Ballet dancers and machine automation? A reference, perhaps, to the famous Dada film Ballet Mécanique? Nope, just the next networking mashup that is 2 Degrees Portland.

Calling all artists, professionals, entrepreneurs, and locals of all kinds invested in Portland’s creative economy. The place to be this coming Thursday, February 16, is Kepware, 400 Congress Street in Portland. That night, from 5:30-7:30 pm, the Maine Technology Institute (MTI) is sponsoring the first 2 Degrees Portland event of 2012. And dancers from the Portland Ballet will be there previewing excerpts from their upcoming production of Giselle.

If you’re not familiar with MTI, you should be. Since 1999 they’ve been promoting and supporting Maine’s technology sectors with grants and assistance. From start-ups to established innovators, companies throughout Maine—many right here in Portland—have grown and flourished because of MTI. (One of those local companies, by the way, is Kepware itself, a leader in automation software, helping sophisticated machines talk to one another.)

And just what is “2 Degrees Portland”? It’s a year-old program that connects people already living here with those who want to live here, or are newly arrived. As Creative Portland’s Jen Hutchins notes, “One reason people love this community is because it’s two degrees of separation, not six.”

On the 16^th, Portland newcomers will have the opportunity to connect with the creative community, and those who are established here can network with each other.  So, if you’re an engineer or a designer or a chef or an actor or a programmer or a photographer or a scientist or a…  you get the point.  The way to cross-pollinate is 2 Degrees Portland, and the place to do it is at Kepware on February16.

Creative economies prosper when they think creatively about themselves. In Portland, you can see that in action in the “Springboard” sessions run by Common Good Ventures.

Every month or so, Springboard pulls together local business leaders to think as out-of-the-box as possible about a nonprofit organization’s problem. In just 90 fast-paced minutes, some of Portland’s most resourceful businesspeople cluster around a table and help the organization develop ideas about a better business plan, more savvy marketing or, really, any business issue.

It all happens at the offices of the VIA Agency, in the historic Baxter Library building, which they have completely retooled for their own look and style. Around the table are local representatives from the worlds of marketing, law, finance, media, retail, and more. Up steps the nonprofit’s Executive Director and he/she walks the group through the organization’s background and particular issue.

What follows is a zippity-quick process of tossing out ideas that are posted on the wall, with time for explanations. In a structured format, the conversation goes back and forth boisterously and convivially. At the end of an hour-and-a-half, the nonprofit comes away with a raft of implementable ideas and perspectives. The for-profit attendees come away knowing that they have had direct—and quick—input into a local organization’s core concerns.

For example, a Springboard session this morning focused on Community Television Network, Portland’s cable access channel. CTN wanted ideas on how to boost sales of their video production services, which in turn support their nonprofit programming. By the end of 90 minutes, the wall was covered with colored stickies categorized into topics like Outreach, Cool Quotient, Social Media, Re-Branding, and Local Products.

Will Springboard replace McKinsey’s management consulting teams? Unlikely. But the process does provide a way for Portland’s nonprofit and for-profit communities to interact in a cooperative, non-threatening, results-driven atmosphere. Plus, it’s free for the nonprofit—and fun for the participants!

You can contact Chad Sclove if you want to attend the next Springboard.

Photo by John Spritz

Part of what makes Portland’s First Friday Art Walks so much fun is that they have no epicenter. As the crowd surges along Congress Street, with smaller group investigating eddies in the Old Port, the Place To Be shifts from one locale to the next. One sure thing: if you stroll enough, and walk through enough doors, wonderful things will happen.

Last night, the December Art Walk that leads up to the holidays, there was an extra energy in the air. You could sense it at Congress Square: on one side, the line snaked into the State Theater for The Fogcutters present Big Band Syndrome (Lauren Wayne posted a video of the finale of the show); the other side of the square featured the Portland Museum of Art (free on Friday nights) and their hypnotic show on classic Shaker artifacts. Meanwhile, in-between, Art Walkers trundled up the stairs of the Flat Iron Gallery, in the pie-slice-shaped Hay Building, to sip and chew and ruminate on Art, Life, and Living in Portland.

Another wonderful thing, as always, took place at Otto Pizza, a few steps down Congress Street. Your correspondent was among the many who stood happily on the sidewalk, waiting in line to purchase a slice of what many consider to be the finest pizza north of Boston (and now Otto is in Harvard Square, too!). When it comes in as ideal and manifold a presentation as Otto offers, pizza can crystallize the creative economy.

