Congratulations to Dannel Malloy on his election as Connecticut’s next Governor. Malloy and his staff have been involved during the campaign in looking and writing about issues that impact the innovation eco-system for the state. Based on comments he made during the most recent CTC/Innovation Community sponsored forum in mid-October he is willing to have the state work to enhance various elements where the state can best support the both the process and specific clusters and firms to help stimulate more fast growing firms.
With many states facing budget cut backs, those that continue to maintain world-class systems to monitor, support and accelerate gazelles will have an advantage over the next decade in job creation. Based on Malloy’s interest during the campaign, track record in Stamford as Mayor there for 14 years and his own personal experience with family members who are successful entrepreneurs, the new Governor will be a great friend of the very competitive process of repositioning the state as a high growth 21st century jobs friendly location.
One area where the tech community hopes Malloy won’t go is in reorganizing the DECD, CDA and CI trio without looking at the roles. Consolidation probably won’t help or save much money. In fact CTC and national experience from other Tech Councils and states points to the benefits of more focus and more flexibility – even more annual funding and moving away from the “evergreen” portfolio based financing we now use – for groups like CI. While coordination and data sharing is essential, keeping funding groups focused on investing and not on the messy jobs of acceleration and the politics of job creation bureaucracies makes a lot of sense.
At the same time, with need to keep budgets tight and with many cuts coming, many states are turning to groups such as CTC, CCAT, CURE and the like to help state organizations with pre-seed and acceleration roles. As the Innovation Pipeline Acceleration proved for four years, no-for-profits can actually spend state money more efficiently and with better focus to help the best high potential start-up firms.