Accelerating the Green Vision:
The Green Valley Network puts Northwest Arkansas on the map as a center of sustainability
By Larry Burge
It’s a long way from Sweden, land of Volvos, meatballs and Annika Sorenstam, to Northwest Arkansas, a region best known as the home of Wal-Mart, Bill Clinton and the Razorbacks.
Despite such differences, a shared vision regarding sustainability has brought economic development representatives from both areas together in a way that was unimaginable just a few years ago. Northwest Arkansas is now attracting interest globally from companies eager to participate in what could become the region’s next wave of economic growth. And Sweden is just the latest example.
That was the case with Per-Erik Persson, the southern region director of the Swedish American Chamber of Commerce. When he learned the sustainability vision taking root in Northwest Arkansas matched that of his home country, the economic development executive arranged a trade mission. He visited the area with Swedish companies involved in dismantling structures and recycling the materials rather than hauling them to landfills, using foam-glass products made from recycled glass and coal to produce building materials, and one that boasts a newly-designed drivetrain for hybrid vehicles that promises to increase gas mileage in a Prius-class automobile up to 82 mpg in city driving and 101 mpg on the highway.
“I see this as an international center, a global hub in Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas for green technologies, technologies the world needs for its survival,” Persson said.
It is a view regional economic development officials, University of Arkansas leaders and politicians hope others soon share, as efforts proceed to brand the region as ‘Green Valley’ and make Northwest Arkansas the equivalent to sustainability what Silicon Valley is to the technology industry.
“We have the largest consumer packaged goods company in Wal-Mart, plus 1,300 of its suppliers, all within a 20- to 30-mile circle of Fayetteville, and Tyson and J.B. Hunt within a 10-mile radius,” said Steve Rust, president and ceo of the Fayetteville Economic Development Council. “That makes this a unique location for companies from across the globe to locate here. We can become the world’s business and technology cluster for sustainability.”
To make that vision a reality a number of events have taken place within the past year that are key to the establishment of the Green Valley Network. Rust serves as the contact point for the Green Valley Network and represents the city, the chamber of commerce and divisions within the university and the community, all focused to advance the local economy through producing green technology solutions. By use of this network, Rust and other Fayetteville leaders hope to attract sustainability-focused businesses that provide technology solutions and green-focused jobs for the community to help broaden and diversify the city’s tax base.
The Green Valley Network works as a funnel for sustainable solutions, Rust said. With it, “we are able to cherry pick green technology providers” that have the best chance of resolving sustainability issues for both Wal-Mart and its suppliers, and make money while doing it.
A key aspect of the network is the manner in which it connects interested parties and provides funding for entrepreneurs. To receive assistance from the network’s support systems, companies or individual entrepreneurs need to present a new or different idea on how to help solve the world’s most pressing problems. The network lends its help by opening economic doors at the economic development council, the University of Arkansas business complex, city government and its appropriate private and corporate business partners.
Through Web technology, the network can link companies to angel investors for startup capital and provide a home for them to conduct research and develop their ideas. Once the ideas mature into viable green technology products or services, the network links the companies with venture capitals to finance the companies’ long-term goals.
After acceptance of a company’s business plan, the network gives Rust a number of options from which he can select. He can contact the university’s experts in the field or use the two Internet-based systems to bring together companies and investment capital, as well as solicit help from the Fayetteville city government or the Northwest Arkansas business community.
“We live in an idea age,” Rust said. “We need to build intellectual infrastructure much the same way others built railways and highways during the industrial age to carry materials from the factory to market. We carry ideas, and those who find and market superior ideas first will be in command of those ideas. In today’s market, logistics is turning intellectual property into new products and services. The way we do this is through the review of business plans.”
Four main divisions make up the network’s business cluster—education, research, business assistance and the city’s resources. These link with Web-based research centers at the university, as well as with privately-held Fayetteville firms.
“The Green Valley Network is a Web portal for interaction among businesses and the public at large to communicate with one another,” Phil Stafford said, at his office in the Arkansas Technology and Development Park of south Fayetteville. He described the Park’s technology exchange center as a place where entrepreneurs of clean technology can post their ideas online. “If you’re a company in need of a clean technology or a sustainable solution, you can post what you’re looking for, so through this exchange center, matchmaking occurs,” Stafford said. “We are where leading-edge development companies can find partners or customers or end-users of their technology, a way for companies that are in need of technology to find an outlet for their products. We have a mechanism now for the exchange of ideas, a tool of communication where anyone, regardless of where they are on the globe, can become a member of this network.”
The network uses a private link called EquityNet to automate the enterprise investment screening process for entrepreneurs and investors. It is a patented economic data collection and computer-generated business evaluation system that eliminates the old way financial brokers thumbed through thousands of business plans to find 10 to present to venture capitalists, with hopes that one in 10 would develop into a high-profit venture.
“We’re growing a two-sided based equity model into a Web-based e-market,” said EquityNet's ceo R.R. (Ron) Goforth. “On the equity end of an e-market place, we provide investors with a prescreened list of companies seeking investment and for the company seeking money, it provides them with contacts in the investor community.”
The technology venture development firm Virtual Incubation, with its office in the Development and Technology Park, has 16 companies under its wing, Goforth said. “They have secured about $45 million in grant money for private equity investment in those startup companies. They recently broke ground for a manufacturing plant for one of those companies, Duralor, in the Springdale Technology Park.”
Another key aspect of the Green Valley Network is the connection to the University of Arkansas. Within the past year, there have been a number of significant happenings that have caused sustainability to take on a more formal organization and one of the most significant was the decision by the Wal-Mart Foundation to fund the creation of the Applied Sustainability Center at the university. It became the unit of research on campus devoted entirely to sustainability to solve business problems.
“The Applied Sustainability Center provides the educational division to the Green Valley Network,” said Jon Johnson, the center’s executive director and University of Arkansas professor. According to Johnson, sustainability challenges funnel to him from the business community as well as through other Green Valley partners. The Center’s instructors present the problems to student teams as actual corporate sustainability issues and unleash the creativity of students and faculty to develop potential
solutions for commercialization.
For existing companies that already offer sustainability-related products, such as the Swedish firms represented by Per-Erik Persson, the supportive environment and unique business ecosystem that exists in Northwest Arkansas was enough to garner interest. Longer term, as sustainability continues to gain traction as a key aspect of everyday business considerations, Northwest Arkansas is poised to capitalize on the next wave of Wal-Mart-influenced growth.
“I believe the real push to the future will be the creation of green economy jobs,” said Fayetteville mayor Dan Coody. “Where we can excel is bringing companies here that produce equipment, machines, technology and knowledge for the sustainability market.”
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