Mayor John Street and University President Judith Rodin yesterday announced a new president and chief executive officer of the coalition designed to attract high-tech businesses to Philadelphia.
Richard Bendis, president and CEO of Kansas Technology Enterprise Corporation, was named head of Innovation Philadelphia, formerly known as the New Economy Development Alliance.
"Richard Bendis is an experienced and talented business leader with a proven record of success in attracting innovative new business and financial opportunities," Street said in a statement.
Bendis' appointment marks the end of a five-month search for the organization's president.
"I never envisioned that I would be coming to Philadelphia five months ago, and what impressed me really was the quality of the assets in intellectual property that resided in Philadelphia," Bendis said.
The goal of Innovation Philadelphia is to use the life sciences to develop commerce in the city, and bring it commercially up to the level of other major cities.
"Whatever the new economy is, it starts with all the life sciences," said Peter Longstreth, president of the Pennsylvania Industrial Development Corp. "They're a very important part of our economic fabric."
"The community hasn't come together, nor has potentially Penn been able to take full advantage of all of the intellectual know-how and resources here, to really stimulate the economy and get it out of being a second-tier city," Bendis said.
Bendis "is going to have to hit the ground running," said Karen Hanson, managing director for intellectual capital at Greater Philadelphia First, an association of local business leaders. "We cannot afford to continue to be behind."
"Our region has strengths," Hanson added. "What we need to do is harness them, market them, be creative and innovative about what we have, do a much better job of getting it out there."
Considering the economic growth surrounding other major research universities -- such as Harvard, Stanford and Duke -- Bendis maintained that Penn, in conjunction with Philadelphia, should also be able to achieve great things.
Innovation Philadelphia hopes to retain more of the areas recent graduates as the biotech industry here starts to blossom. Both Bendis and Rodin -- who Street appointed as chairwoman of Innovation Philadelphia's Board of Directors in February -- agree that perception is part of the city's problem.
"We have to create a new culture," Bendis said. "What I've been hearing is there's a major brain drain challenge here in this region because that entrepreneurial culture has not been developed, and if it has, it's really in the suburbs. It's not in Center City."
He feels, however, that his position as an outsider actually gives him a clearer view of Philadelphia's problems.
"I think that there's an image and a packaging problem, and sometimes people from the outside can have a better perspective of what's going on inside than the people who look here everyday and all they see are the challenges," he said.
The name change is a result of that perception issue.
"`New Economy' started to take on the connotation of the things that didn't work in the dot-com debacle, and we really didn't want this to be associated a) with failure or b) with dot-coms, which wasn't what we intended to convey when we gave it its name initially," Rodin said.
"This really is about creating a culture of innovation and of innovators, and when you do that, and you create a climate that feels entrepreneur-friendly, attracting these businesses, keeping the young startups, etc., really is more likely to occur," she added.
The new president and CEO was supposed to be announced in July, but those involved with area businesses say Bendis was worth the wait.
"It's not exactly the way everyone would have wanted it to happen, but this is for a much longer term," Longstreth said.
"This is something the mayor's administration is committed to, so the five months is not significant when you look at in that regard," he added.
The Pennsylvania Industrial Development Corp. will be sharing its office building with Innovation Philadelphia.
Bendis will continue to guide Kansas Technology Enterprise Corporation as it searches for a new president, but he maintains that his primary focus will be in Philadelphia.
