PROVIDENCE – Walking up wind-swept Sabin Street on a recent rainy afternoon, the man-made canyon offered its own vision of corporate branding and rebranding in Rhode Island: the Providence Journal building; the R.I. Convention Center; The Dunk, née the Providence Civic Center; leading up to Hasbro headquarters, now ensconced in the former Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island building at La Salle Square.

ConvergenceRI was running late [in part because of a refusal to park in the too expensive Convention Center garage], on the way to attend The Garage 2014, “The Conversation Continues,” a Knowledge Economy forum, sponsored by the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, with the promise: “where every company can be part of a growth story.”

But whose story? Practitioners of the innovation economy often say: there is a need for convergence and collision – the friction of day-to-day, unplanned interactions and conversation. On Sabin Street, most of the pedestrian traffic was huddled on the Convention Center side, with haphazard lines of rain-swept RIPTA passengers waiting for buses, displaced by the ongoing work on Kennedy Plaza.

The buildings are sculptures, walled cities, monuments to a 20th century vision of a post-industrial economy, a tourist Disney World where few people actually reside anymore.

ConvergenceRI arrived at the tail end of the talk by Rob Atkinson, president and founder of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. Atkinson’s message was to embrace and invest in charter schools as the best way to boost innovative, entrepreneurial thinking as a way to improve otherwise mediocre public education in Rhode Island. [The successful model of the R.I. Nurses Institute Middle School Charter High School, however, was apparently not part of Atkinson’s entrepreneurial vision.]

Atkinson championed building an integrated educational system, to support a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation in Rhode Island. He cited Olin College in Massachusetts as the kind of entrepreneurial hive that should be implanted here in Rhode Island.

Atkinson, like most of the speakers preceding him, including University of Rhode Island President David Dooley, championed passage of Question 4 on the November ballot, a bond to fund improvements to the engineering school at the University of Rhode Island.

It was a definite STEM, not STEAM audience; the integration of arts into the mantra of science, technology, engineering and math was not part of the conversation. There were no companion calls for support to promote Question 5 on the November ballot, supporting investments in the state’s arts infrastructure. The innovation silo separating arts and engineering is alive and well in corporate Rhode Island, even at the corporate headquarters of Hasbro. What would Mr. Potato Head say?

What’s my line?
The far more intriguing part of the program was a series of one-on-one interviews conducted by Angus Davis, founder and CEO of Swipely, the company with $2 billion in transactions, showcasing the stories of a series of corporate entrepreneurs in Rhode Island.

Davis played the role of glib talk-show host, offering up a series of softball questions to the entrepreneurs, in a made-for-the-Chamber-audience production, in a well-orchestrated format and agenda.

First up on the stage was Andy Arends, the managing principal of Health Plan Innovation & Consulting, at Dell.

Arends detailed how Dell, the now private computer conglomerate, had partnered with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, to transform what had been a B2B platform, or business-to-business IT platform, to a business-to-consumer IT platform, thanks to the changes in health care ushered in by the Affordable Care Act, and the need to manage the population health analytics as part of a changing reimbursement strategy.

Arends was a bit vague about exactly how the partnership worked between Dell and Blue Cross, and how many workers were employed in total, and where they all were located, other than to say that there were some 200 Dell workers located here in Rhode Island.

For both Davis and Arends, the Dell-Blue Cross partnership was an example of health care innovation – getting “everybody to play together,” as Davis put it.

What was missing from the equation, of course, was any discussion about health innovation at the front end of the system – where money was invested not in health insurance or in health care delivery, but in prevention and wellness.

Property matters
Next up was Roberta Butler, senior vice president of Marketing at FM Global, who explained that her laser focus was targeting the Fortune 1,000 companies and insuring their property, to the tune of $5.5 billion a year in policies.

The last four people Butler hired for her marketing team were not from Rhode Island, saying it was easier to attract new employees to Rhode Island because of the quality of life here.

Butler also endorsed the need to pass Question 4, saying that much of the workforce at FM Global was “card-carrying engineers.”

Apply, apply, apply
Howard Jenkins, the human resources manager with General Dynamics/Electric Boat, said that as a result of landing a $17.8 billion contract with the federal government to build two new nuclear submarines, as well as another contract to build replacement submarines, there was “enough work for the next 30 years.”

As a result, Jenkins said that the company’s Quonset facility would be doubling in size.

What Rhode Island needed to do, Jenkins said, was to have parents start talking about manufacturing as a career, such as pipe-fitting and welding. The company was very strong in engineering, but what it needed was more trade workers. “We’ll train them,” he said.

Jenkins said that they were working with community colleges and trade schools to create new careers in manufacturing. “We are hiring now,” he said. “Apply, apply, apply.”

Transformers redux
Josh Lamb, a RISD grad, and senior design director for Transformers at Hasbro, talked about the way that global consumer research had enabled Hasbro to respond to designing Transformers to alter the toys to meet the different cultural needs of countries. In South America, the size of the box was important, because parents wanted to make a big splash in the presentation; in China, the parents wanted the educational value of the toy to be front-and-center.

Lamb said that the secret of being hired as a designer at Hasbro was to become an intern, because many of the interns ended up being hired by the company.

