Gainesville companies are feeling the results of high-tech growth in Innovation Square. A myriad of local businesses are expressing increased production in or near the science and technology community and are excited about the prospect of future growth.
“Innovation Square is on the verge of exploding,” said Shariq Siraj, president at Storter Childs, a consolidated graphics company off of Waldo Road on the east side of Gainesville.
Gainesville-based Storter Childs is in the final stages of becoming a sponsor of the Florida Innovation Hub, an entrepreneurial incubator that was Innovation Square’s first new building. The company made the Florida Innovation Hub’s vibrant lobby mural for which it has become known for locally. Storter Childs is also in discussions with MindTree, a notable information technology company within Innovation Square, to determine their future needs.
Siraj stated that with the increasing growth and occupancy, his business is “definitely expecting more growth due to Innovation Square.”
“When companies bring in hundreds of employees, they need the print and web products we have to offer,” Siraj said.
Local artists are also benefiting from companies and developments within Innovation Square. They have been called upon to supply the community with projects that represent the area’s new modern, fresh environment.
“Innovation Square has been an absolute boom for this business,” said Alexis Dold, owner and artist at Circle-Square. The design and fabrication company has formed synergistic relationships with Fracture and other neighbors in the science and technology community.
Dold, who recently hired his first employee from Eastside High School’s Architecture Construction and Engineering Program, acknowledged Innovation Square as the key factor in his company’s expansion.
“I’m getting jobs I wouldn’t even be able to think about if I wasn’t in Innovation Square,” Dold said. “As a community, projects that would otherwise have to be farmed out to other cities to complete, we are now able to do here locally.”
Circle-Square will be collaborating with neighboring construction company, Skanska, to renovate the University of Florida’s Reitz Student Union.
Restaurants are finding their services useful to the growing Innovation Square population as well. Reggae Shack Café, which is located near the tech companies downtown, has grown from four to 30 employees and has recently expanded to a new location on Hawthorne Road in East Gainesville. Owner Omar Oselimo stated that the new location, Southern Charm, has created up to 20 new jobs there.
“We used to be surrounded by empty buildings and undeveloped lots,” Oselimo remembered. “Now, we have companies and students around Innovation Square that patronize our restaurant.”
The building housing Southern Charm is owned by the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). The CRA is redeveloping buildings in the Hawthorne road area in an attempt to increase its appeal to local businesses and supplement economic development there.
Just a few blocks down University Avenue from Reggae Shack Café, the Sweetwater Branch Inn is enjoying an increase in sales. The historic bed and breakfast is being utilized by new Innovation Square company, Mobiquity, to house trainees and new employees.
Sweetwater Branch Inn owner, Cornelia Holbrook, mentioned that the company has ramped up marketing efforts and redeveloped areas of the property in hopes of further increased sales. Holbrook estimates that partnerships with Innovation Square have been worth around $7,000 this year.
Holbrook also praised Innovation Square’s capacity to reinvest in other areas of Gainesville.
“It helps out these other neighborhoods so that this extends outside of Innovation Square,” Holbrook said. “That way there isn’t a nice part and then you go two blocks and it starts to slump.”
Innovation Square and Gainesville in general are motivating companies to expand while providing a model for communities that want to ramp up their economic output.
“In Gainesville you have a city that is 90 percent smaller than larger cities trying to do the same thing as Innovation Square – and pulling it off,” said Dold. “Hopefully this will be a prototype for smaller cities to prove you can run your community more efficiently.”