Analyst more upbeat about Wichita’s business climate

Wichitans are doing more to foster business growth but must do more to encourage business investment and to create a better environment for entrepreneurs, an economic analyst says.

That would mean aggressively investing more not only in business and entrepreneurship, but in education and in “civic activity,” said analyst James Chung, a Wichita native.

Chung, Harvard-trained but still in love with his hometown, was hired by the Wichita Community Foundation last year to drill deep into economic data and start a fact-based community conversation to improve the economics of Wichita.

“We don’t think Wichita is wrong, but we think there is a lot more that could be right,” said Shelly Prichard, the foundation’s CEO and president, at the presentation Thursday at Abode.

Chung spoke to packed houses last year in several presentations, though a lot of people felt disturbed at his grim view of Wichita’s future. It might might include a “death spiral” for the business climate, he said then.

He spoke to three more packed houses this week, as he outlined more data, and spoke more encouragingly, about how many people since his visit last year were collaborating more and working to improve business. Accompanying him in his three presentations were panelists from Wichita who had their own stories to tell.

Chung’s work this past year included more analysis of other cities: what works, what doesn’t, and why cities roughly the same size as Wichita, with comparable challenges, have done better than Wichita at creating jobs, business growth and opportunity.

Those cities, including Oklahoma City, Omaha, and Cedar Rapids and Des Moines in Iowa, have two things in common that Wichita could work on, Chung said: They attracted much more venture capital to invest in businesses, including in risky businesses, and they worked deliberately to improve what Chung called the “talent ecosystem” in their cities.

For example, leaders in those cities became good at “redeploying local talent” if a company left their city, he said. Wichita, meanwhile, is educating young people who leave, in part because they don’t think they can find jobs here. “We’re losing a lot of the best talent we have,” Chung said.

The U.S. is full of cities that succeed these days, and there’s no reason Wichita can’t aspire to join that success, Chung said. Kansas City is only three times larger than Wichita, yet it attracts 15 times more venture capital for business; St. Louis is four times larger and attracts 30 times more venture capital than Wichita. Wichita, with careful thought and hard work, could do better, he said. “It can be done.”

The cities more comparable in size to Wichita, Cedar Rapids for example, all were suffering years ago from lack of growth, yet turned things around and are booming now. It happened not by accident but because everybody – government, business, young entrepreneurs, colleges and public schools – came together and made smart decisions about goals and how to get there. And they all took risks, and invested, Chung said.

They also embraced the possibility of failure, said panelist Jonathan George, a Wichita entrepreneur who has created successful – and failed – companies.

“Failing is a good thing,” he said. “It is a catalyst for growth. If we are not failing, we are not trying.”

Failure is essential to creating successful entrepreneurs and successful economies, he said, because “those who lose come back stronger.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2016 at 5:12 PM with the headline "Analyst more upbeat about Wichita’s business climate."