Arkansas Innovation: The Ingredients Are in Place

The ingredients are in place for Arkansas to become a tech-based innovation hotbed. All it needs are the right hands in the kitchen.

Jeff Amerine has firsthand experience in cooking up environments that foster innovation. A former U.S. Navy and Air Force officer, Amerine finished his military career as R&D program manager for Air Force defense communications, which led him into the commercial arena.

Currently, he teaches entrepreneurship and technology commercialization classes at the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, and is an officer at the UA’s Technology Licensing Office where his job is to take the world-class research being done there and guide it to commercialization.

Amerine has held senior leadership positions in seven startup ventures and three Fortune 500 companies. Before joining the UA in February 2008, he served as the vice president and general manager for KonaWare Transportation & Logistics, a startup headquartered in Silicon Valley that focused on mobile-software solutions.

An adviser to Innovate Arkansas and author of the Techpreneurship series that runs each Thursday in IA’s INOV8 blog, Amerine knows a little about startups and the proper environment to grow them. He believes the time is right for Arkansas to come out from under the national innovation radar.

“I’ve lived the startup scene in Arkansas as a technology entrepreneur and a coach/mentor over the last six years,” he said. “

In 2004, the situation was pretty bleak. At that time, those early-stage firms that succeeded largely did so through sheer tenacity, determination and luck.

“In 2009, the picture changed. Through the Arkansas Economic Development Commission and university leadership, we have the beginnings of a truly viable entrepreneurial support structure.”

That support, he believes, is embodied in entities such as Innovate Arkansas, a joint venture between the AEDC and Winrock International, and the Arkansas Small Business & Technology Development Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. In addition, Amerine noted the entrepreneurship curriculum now being offered at community colleges and universities across the state.

“We should all take great pride in recent success in state, regional, national and international business-plan competitions against the best schools in the world,” Amerine said.

“Arkansas has repeatedly stunned the best and brightest from elsewhere.”