Outside Otto, the sidewalk mambo was wending its way down Congress Street to Space Gallery, with many a stop along the way. Inside Space, one of First Friday’s mainstays, there was music, there was art, there was laughter, there was drinking, there were jostling crowds and a buoyant sense of pleasure in the air. There was also an Alternative Gift Market where you could buy donations to a wide range of curated non-profits and deliver them in a selection of limited edition, hand printed cards designed by artists Beth Taylor, Erin Flett and Jacqueline Dubois.

If you prefer your art au plein air, you could step outside of Space onto the sidewalk, where an open-air truck had pulled up to the curb. Just climb the ramp into the truck’s back to observe the paintings hanging within.

The crowd kept surging, now on to the Maine College of Art. Every year, MECA combines their First Friday participation with a huge holiday sale of items by college students and alums. This year, three floors were given over to a cavalcade of holidazzles, and so the crowds were especially strong here. Among the (hundreds of?) tables and booths, there seemed to be a particular emphasis on recycled treasures: playing cards converted into wallets, umbrellas converted into aprons, stamps converted into earrings.

For those who needed to retreat from the gleeful cacophony of MECA, there was quieter contemplation at galleries where one could, for instance, admire scale models, photos, and blueprints celebrating the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Or, upstairs at Cross Jewelers, you could sample “tastings” of various hot cocoas. Then back out into the street and more galleries, more stores, more music.

Until, in the words of Samuel Pepys, one has turned First Friday into First Saturday, “and so to bed.”

Photos by John Spritz

When people think on innovation and creativity, they tend to think big. And there’s been no one bigger on our minds in those departments lately than Steve Jobs. For everyone intimidated by Jobs’ formidable accomplishments, Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker offers a bit of a revisionist spin: Jobs was a tweaker.

In The Tweaker, Gladwell writes, ”Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him… and ruthlessly refining it.” Jobs himself admitted that his gifts were more combinatorial than generative, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Stepping into the time machine, Gladwell cites an article by the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr to explain why the industrial revolution began in England. Britain, they say, had a “human-capital advantage—in particular, … a group they call ‘tweakers.’ They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.”

Now what has this all got to do with Portland, Maine? Well, I spent last weekend at the Juice 3.0 Conference in Camden trying to get a handle on how the creative economy and the innovation economy are intersecting in Maine. For that reason, I focused on the break out sessions that featured innovative companies and technologies, and I was not disappointed. I came away with the feeling that some of the most impressive innovations did not involve inventing ground-breaking technologies but in crafting creative ways of delivering existing technologies.

One of the most moving and impressive presentations was by Jon Calame of Thermal Efficiency Eastport during the “Risking Energy Revolution” panel. Calame is an internationally award winning architect with a background in historic preservation. He is passionate about architects’ responsibility to make buildings work for people—especially in challenging times in northern climes. Driven perhaps by the thought that historic buildings can’t be preserved if the people living in them can’t afford to heat them, Jon has taken on the urgent problem that the British have named “Fuel Poverty.” Jon has relocated himself and his family from Portland to the tiny city of Eastport (population about 1,500), which is indeed the easternmost city in the continental United States. Thermal Efficiency Eastport is a long-term project to demonstrate how applying “proven fuels, equipment and structural upgrades … in all kinds of buildings [can yield] clear, measurable advantages.” The real tweak in the project is not some new kind of furnace or insulation, but the packaging of economic arguments that will allow these retrofits to be financed and broadly available to the entire town.

Yes, that got the attention of all the bankers out there! The creative and innovation economies need creative financing. They also need people who can look at technologies and put them together in new ways. And finally, they need people who can tell compelling stories about these innovations to help attract customers and capital, retain workers, inspire students and generally connect the dots. And all of these are jobs for tweakers! Maine has lots of them and Portland is particularly dense in finance, marketing, design and story telling.

The lesson of Steve Jobs for Portland and the creative economy is not only the first part—the obvious part—of his advice to graduating Stanford students, that “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” It’s in the second part, the tweaking part, “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. … you’ll know when you find it.”

Portland is as dense with ad agencies as it is replete with restaurants and arts venues. So if you’re new to town how do you get a sense of who is doing what in Portland’s creative AdLand? One easy answer is to look at the list of winners of the biennial Broderson Awards—or better yet, to have been at the awards ceremony last Thursday (October 27) at the State Theatre.

That might have helped Pete Shelly, a young copy writer now based on the outskirts of NYC who is hoping to move to Portland, but he visited portland a week too soon. Pete is so gung ho about moving here that he built a very cool little website announcing his trip here and inviting ad creatives to have a cup of coffee (on him) to talk about Portland.

