Co-written by Andy Wilson
Painting by Pasadena artist Kenton Nelson
Pasadena, known for the Rose Parade and its quaint Old Town, is fast becoming a vibrant center of entrepreneurship and innovation in Southern California. Home to JPL, Caltech, Art Center College of Design and a wide rage of renowned engineering and design firms, Pasadena is busily reinventing itself. Faced with the challenge of freshly minted entrepreneurs leaving for Silicon Valley, the San Gabriel Valley community is now building a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem centered on its own unique history and strengths.
It might surprise some to know that this is actually Pasadena's second time around at playing a significant role in the region's innovation economy. During the first internet boom, Pasadena was home to cutting edge firms like Earthlink, CitySearch, Overture, eToys and eHarmony to mention but a few. Many of these were spun out of the idea factory of Bill Gross, known as Idealab. Over almost twenty years, Bill and his Idealab team have spawned more than one hundred companies and continue producing incredible companies today in the area of 3D printing, search, e-learning and ecommerce.
To re-establish the area's leadership, Innovate Pasadena was founded in 2013, for creating a vibrant ecosystem of innovation in the greater Pasadena area that supports sustainable economic growth. The organization supports collaboration across and within business, academia and the broader community in order to attract and retain companies, entrepreneurs, innovators and capital.
How does one realize these lofty statements in practice? Pasadena contains a rare mix of pragmatists and dreamers that combine long-term ambitions with everyday practical changes of reality. Their approach depends on developing diverse and frequent programming that pulls individual entrepreneurs and innovators out of their private world realms into a connected ecosystem.
This approach has already spawned weekly Friday educational coffee meet-ups to a wide rage of sub-group activities. Some of these include Techsparks' pitching practice sessions, Pasadena Big Data User Group, for gathering the tips and tricks of Big Data analytics and Innovate Pasadena - Design X, all sharing cutting edge design and design science research practices. In two years time, together with an annual Pasadena Connect week, Innovate Pasadena has helped grow the organization from just five to over two thousand members who have now had the opportunity to connect through over three hundred events.
In some cases, these collaborations have become more formalized as in the case of The Design Accelerator (TDA). TDA is the product of a joint effort between Pasadena's top design school, Art Center College of Design and Caltech; it's leading Research University, and is housed in the startup environment at Idealab. TDA accelerates earliest-stage design and engineering entrepreneurs in the greater Pasadena area. This effort has already produced more than a half dozen innovative ventures, several of which have successfully secured capital beyond the startup funding provided by TDA.
It is the unique combination of original research, incredible design know-how and deep engineering DNA that makes Pasadena so compelling for startups. TDA is just an example of these worlds working together harmoniously to drive extraordinary outcomes. In reality, this integrative capability has been a hallmark of the Idealab approach to innovation. The Pasadena innovation community realizes that it can re-establish its regional and national leadership in innovation through a thoughtful and broad-based blending of these disciplines. No longer content to merely hold these capabilities in inventory, the powerful convergence of these factors is now beginning to produce winning outcomes.
Special thanks to Andy Wilson for researching and co-writing this article
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