Meet Jersey City’s i-team: a group of seven Jersey City innovators working to reinvigorate neighborhood business districts while addressing the most critical and complex problems that the city faces.
The team assembled in early 2015 following Jersey City’s receipt of an initial three year grant of $2.25 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies to improve the city in meaningful ways through innovation. Thus, the Jersey City Office of Innovation – or, the i-team – was born, joining the 14 other i-teams working in areas across the country. Its initial challenge was to revitalize “Jersey city’s underutilize commercial corridors,” according to Mayor Steven M. Fulop in a recently released report about the program.
During the summer of 2015, the i-team held focus groups with business owners to discover the main problems the city faced. Through this, they found that access to capital, locating affordable space, and unclear city regulations were keeping businesses from thriving, among other factors.
From there, they worked on developing the “Innovation Delivery Approach,” which is a technical term for focusing on collaboration to solve any pressing issues the city faces. The framework consists of four steps: investigate the problem, generate new ideas, prepare for action, and delivery and adaptation.
One of the biggest problems facing the city was commercial vacancies, so the i-team chose to target that. With their goal set, they aimed high. They plan to reduce retail vacancies in certain neighborhood business districts by 50% by January 2019. The current number of vacancies is 155, and they hope to lower that number to 77.
But their goals don’t stop with eliminating vacancies; they ambitiously want to create a local ecosystem where businesses thrive and flourish. So they also set a goal to increase the number of businesses in Jersey City by 200 by January 2019. To do this, the i-team held 10 “Pop-Up Idea Lounges” throughout the city to engage the community and hear suggestions on how to address the problems facing the business community. Over 400 suggestions poured in.
From there, their job was to work with the city to put those ideas into action.
Their collaborative resume is impressive. Over the next year, they worked with 28 city offices, 7 neighborhood associations, 5 Special Improvement Districts, 3 local universities, 200 small businesses and 1,000 community members. In addition, they hosted workshops, focus groups, community meetings and stakeholder interviews to track their progress along the way.
So did this new approach from the dedicated i-team work? They feel it did.
According to a recently released annual report from the city, the team presented their initiatives via three categories to gauge and reflect the impact.
The team calls its first category the “Business Brush-Up,” which is entirely dedicated to revitalizing commercial spaces and making abandoned business districts more enticing to small business owners and community members.
First, they worked with the Jersey City Economic Development Corp to develop two new microloan programs for small businesses in the city. Within the plan, traditional microloans can be used for much broader purposes, and the Small Business Investors Fund allows JC businesses to borrow funds between $5,000 and $10,000, and if they remain open and hire JC residents, a portion of the loan is forgiven at the end of the year.
The i-team also hosted free business classes to teach owners essential skills like writing business plans, bookkeeping, creating a website and more. In addition, they worked with architecture students from local universities to develop “imagination stations,” which reimagine what vacant commercial spaces can look like with a thriving business in them.
The second category is the “Business District Reboot,” which seeks to reenergize and rebrand the entire district. To accomplish this, the i-team developed pop-up events in lesser-known commercial areas, which brought consumers to parts of the district where they wouldn’t normally be. They also worked on branding campaigns to establish identities for certain districts and brand them in a marketable way to consumers.
The third category is the establishment of the Office of Small Business Services, which acts as a resource for any and all small-business issues. The i-team hired the city’s first ever Small Business Development Coordinator in July and created a website that business owners can visit to learn the city’s rules and regulations.
The i-team also aided the city in projects outside its own jurisdiction, such as streetscape improvement, waste management and redevelopment plans. They used their team’s knowledge and experience with innovation to help the business environment become cohesive and collaborative with other elements of the city.
Year-long diversified efforts are yielding a significant pay-off. Over 100 new businesses opened in Jersey City, and momentum suggests that that number will continue to climb. A critical foundation is now in place that enables more initiatives to be undertaken and optimistically extended into more business districts around the city.
“It’s a road map of the future,” summed up Mayor Fulop. “Charting a new course, so that Jersey City continues to grow and expand, local entrepreneurs can rest assured knowing the city is doing everything it can to support them.”