Newest kid on the block
Noah Salem, the 15-year-old CEO and founder of KickVids, a start up firm that produces videos to push Kickstarter campaigns, talked about producing a video to promote a new Nancy Drew game. Davis, casting a long glance at Lamb, suggested that Hasbro may have another candidate for its internship program.

Salem talked about his experiences at the Met School, a charter school, and the E-360 program it had for young entrepreneurs.

Afterward, in a networking session, Salem talked with CovnergenceRI about some of his other entrepreneurial dreams – such as creating a solar energy system to replace the unreliable electric grid in Egypt. The conversation was cut short as Salem had to head home – his mom wanted to know where he was.

From fish to textiles to splitting up expenses
In rapid succession, Davis interviewed Walter W. Martish III, the president of Lincoln Fine Ingredients, a manufacturing and chemical distribution firm in Lincoln that focuses on the production of key ingredients in products – from food to soaps; Paul Ferrara, director of new product development at On Semiconductor, which develops energy efficient programs for cars, focusing on hybrids; Bethany Pollack, vice president of business innovation at Propel, LLC, a four-person firm that develops textile products for military applications, working closely with .the military research center known as U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass.; Kurt Harrington, CEO of Something Fishy, which creates and cares for aquariums in the workplace; and Zoe Chaves, the product lead for Splitwise, a company that has developed an app that allows couples and housemates to divvy up expenses.

Learning from a failed innovation experiment
About a block from Hasbro headquarters, at 131 Washington St., in the upstairs of the renovated space run by AS220, the innovative dreams of a co-working space to serve as the home of Digital City Rhode Island have crashed landed.

It’s a story that probably won’t be featured at the next Knowledge Economy Forum, but it does provide some insights into the frailty of state’s innovation ecosystem.

With support from the Rhode Island Foundation, as an outgrowth of Making It Happen, Digital City Rhode Island began a year ago with visions of transforming Rhode Island into an international hub for digital media design and production.

That dream is still alive, but the co-working space as a way of driving the conversation, proved not to be financially self-sustaining. It will be closing its doors on Oct. 31, Halloween, with the custom designed furniture for sale.

The last gathering of Digital City Rhode Island in that space will be held on Oct. 30 at 5:30 p.m. The group still seeks to create a network – “Think Airbnb meets LinkedIn for Rhode Island’s digital media makers,” as Gary Glassman described it – to catalyze collaboration.

The value proposition of the network – beyond being a place or a website to share contact information – still needs to proven. The education team of Digital City RI created a short poll to gauge public opinion among Rhode Island residents about digital learning, the results of which were to be unveiled at the R.I. Department of Education’s Technology Day on Oct. 25 at the Providence Convention Center.

There’s no success like failure
The truth is, not every company can be part of a growth story; most companies backed by venture capital fail, as serial entrepreneurs will tell you, if you press them hard enough. Perhaps Digital City Rhode Island should have been on the agenda at the Knowledge Economy Forum, with the goal of helping them better understand what went wrong – and where they need to go.

But there is a larger problem growing, metastasizing, under the guise of innovation in Rhode Island: the disconnect in conversations and convergence. What’s happening in health innovation in Rhode Island is truly astonishing – it’s much more than Dell working with Blue Cross on developing the insurer’s consumer marketing approach – but it has yet to be mapped out. With 330,000 Rhode Islanders receiving primary care through a patient-centered medical home model, the health reform evolution has passed a tipping point – but it hasn’t yet become part of the story telling about innovation.

The new planned investments by the R.I. Department of Health to develop “Health Equity Zones” in communities across Rhode Island, focused on prevention and wellness – that’s innovative. The new, reborn health clinic at Central Falls High School, the precursor of a Neighborhood Health Station in the square-mile city, which is scheduled to open on Monday, Oct. 27, that’s collaboration at its best. 

Technology without arts?
The political push to support the Question 4 bond referendum for the engineering school at the University of Rhode Island by the business community, without any linkage to Question 5 to support investment in arts infrastructure, showcases the disconnect.

The ongoing controversy over “GamerGate,” where a group of gamers have mounted digital attacks on women, threatening them with physical violence, harassing them and hacking their online presence, illustrates the dimensions of this disconnect.

“It is this lack of empathy that is so devastating, because it means that we, the educational institutions of America, have failed our country and thus ourselves,” wrote Andrew Phelps, the founder of the Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “As I write this, there is an advertisement on the local radio for a political race that espouses that we are ‘behind in math and science’ relative to the rest of the world.”

Focusing on technology, he continued, “without also exploring its history, use, psychology, capabilities, and ethics is precisely where we find ourselves today in GamerGate. A segment of our population, with little to no understanding of either the historical journalistic process and operations of a trade press, or the ways in which games are currently created and marketed, sees no issues with using technology to destroy the public and private lives of women and those close to them based on their misconceptions.”

Phelps concluded: “It means that we have failed to instill the values we would hope for in future generations: compassion, generosity, trustworthiness. Instead the GamerGate phenomenon points to a group using modern technology and communications platforms through their ubiquity, anonymity, and techno-centrism for the purposes of furthering their own gendered and discriminatory agendas driven by hate, ignorance, and fear.”