Business Professor promotes Boise's creative potential

by Anne Wallace Allen @ Idaho Stateman
Article published Oct 5, 2006

Business professor promotes Boise's creative potential as economic resource
Napier will conduct workshop Oct. 12-13 on how to keep creativity thriving in Valley

The potatoes are well known; so are the microchips.

Now, as Idaho competes in the world market, a Boise State University professor is looking for ways to promote another valuable state export: the creativity that has led to the success of the state's strongest industries.

Nancy Napier, professor of international business, will host her third workshop on the creative economy Oct. 12 and 13 .
The gathering of experts is aimed at helping business, education and other leaders focus on how creative work has helped Idaho's economy thrive, and how they can keep that creativity strong.

"If we're not doing something systematically, they're going to pass us by," Napier said of other countries that have focused in past decades on building creative industries including the arts, film, design and architecture, and software. "There's evidence that's happening."
Napier, a 20-year employee of BSU, believes that creative thinking has been such an integral part of pioneer cities such as Boise that it's now taken for granted. She wants business and public leaders to pay more attention to the notion of creativity, and to manage creative areas and make them stronger.

Napier closely follows the work of author Richard Florida, an economic development guru whose best-selling "The Rise of the Creative Class" theorizes that the most successful cities are the ones that attract highly educated creative workers.

After discovering Florida's work a few years ago, Napier started taking a close look at key Idaho organizations that have used creativity to excel — such as BSU's Bronco football team; the Idaho Shakespeare Festival; and ProClarity, a Boise-based software company that was recently purchased by Microsoft.
What she learned energized her. In an essay she wrote after studying those entities, she said Boise and Idaho — once little known by outsiders — were coming to be seen as a place with a high quality of life and good business environment that attracted a new wave of pioneers: creative people looking for a place to do their work.

"We have super-high technology and super-high talent," said Napier of people working in high-tech Boise jobs. Well-educated creative people are likely to support arts and education, Napier said. And those entities, in turn, attract other creative people.
"You've got smart people with talent who want to live in a nice place," Napier said. "They come to places like this, and they find interesting things to do, and they create interesting things to do. That kind of thing is likely to attract entrepreneurs."

Creativity is a new or original idea that fits its context and has value. Napier uses as an example the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, which has adapted its performances to appeal to Boise's audience of outdoor-loving, modern theatergoers.

The festival is hugely successful — 53,000 people will attend its shows in Boise this season, said its producing artistic director, Charlie Fee. That's more than 10 percent of the city's population.
"As you start to invest in the arts, the community takes on a whole new, psychological setting, which is this is a hip place to be," said Fee, who moved to Boise in 1991 to lead the Festival. "That generates more interest for the businesses, and then you get more interesting people moving to Boise."

Where the arts are concerned, Boise already has a lot of offerings — its relative remoteness long ago spurred its residents to support the symphony, the ballet, and opera.
But now other cities — including many in northern Europe that Napier has studied — have started promoting those creative industries and others such as film, and Napier thinks the United States is starting to drop behind.

"This is a competitive issue long-haul for the U.S.," she said.

Idaho has all the assets it needs to pull ahead of its competitors, Napier said. First, creative people who can choose where they live are likely to choose Idaho not only because it has some strong cultural offerings but because it's easy to get around, is relatively inexpensive, and has very accessible outdoor activities. In fact, nature might make people more creative, she said.
"In Idaho, the air is so big, the sky is so big, that people are so open that they have no borders in their thinking," she said.

Then there's Idaho's pioneer tradition.
"There's an openness and a grittiness that you have to have to live in this part of the country," Napier said. "Everything's not already there; we're creating it as we go, so to speak."

Idaho is so small that you can make things happen faster than you could somewhere else, she added.

"Everybody is accessible; I can get in to see the governor if I want to, a lowly professor"
But she said political leaders must continue working to make Downtown attractive, and businesses must keep encouraging workers to find new and better ways of doing things. Her workshop this month will have teams of workers from various Idaho organizations focus on creative problem-solving with a Canadian professor, Min Basadur.

"We've gotten costs down as much as we can; we've used technology in so many ways, but it's that creativity spark we need," she said.