of new businesses rub shoulders on a daily basis with experts who can help their businesses grow to a global scale; a place where they can share ideas and work together with artists, writers, filmmakers, craftspeople, and musicians; a place where movie lovers and music lovers will mingle with visitors from around the region and around the world at a new, permanent farmers' market and an international marketplace featuring fledgling restaurants and shops that market the region's goods. Students, faculty, and staff of area universities will be a big part of the mix, as company founders, interns, new employees, advisors, and customers.

The need for such a project is clear: the region significantly underperforms its potential in new-business and job creation. According to the Washington Technology Center's Index of Innovation and Technology, even Bellingham has more private investment activity than Spokane. With only four times the population of Spokane County, King County produces eight times as many technology startups. That means we need to double our startup creation just to stay in the game. We need to make a pro-active effort to jumpstart new-business creation, not only in technology, but in all sectors of our regional economy. The Phoenix Project can jump-start this activity at a low cost, using proven techniques derived from rapidly growing economies around the world.

The projected location is the classic Jensen-Byrd warehouse, in the heart of the proposed University District, just two blocks from the new convention center. The building contains 185,000 square feet of heated, sprinklered, and electrified open-plan space.

To become the best, we must learn from the best. The Phoenix Project builds on the legacy of earlier, proven Spokane catalysts like Second City and the original farmers' market, but also incorporates other successful ideas from some of the most thriving economies in the world, including Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Vienna, Boston, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle. Our advantage is that, because we are starting from a small base, we can put all these catalysts in one place, maximizing the serendipity needed to generate new ideas and creative ways of implementing them.

Many popular initiatives in Spokane are in search of a home, and the Phoenix Project has room for them all:

• A high-speed GigaPoP combined with an internationally competitive Meet-Me Room to turn Spokane into an Internet mecca, building on existing, underutilized assets.
• A demonstration center for regional technologies working together, including vendors like Vivato, ReliOn, Purcell Systems, World Wide Packets, and 180 Communications.
• A year-round farmers' market and international marketplace with low fees in a stable location.
• A location to develop commercial applications of research from WSU, PNNL, and other area research institutions.
• A source for student jobs in the University District and a de facto student-activity center for the University District.
• Expanded studios for KPBX, including an auditorium for live productions, and offices for Spokane Public Radio.
• A sound stage and post-production facilities for a large, local movie production company.
• A multi-screen art-film theater.

• Acres of inexpensive space for entrepreneurs to gestate their ideas, develop their business plans, and build their startups, surrounded by those whose mission is to develop new businesses, including attorneys, accountants, bankers, venture funds, and non-profits. Nearly everything a startup needs can be made available in the building, including light manufacturing, shared large-scale shipping and receiving, and other shared services, as well as room to grow.
• Rapid deployment of new startups, emulating Silicon Valley's dense network of relationships, which allows a startup founder to potentially put together an entire team, funding package, and office space in a matter of hours.
• A writers' grotto similar to the successful San Francisco institution, where space is shared by writers, artists, and filmmakers.
• Artists' lofts and craftmakers' workshops, including public demonstrations of such activities as glassblowing and woodcarving to attract tourists and convention-goers.
• A cluster of support services for creative projects, including a recording studio, digital video editing suite, sound stage for film production, music and dramatic rehearsal space, and informal performance space.
• A cluster of support services for startups, professionals, and the University District as a whole, including day care, copy shop, computer technicians and networking specialists, graphic designers, and more.

