By Brian E. Clark
WisBusiness.com
MADISON — Going into its second year, Thrive — the eight-county south central Wisconsin economic development group formerly known as the Madison Region Economic Development Enterprise — has “gotten its infrastructure built and is now dressed up and ready to go.”
That’s the optimistic assessment from the John Biondi, Thrive’s new chairman. He took the reins of the group Jan. 1 and will serve for one year.
In addition to attracting new businesses, helping new firms start and seeing existing companies expand, the new chairman stressed that Thrive wants to help the region maintain its prized quality of life.
Besides Dane, the other counties in Thrive are Columbia, Dodge, Green, Iowa, Jefferson, Rock and Sauk.
Biondi is president of Middleton-based C5-6 Technologies biofuels company, a spinoff of Lucigen and a commercial partner in the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center that is underway on the UW-Madison campus.
Biondi said Thrive is focusing on the health sciences, agriculture, biotech sectors and has hired specialists to work in those areas. He said the region is strong in nanotechnology and information technology, which can undergird or “enable” the target sectors.
With a jobless rate of 3 percent – the lowest in the state – Dane County would not appear to be in need of economic boosting.
But Biondi and Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce President Jennifer Alexander said Thrive is not focusing its efforts only on Dane County.
“A lot of the intellectual horsepower that we are trying to leverage is coming out of this county … from the university or state government,” said Biondi, who holds an MBA from Georgia State University and has 30 years of management experience.
“But we want to use that to benefit the entire region,” he added.
Alexander said Thrive was created not so much in response to an economic downturn or crisis, but as a way to build for the future on the area’s strengths.
“It was a number of regional leaders coming together,” added Alexander, who is president of Thrive. “And recognizing that we are functioning in a global economy so that the old way of doing business — Fitchburg competing with Sun Prairie — wasn’t the way to go.
“Then there was the dramatic growth that Dane County and the whole region was experiencing at that time,” she said.
“This was about looking ahead and anticipating needs rather than waiting for a crisis,” she said. “A lot of people were working on similar things, but what we needed was focus.”
Biondi said he is enthusiastic about the name “Thrive,” which was announced only in December.
“I really like it,” he said. “It’s a brand that itself incorporates the benefit. Obviously if we do our job, then the region will thrive.
“That’s what it’s all about … And it has a freshness to it,” he added.
Biondi said regions banding together is becoming a common theme here in Wisconsin, as well as in other areas. In the Badger, New North and the Milwaukee Seven councils are working to bring commerce to their neighborhoods.
“It certainly is going on in other states,” he said. “I think the notion of how best to compete is popular and people are looking at how beyond their local communities, whether it’s the regional or state level.
“It’s taken hold in this state and we are trying to bring those regional economic development entities together at the Governor’s Business Council level so that we can rationalize activities so that everyone isn’t … balkanizing the development efforts of the state.”
