By Allan Maurer
SAVANNAH, GA—After 20 years spent in Atlanta technology companies off and on, Chris Miller says he decided, “Life is too short to sit in traffic sucking bad air.” Miller, formerly with Mindspring, knew what he liked in cities, and found that Savannah “hit all the criteria.” In 2004 he began the Creative Coast Initiative to help lure others to the city.
Miller says he looked at the technology infrastructure of Savannah and thought the city up to that point had not done a good job of making it part of the “larger conversation about Savannah.”
“I got here and saw 38,000 miles of fiber optic cable, 100 square miles of wireless broadband, 49,000 students in 17 local colleges and universities, including one of the world’s largest and most respected design colleges. Savannah knows how to speak geek.”
The Creative Coast Web site (www.creativecoast.org) even points out that “We’ve got a history of technological innovation—we built the first steamship that crossed the ocean.”
Creativity is key
“We have a small airport,” says Miller, but it has 54 direct daily flights to 80 percent of the U.S. market and it doesn’t take four hours to get from your bed to a seat on the plane, it takes 45 minutes. For people who move around and operate in different cities, cutting three hours off a commute time is a big deal.”
Tech businesses headquartered in Savannah, which is about four hours from Atlanta, include Verisign, Gulfstream, and startups such as Oddpodz, the social networking site for creative types. Oddpodz and the Creative Coast initiative both owe some inspiration to Richard Florida’s influential book about the “Creative Class.”
“Florida and others recognize that technology is just a screwdriver,” says Miller. “The creative use of tools creates value. That’s where innovation comes from. It invariably involves technology. But, it is as much about creativity as about technology.”
Back in 2004, Miller convened a group of “15 or so of the top leaders in town” to ask, “what does Savannah want to be? Realistically, what could it be?” The idea was to focus on that Holy Grail of economic development, “growth and attraction of the higher wage economy, of smart people doing smart things.”
City advantages
The Creative Coast initiative, says Miller, executive director, “is a concierge service to the brainy businesses and people attracted to Savannah for the same reasons I was.” The organization is a joint collaboration between the city, Chatham County and the Savannah Economic Development Authority.
That means it tries to present Savannah in a way to help entrepreneurs and knowledge businesses understand what’s there and once they come to the city, to find access to talent, understand the market and find clients and make connections.
Of the city’s advantages, Miller also notes that 80 percent of a product’s cost in knowledge businesses is in the talent they hire. In Savannah, he says, they can hire the talent for half what it costs in New York City or LA. “That gives companies here a huge competitive advantage.”
Since its founding, the Creative Coast initiative has helped lure a number of firms to the area, including Raleigh’s Guerilla Productions and Benedetto Guitars, which makes high-end jazz guitars that cost up to $80,000 each.
“The film and video business is thriving here,” Miller says, pointing also to a group that bought the rights to The Farmer’s Almanac and set up a cable channel of the same name.
Other small area tech companies include Pixelphish Interactive, Color Maria, Evoca, and Morris Technology.
The location of the world renowned Savannah College of Art and Design in the city feeds a number of companies focused on applying digital design in new ways, such as Blue Lime Studios, which produces 3D renderings of architectural projects.
Other tech resources
The area also boasts the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, which monitors the coastal environment via a network of sensors feeding data into wireless links.
Memorial Hospital has a large molecular oncology research facility that, Millers says, “has hired eight or nine of the top people in the world studying the genetics and origins of cancer.”
The city of 130,000 also hosts one of five innovation centers in Georgia, Savannah’s focused on port logistics. Savannah has one of the top five container ports on the coast.
The city’s amenities have won it numerous awards for its quality of life. “We have two and half times more art galleries than New York City,” Miller says. It has been named, variously, one of the top ten most beautiful places in America and one of the world’s trendiest hot spots and one of the top 25 places to live and work.
But the bottom line for Miller, he says, is that “You have a choice. You can sit in traffic on a Friday afternoon during your three hour commute, or minutes after leaving work you can paddle a kayak down one of the five rivers here.”
On the Web: www.creativecoast.org
© 2007, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