What kind of welcome did Pete receive in Portland? “I had 5 ad agencies in mind, and I had meetings with principles at 4 of them, all based on the premise of ‘hey, let’s grab a cup of coffee.’” Pete says. “They were all pretty open about lending a hand and giving their perspective. I was kind of blown away by the response. Nobody had to let me come into their office, but they did, and they took the time to sit down and listen to my story. I was anxiously awaiting the list of Broderson winners. I had the opportunity to stop by the gallery they had set up next to the State Theatre, and, having talked to creative directors and writers at each of the agencies, I was curious to see how everyone fared. I think that taking a look at the work produced in Maine just this year is a pretty good way to see how much talent is in this city, and that’s pretty attractive to me. I want to be a part of it as well.”

So here, Pete, is a whirlwind tour of Portland’s advertising creatives, courtesy of the Ad Club of Maine:

First off, the Best of Show award went to creative director Don Fibich of Kemp Goldberg Partners for their “Continue the Journey” print campaign for Sea Bags (great Portland agency building a great Portland brand—this is our kind of story). KGP also scored with their Camden National Bank Annual Report and their logo for the Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine.

Virtually owning the big budget TV categories, the VIA agency‘s Teddy Stoecklein, Amos Goss, Ron Clayton, Ken Matsubara walked (half a block) home with medals for Samsung, Fairpoint and Klondike. VIA also won for it’s integrated marketing campaign for Samsung’s tablets, digital work for Samsung and Pediacare, environmental design for DuPont and a “Pitched but Ditched” whiskey bottle design for Pendleton.

Garrand‘s chief creative officer Larry Vine chalked up an impressive 12 (mainly print category) wins for national clients like Dunkin’ Donuts, Hood  and United Way and Maine brands like Gorham Savings Bank, Gorgeous Gelato and Maine Jewish Film Festival.

Several strong in-house departments scored as well: Angela Adams, IDEXX Laboratories, CIEE, Maine College of Art, White Rock Distilleries, Inc. and Coastal Enterprises Inc.

Dearest to LiveWork Portland’s heart, perhaps, were wins by independent creatives and small design studios for authentic local brands, like Leslie Evans‘ logo and brochures for Calendar islands Maine Lobster, Taja Dockendorf of Pulp + Wire’s identity and packaging work for Pleasant River Soap Co. and Erica Hebold of E+M Marketing’s design for the Grace Restaurant website.

Will the winners influence where Pete applies for a job? Or will he just move here, find some buddies and set up his own shop? As Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution, “It’s too soon to tell.”

From the VIA Agency (left to right): Teddy Stoecklein, Jessica Fidalgo, John Coleman, Greg Smith, Dan O’Donnell

In a world of uncertainty, why celebrate risk? Why put everything you have into a crazy idea with only the barest beginnings of a plan? Ask that to Corey, Tyler and Seth, above, when they leave Love, The Bus in LA and fly back to Camden to be among the keynote speakers at the Juice 3.0 Conference in Camden on November 4 and 5th. In the case of Tyler Dunham, Seth Brown, and Corey McLean, these three “lifelong friends, filmmakers, and adventurers from the coastal town of Lincolnville, Maine (pop. 2,042). …[are] brimming with optimistic energy and a desire to accomplish something epic.” So they converted an old schoolbus into a grease-powered, web video road trip mobile and have been travelling around the country raising money to fund projects for community organizations and uploading the results in real time. If they can do all that, what else can they do?

And that’s just the point. The creative economy, the innovation economy, the experience economy—these are all expressions of the fluidity required by this crazy world—call it the improvisation economy. The Juice Conference is dedicated to bringing together a wide range of creative, innovative thinkers who have figured out how to put their ideas into action. Speakers and panelists include Maine heavyweights like Governor Angus King, Eliot Cutler and Roxanne Quimby, art world luminaries like Louisa McCall, Donna McNeil, and Eric Fischl and technological innovators like Kerem Durdag, John Ferland and  Steve Page. Portland’s creative economy is well represented by Ben Sawyer, of Digital Mill, Josh Broder of Tilson Technologies, Paul Dobbins, of Ocean Approved, Stephanie Volo of Planet Dog and Jaime Parker of Portland Trails.

One of the highlights of the conference is the pitch contest with $150,000 in financing to the winning business plans. (The deadline has been extended to Friday, October 28, so there’s still time to apply). If you’re not up for facing the “shark tank” in the pitch contest, they also have a short film contest (the deadline to apply is also now this friday.) Putting business plans and people who think about making business plans in front of investors and experts about those businesses is exactly what Juice is trying to do. And if your plan sounds like a mystery bus ride, what start up these days doesn’t?

