The Internet startup hub Silicon Valley in northern California has more than double Maine’s population of about 1.3 million, which is why the lead organizer of Maine Startup and Create Week called for all hands on deck.
The weeklong conference starting Monday expanded its reach this year by offering discounts and subsidized bus tickets to Bangor entrepreneurs as part of an effort to get more of the state involved in the second year of the Portland event. But the perceived focus on Portland goes deeper than just those two years, according to Jess Knox, a business consultant who started the first Maine Startup and Create Week last year.
“We’re fighting against many, many years of ‘that’s just Portland’s thing,’” Knox said. “Most big cities in the country or the world are bigger than our state in population … and we need everybody with their oars in the water.”
The startup week isn’t just geared at tech companies or Silicon Valley types, Knox said. The event will offer lessons for rural economies in Maine, too.
“Innovation comes from getting as many people from different backgrounds as possible to solve an existing problem,” Knox said. “If we’re only creating communities and workgroups that have the same people and same backgrounds, then we’re never going to solve these problems.”
In that way, he said, it’s something of good news that Maine has a relatively small population.
“The ability to change here is enormous related to the input that’s needed to do it,” Knox said. “We’re not trying to change Boston, which has 5 million people, and we all love (Maine) — even people who are down on it.”
Knox said this year the group has increased marketing to the midcoast region and the Lewiston-Auburn area as well, but the Bangor bus route on Concord Coach Lines provided the only definite way the group could help fund rides from elsewhere in the state to Portland.
Brian Rahill, founder of RainStorm Consulting and the education software company CourseStorm in Orono, said that bus connection is “one of the better-kept secrets” for Bangor-area business people making meetings in Portland, where he typically hails an Uber car to travel from the bus dropoff point to meetings.
“I’ll schedule a meeting for 15 minutes after the bus hits Portland,” Rahill said.
Knox said Tuesday there still were funds for subsidized bus tickets to the event, available by request from Jesse Moriarty at the Foster Center for Innovation.
Moriarity, who runs the University of Maine’s Foster Center for Innovation, said the bus trip allows people to work via WiFi available during the trip between Portland and Bangor.
“It’s not a wasted two hours,” she said, comparing the bus trip to making the drive.
That bus trip is the only work-hours public transit connection between Maine’s major metropolitan areas, but Rahill said he sees growing business connections among various parts of the state, with the business leadership training program Top Gun’s statewide expansion as an example.
Another comes through the Blackstone Charitable Foundation, which supported various business development hubs throughout the state and has sponsored the startup conference — Knox runs the Blackstone hub network.
Funds from that multi-year effort run out at the end of 2015, but the group earlier this month announced new hubs in Lewiston-Auburn and York County.
The goal of the event, Knox said, is to “engineer serendipitous collisions” between like-minded business people from around Maine and around the country. After the first year, he said, it has become easier to draw back to the state people with Maine connections.
“One thing that we’ve seen this year is pretty awesome is people who have affinity for Maine wanting to be a part of it,” Knox said.
He expected ticket sales to be on par with last year, at about 700.
The event this year has grown, Knox said, bringing in a much larger organizing committee and having three specific tracks focused on sessions for small business, agricultural innovations, as well as scaling and growing a business. Each day features keynote speakers from around the country.
Knox said he hoped the industry-specific focus on food innovation would speed the already rapid growth in local agriculture in Maine. Those sessions aim to deal with more than just what happens on the farm or on the boat, Knox said.
“It’s not just about food production, but what are the technology platforms for traceability and what about delivery and what about aquaculture? And what are emerging markets?” Knox said.
And there’s more time for “hall talk” between sessions this year, Knox said, so attendees will have greater opportunities to get to know one another, which he said could be one step toward addressing some of the state’s economic challenges.
“I can use the power of convening people to come up with all sorts of experimental solutions, and that’s a different way of thinking,” Knox said.
The event runs through Saturday, June 27.