News

Rural economic development ecosystems cross-pollinate and thrive

Rural LISC, along with the Center on Rural Innovation, is working to cross-pollinate ideas among small business and entrepreneurship ecosystems.  Recently, Rural LISC sponsored a visit by The Generator, an emerging innovation hub in the Arkansas Delta, to Codefi, a technology incubator and co-work space located in the bootheel of Missouri.  The two groups, both participants in the Center on Rural Innovation’s inaugural Rural Innovation Initiative, used their time together to provide peer-to-peer mentorship.  Co-creating a learning agenda, both teams shared valuable lessons like creating high interest topics for small businesses, assessing the needs of entrepreneurs, creating a tech talent pipeline, and how to set up space to facilitate innovation.  These partnerships are essential to growing rural networks and further broadening their abilities to have a supportive and responsive community of practice that addresses issues specific to rural small business and entrepreneurship. 

“As small towns like Pine Bluff and Cape Girardeau pursue strategies for local ecosystem development, this kind of peer-to-peer connection is incredibly important.”
— Matt Dunne, Founder and Executive Director, Center on Rural Innovation

To date, Codefi has seen more than $15 million invested into 40 startups with 167 jobs created in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.  The Generator, still building out programming tailored to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a community that is both rural and a community of color, was able to experience firsthand the programming that is needed to nurture new and upcoming businesses.  Partnerships like these will help accelerate the growth of rural innovation hubs and provide much needed capacity building specific to rural America.  

LISC Vice President and Rural LISC Director Suzanne Anarde spoke to the power of our rural network of community developers. “The challenges rural communities face are great, no doubt,” she said, “but when we come together to share our ideas, experiences and develop mutually supportive relationships, we create synergy and strength, which reflects our amazing potential.  Peer to peer interactions like the meeting of The Generator and Codefi – both of them homegrown, innovative and responsive to local needs – catalyze this rural potential towards success, for both groups…and their peers.”

Matt Dunne, Founder and Executive Director of the Center on Rural Innovation, said: “The Generator and Codefi are both doing groundbreaking work. As small towns like Pine Bluff and Cape Girardeau pursue innovation hub strategies for local high-tech ecosystem development and work to create resilient, innovation-based jobs, this kind of peer-to-peer connection is incredibly important. Ecosystem-building is challenging work, and sharing experiences and strategies helps communities persevere and increases the likelihood of success.”  

Partnerships will help accelerate the growth of rural innovation hubs and provide much needed capacity building in rural America. 
Partnerships will help accelerate the growth of rural innovation hubs and provide much needed capacity building in rural America. 

About the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI)
CORI is a Hartland, Vermont-based nonprofit action tank working to rebuild rural America using progressive public, private, and philanthropic partnerships and data-driven strategies to help small towns achieve sustainable economic success. Learn more at www.ruralinnovation.us. 

About Rural LISC
Launched in 1995, Rural LISC is the rural component of the largest community development support organization in the country, called LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation). For 24 years, Rural LISC has partnered with rural communities, helping to forge innovative solutions that lead to prosperity and opportunity. Rural LISC provides a wide range of services, investing in the grassroots efforts of its 89 partner community-based organizations, Rural LISC is committed to making rural communities good places to live, work, do business and raise children. Learn more at www.lisc.org/rural.