Maine is full of smart people doing interesting things, but we may all be a bit too independently minded for our own good. That’s why conferences like Juice (and TEDx Dirigo) and places like Portland are so important. As the innovation economy spreads out through Maine, Portland has a role to play as a place to bring people together, to develop stories, to share a great meals, to cross-pollenate and propagate. Josh Broder of Portland’s Tilson Technology was just named to MaineBiz’s Next List for 2011. In the article he predicts that certain parts of the economy are poised for significant growth, “especially in those industries with strong ties to the creative economy. ‘American centers of innovation are our capital—the companies coming from technology, software and social media,’ he says. ‘All of those new things require significant infrastructure, and we’re the infrastructure provider.’”

And the same could be said of Portland. If risk is the juice of the Maine’s creative economy, Portland is it’s glass.

Photo from Love, The Bus

The First Friday Art Walk has entered a new phase in its life cycle as the flagship of Portland’s creative economy. Since July, designer Jennifer S. Muller has been producing a beautiful broadside map and program distributed the previous Thursday in The Portland Press Herald. The way the heavy, uncoated stock of the piece absorbs the ink makes it look more hand made than commercially printed, which is just the right touch for the Art Walk that aims to stoke local commerce through the propagation of fine art.

And building on the uproarious success of the What Cheer? Brigade at the SPACE Gallery Block Party, tonight’s festivities include New York’s Asphalt Orchestra for more street band fun. (Thank you, Portland Ovations) Programs? Marching Bands? And soon food carts? This is beginning to sound like a sporting event for creatives!

Some of tonights highlights include: a performance at 4:30 in Congress Square by The Milkman’s Union presented by the Portland Music Foundation to highlight this year’s Portland entries in the NYC’s CMJ Music Marathon; the opening reception of Good Design is Good Business: The Elements of Branding, the 2011 AIGA Maine Annual Exhibit at the Lewis Gallery, Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square; an exhibit of photographs from the Portland Ballet’s “Who’s Your Dancer” project will be  on view at the KeyBank Monument Square branch; and the work of at least one Portland mayoral candidate is on view!

John Rooks is a true Portland original. As the founder and president of The Soap Group, he is at the forefront of business consulting for sustainability and social justice. In his new book, More Than Promote, he looks past the duality of consumerism and environmentalism and “reassembles a new thing; a strategy and methodology of promotion that is, simultaneously, sustainability.” Neat trick, John.

For his presentation at TEDxDirigo, Rooks tackled the issue of authenticity (often hilariously) and it’s post modern sci-fi doppelganger, the simulacrum. For those of you less up on your Philip K. Dick (and Arnold Schwarzenegger) than John, a simulacrum is a copy for which there is no original. His point is that advertisers have to move beyond the wink-wink head fake of “green” marketing to the more radical transparency of authenticity.

I was intrigued by John’s concept of the “authenticity audit” and about how it might apply to Portland. In many ways, the appeal of Portland—and of Maine—is that they are originals for which there is no copy, so I though we would hold up pretty well. I asked him to sketch out for us what an audit of Portland might look like and, true to form, what he came up with was both tougher and more helpful than I had anticipated:

When a cruise ship pulls into Portland, and the tourists spill out into the street, money falling from their pockets as they shuffle their way into chowder houses, are they experiencing the real Portland?

Do we, as residents experience the real Portland?  Is there any such thing as a Real Portland? It’s not a metaphysical question.  It’s a strategic question important to mental and economic health of our city.

Today, the question is important because Authenticity is a new kind of currency.  Brands and destinations are all claiming that they offer authentic products and experiences.  Realwashing is the new greenwashing.  So, as both a brand and a destination it seems that Portland might want to explore its own Authenticity a bit.  The underlying logic says that consumers (or in our case residents) want more Authenticity in their lives.  And brands (or cities) need to be ready to deliver.

But contrary to popular mythologies, Authenticity is not an effortless way of being.  It does not just happen.  People, businesses and even municipalities need to work hard at it. This is where things get exciting.  It turns out that Authentic people are happier.  And Authentic businesses are more profitable.  Authentic cities, the logic follows, would have happier people and more profitable businesses inside the city limits.

If we were to perform an Authenticity Audit on Portland, what would we find?  If we measured what Portland says about itself (via Portland Downtown District, LiveWorkPortland, PACA, Greater Portland Convention and Visitors Bureau, Portland Buy Local, the Chamber, City Hall, Maine Department of Tourism, etc., etc) against what Portland actually does, what do you think we would we find?  That’s the authenticity formula – the difference between what you say and what you do.  And between the two is an Authenticity Gap™.  Within the Authenticity Gap are opportunities to make yourself, your business and your Portland a better place.