• The Meet Me Room in Los Angeles' One Wilshire turned an area in steep decline into one of the most valuable locations in the city. Imagine Spokane's own GigaPoP reinvigorating the east end of downtown as well as the University District and surrounding neighborhoods, activating the entire region from the Cascades to the Great Plains as the most wired region in the country, and linking regional universities directly to the world's most advanced research networks.
• Vienna's year-round Naschmarkt draws both tourists and locals to an outstanding mix of farmers' booths and retail stalls, as does Seattle's Pike Place Market, which gave birth to Starbucks and Spokane-funded Sur la Table. What businesses will our farmers' market give birth to?
• Tokyo's Akihabara electronics market provided the materials that a tiny startup later called Sony needed to create its first product. Would we like a Sony to grow here?
• Tourists as well as residents are drawn to gathering places. The modern-art horologe near the Pompidou Center in Paris and the classic glockenspiels of cities like Vienna and Munich draw crowds as their animated figures act out stories from history or fable. Imagine convention-goers tramping over to see a giant clock whirring to life on the hour as the figure of a local tribesman spears a salmon by the falls, a miner digs for gold in the Coeur d'Alenes, and farmers square-dance after the harvest. Or to see something unlike anything else in the world--a cutting-edge holographic glockenspiel created by local holography expert Steve McGrew and local game developer Cyan Worlds.
• Place Beaubourg in Paris is filled with a sense of celebration, as jugglers, poets, musicians, fire-eaters, and street actors entertain spontaneous crowds. These kinds of performers can be easily accommodated indoors and out at the Phoenix Project.
• Informal jam sessions beginning 30 years ago in the bar of the general store in Luckenbach, Texas, a tiny hamlet outside Austin, spurred the city's thriving downtown music scene, which grew lock-step with its startup sector. The Phoenix Project can be our little Luckenbach.

The benefits are clear. And they are not limited to impacts within the scope of the project itself. By driving Spokane's status as a Tier 1 city in Internet connectivity, combined with the new vibrancy in the University District and the spinout of successful startups into the broader community, the fully-implemented Phoenix Project will lay the groundwork to:

• Increase office occupancy rates downtown and near the eMAN fiber-optic loop around the city.
• Fill up other retail, industrial, and commercial space as startups expand.
• Increase sales at other local enterprises, including manufacturing, entertainment, lodging, and support services.
• Improve returns for owners of office and commercial space.
• Lower data storage and distribution costs.
• Increase regional Internet accessibility.
• Increase the attractiveness of the region for large-scale, data-intensive industries of the future.
• Increase jobs at all pay scales.
• Increase the average wage.
• Decrease poverty as more jobs become available.
• Decrease homelessness as more people earn livable wages and can afford housing.
• Increase the local tax base, making more funds available for better libraries, public safety, schools, roads, and other infrastructure.
• Decrease property taxes as a percentage of household income.
• Increase the percentage of the population with college and post-graduate degrees and raise the region's rankings in lists of top cities for entrepreneurship and creativity.
• Foster WSU's efforts to become a truly world-class research university and to support other regional colleges and universities.

Why the Jensen-Byrd Building?

The building contains massive amounts of potential office space; warehouse space; high-ceiling, large floor-plate open space; loading bays; adjacent parking; proximity to Downtown, SIRTI, and the Riverpoint Campus; all of which make it ideal for nurturing a variety of startups that will be addressing national and international markets. A company can develop products, perform limited manufacturing, begin shipping and receiving, all within the same space, and all while surrounded by other companies developing their own businesses. This ferment is less likely to occur or will take substantially longer if the startups are spread all over the region.

In addition, the retail-oriented businesses of the international marketplace will benefit from the massive amounts of foot-traffic possible when located an easy walk from downtown, the University District, Gonzaga, and new housing in nearby neighborhoods—and from the proposed light-rail stop, which will potentially carry people to the project from as far away as Coeur d'Alene. An isolated location on the West Plains or near Liberty Lake, for example, would be unlikely to provide the same benefits.

The major, national, multigigabit fiber lines that pass near the Jensen-Byrd building are another incentive to locate the project there. The location in the University District has symbiotic benefits for the project and district that won't happen if it's located elsewhere, including connectivity to downtown and the community, access to the fiber trunk lines for the GigaPoP and Meet-Me Room, the large amounts of space available nearby for telecom uses, and the community economic zone (CEZ) benefits to startups.

What's the point of putting all these various activities in one place? As explained below, creativity thrives on diversity—of ideas, of people, and of opportunity. Some of these activities are merely “fun.” Why link serious economic development efforts with such frivolity? Ask Jim Fleming, founder of GenPrime, who needs rehearsal space for his band to practice. People are more productive when they can have fun. “Empirical research has found a significant relationship between fun and productivity under the perspective of ‘subjective well-being,'” writes Jim Kouzes, former chairman of the Tom Peters Group.