With thousands of new hires expected at Electric Boat over the next decade, the Thames River Innovation Places process that starts this week might be the catalyst for just the type of transformation this region needs, according to economic development experts.

The local Innovation Places group, headed by Hannah Gant of Spark Makerspace and Susan Froshauer of Connecticut United for Research Excellence, won the first round of funding to try to make Groton and New London a state-designated Innovation Place. The idea is to create regions in Connecticut that are more attuned to entrepreneurship and innovation, spurring an economic renaissance locally and statewide.

Now, the newly formed organization begins a Story of Place effort spearheaded by the Santa Fe-based Regenesis Group that will be used to offer up concrete projects to make the region a more connected, exciting place to live. The group will be in town this week to explore the history and culture of New London and Groton, holding meetings on such disparate subjects as aquaculture, the Thames River Heritage Park and the local port authority.

"I think it's huge," said Sean Nugent, acting director of the Southeastern Connecticut Enterprise Region, also called seCTer. "If you're constantly doing the same things you're staying stagnant."

Paige R. Bronk, economic and community development manager in Groton, noted that the region is poised for a large influx of young professionals at EB, both because of new hires and a large number of retirements as baby boomers move on.

"That's a huge catalyst for a change in the economy," Bronk said. "It will have a huge impact on our identity here in Groton and also in New London."

Partly because of New London's history as an arts center combined with Groton's longtime significance in scientific and military circles, backers of the regional effort at economic transformation are confident of winning state funding in the Innovation Places competitition. As Nugent said, the two cities together create the kind of business-and-culture mashup that state leaders are seeking to jump start innovation.

Because the Thames River is so central to the region's economy, affecting commerce, leisure activity and tourism, it was chosen as the centerpiece for local efforts to win an Innovation Places designation. Only about half of the 12 regions that won the first round of funding are expected to make the final cut for at least several hundred thousand dollars in state funding to put plans into action.

Kip Bergstrom, who is overseeing the Innovation Places program at the quasi-public agency CTNext, has made it clear that smaller regions such as the Thames River group have just as much chance at funding as larger, more established entrepreneurship communities in New Haven, Stamford and Hartford.

"It is a jump ball for any city, any places in Connecticut," said Thames River organizer Gant. "Kip made it clear he will not be looking for good places from great cities but for great places from good cities." 

Innovation Places, she emphasized, "is not so much to do innovation as it is to set the table for innovation" by acting on ideas to attract and retain talent in the region.

"The gestalt of Innovation Places is about places — making them cooler," Gant said.

And she said smaller places like the Thames River area in some ways are easier to turn around than sprawling metropolises because it takes fewer people to buy in to effect change. What's more, Gant and others said, New London and Groton already have begun the heavy lifting of cooperating on several recent projects, including the Thames River water taxi and the Thames River Heritage Park.

"The river used to be a barrier," Groton City Mayor Marian Galbraith said. "Now it is a connector."

According to a white paper written by Bergstrom earlier this year, the Innovation Places idea, funded by the legislature in its 2016 session, is part of a larger effort to attract "serial entrepreneurs" to Connecticut, encourage the development of more growth-oriented companies, leverage venture capital and strengthen state education institutions' entrepreneurial culture.

"There is not a big history of entrepreneurship anywhere in Connecticut," Bergstrom said in an email explaining the program. "We have the lowest rate of business startups in New England and the lowest rate of firm and worker churn (employees moving to other firms) in the U.S."

Bergstrom said he was heavily influenced by a Brookings Institution report titled "The Rise of Innovation Districts," which emphasized "physically compact" areas close to transit mixing anchor businesses with incubators, accelerators and start-up companies tied together through social networks.

In Connecticut, Bergstrom said in his white paper, the "most fertile ground" for Innovation Places development is along rail connections, including Shore Line East that runs to New London.

"The long term strategy play for Connecticut is to serve as the connective tissue between New York City and Boston, using higher speed commuter rail to aggregate their innovation capabilities with ours...," Bergstrom wrote.

"The hope is to hook all of these places together at some point to transform the whole entire state," said Timothy Stewart, a leader of the Central Innovation Places effort based in New Britain and president of that region's Chamber of Commerce.

The CTNext board will decide on which groups in the state will get Innovation Places funding. Bergstrom said leaders could decide on a mix of large and small places, and he said he has encouraged local organizers to "deeply engage" with older, more established companies such as Electric Boat and Pfizer Inc., pointing out that Spark Makerspace in New London has a good contingent of EB engineers involved, while the Groton-based CURE Commons incubator is dominated by former Pfizer employees.

Bergstrom said CTNext, which is a subsidiary of Connecticut Innovations, has not yet decided on evaluation criteria for which places will win state implementation grants.

"A broadly inclusive process is preferred," he said. "We want these initiatives to be privately led, ideally by entrepreneurs."

George Mathanool, an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and former chair of the Groton Town Economic Development Commission who is on the CTNext board, said the three pillars of the region are defense, biopharmaceuticals and education, along with New London's deepwater port. Any plan to improve innovation in the region needs to capitalize on these major assets, he said.

"The time is now right to do so," he said. "The people in Connecticut are known as innovators. ... We need to create a resurgence of that mindset with the new millennials."

Bronk, the Groton economic development official, said he believes the public largely is unaware of the significance of the Innovation Places project in the future life of the region.

"It's the first time New London and Groton have come together to do something of this scale," he said. "We have a lot of divisions and differences but, coming together, we will have an opportunity to be a real strong asset as an area."

l.howard@theday.com

Leaders of the Santa Fe-based Regenesis Group will be on hand from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at the Harris Place building, 165 State St., New London, to hold a workshop for people interested in learning about and carrying on their economic-development process.

Joel Glanzberg and Ben Haggard use their so-called Story of Place method to jump-start discussions intended to bring people together to develop projects and programs unique to a certain area.

"What does this place uniquely have to offer?" Glanzberg said. "What is undisplaceable?"

Their Saturday workshop, a key component of the Thames River Innovation Places effort underway to revive the region's economic fortunes, is expected to attract up to a few dozen people, said Hannah Gant, a social entrepreneur who is organizing the event.

She said the idea is to develop local practitioners who can continue the Story of Place effort on an ongoing basis with the intention of quickly acting on ideas that need to be accomplished.

Glanzberg said the key is asking the right questions, such as "What is it you love about a place," or "Why be here?" He tries to find at least one thing that everyone agrees is important about a place, often the ecology of a waterway like the Thames River.

Gant, who helped initiate the Spark Makerspace on Golden Street in New London, is asking people interested to RSVP because of limited space. For more information, call (860) 866-4834, email make@spark.coop or visit http://www.spark.coop/.