What Rooks is pointing to, from our local perspective, is that the conditions that have created the creative economy in Portland need to be explored, understood and promoted. And beyond that, the sustainability of the creative economy here is based on the authentic talents and efforts of people and companies that are responding to the authentic needs of their customers and the challenging conditions of our times. And that response is an ongoing human performance, not a robot on auto pilot. It’s not easy being authentic, but it wasn’t easy for Kermit to be green, either.

Image of John Rooks courtesy of TEDxDirigo, photograph by Jason Esposito

While the national—and global—economic picture is decidedly mixed, there are signs that Portland, Maine, may be exceptional in more ways than it’s number of James Beard nominations per capita. This may be highly anecdotal, but in the last few weeks many postings for high-level creative jobs in Portland have moved across my radar. These are not just-out-of-college quasi-paid internships, but well-paying jobs worth moving from Brooklyn, Boston, Berkeley or Austin for. Putney, a veterinary products startup based in Portland, was the highest ranking Maine company on Inc. magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest growng small companies with an impressive 291% three year growth rate. Go to the careers page their website and you’ll see they are looking for a director of marketing; If you follow Mediabistro you would have seen a posting for an art director at Kemp Goldberg Partners marketing and advertising agency; and (as I mentioned in a recent post) The Via Agency has 8 positions to be filled.

At a time when all levels of government are talking about how to spur job creation it is great to see that the creative economy (at least here in Portland) is actually doing it. All kinds of non-profits are sharpening their business focus as well in hopes of remaining relevant and positioning themselves as worthy targets for scarce investment dollars. The speakers at the upcoming TEDxDirigo conference receive coaching in how to distill their “ideas worth spreading” into 18 minutes or less and then get a high quality video of their talk to help them spread those ideas further. MaineBiz just did a profile on founder Adam Burk. TEDxDirigo talks are not quite elevator pitches, but they’re a way to give creative social entrepreneurs a leg up on getting attention—and funding.

Art, it must be said, is not business. But there is a lot of business that develops around art. In order for that process to happen there need to be opportunities for artists to find support for their own basic research and let others jump in to find applications. The Maine Arts Commission just released a report on the economic impact of Museum attendance in Maine as a way of demonstrating an aspect of that link. MAC has shown unwavering support for both local arts organizations and individual artists, both crucial components in the growth of the creative economy from which many of the cultural perks of Portland flow.

In a similar vein, Maine AIGA’s annual exhibit this year is entitled, “Good Design is Good Business,” and the focus is on “the elements of branding.” Maine AIGA president, and partner at Portland branding shop Might & Main (formerly Forge), Sean Wilkinson says, ”Well designed presence in the world is what sets one great idea apart from another. It is ‘intelligence made visible.’ Your expertise as a business is only as valuable as people perceive it to be, and hiring a designer is one of the most important steps in shaping that perception. It also keeps good folks like me gainfully employed.”

Good folks, gainfully employed in Portland, Maine—the image of a glass filling…

background photo by Corey Templeton, Portland Daily Photo

The summer’s other great sequel was not in 3-d multiplexes but right on Congress street in Portland. Ad Age named the VIA Agency, Small Agency of the Year, Gold. Why the Harry Potter motif? “The Via agency is housed in the Baxter building, built in 1888 as the public library of Portland, Maine. The imposing peaks and gables of the stone facade and wooden beam-studded high-ceiling interior led one Via client to dub the building the “Hogwarts of Advertising.” … And if the building is Hogwarts, then CEO and founder John Coleman is its Harry Potter. With similar rounded black-framed glasses, an affable charm and wide-eyed curiosity about everything, Mr. Coleman even seems to have Master Potter’s magic touch — in the advertising industry at least,” reads the lead of the Ad Age piece.

Careful readers of this blog will remember that VIA won silver for the same prive last year, no mean feat for a Portland agency. But the intervening year has been a very good one for VIA and they attribute at least a bit of that good fortune to being located here. ”To live in a smaller town and to go to baseball games and do the grocery shopping and all of that, helps in understanding the broad spectrum of different kinds of people, but I truly believe that what it really does is afford us the opportunity to think,” Mr. Coleman said. “I love New York, but I feel blessed to live in a place like Portland.”

Go to the Portland section of the Via website and the first thing you read is “Portland isn’t just where we are. It’s who we are.” (I wish we had written that!) They then lead you through three iPad swipes of highlights that tell you why it’s great to live in Portland followed by listings for eight (at last count) really great jobs. Talk about brand story! VIA is itself one of the best advertisements for Portland that Portland’s got. And for those of you who like a little wistful bitterness to temper your jubilation, read Chief Creative Officer Greg Smith’s reaction to the award, “So That Didn’t Suck.”