By Neil Johnson njohnson@gazettextra.com February 1, 2022
JANESVILLE
If an emerging partnership takes off, a Janesville business incubator and a local business operator would provide Janesville high school students and budding entrepreneurs with commercial “coworking” space in a third-floor loft downtown.
The Janesville Innovation Center, a public-private nonprofit business incubator on the south side, seeks to link up with the owner of a four-story, converted warehouse at 207 N. Academy St., known as The Gray Goose, with plans to offer 5,500 square feet of finished, vacant space on the building’s third floor.
Through a partnership that officials say is still in the works, the incubator would offer the Gray Goose loft space as the Janesville Business Hub. It would serve in part as a launch pad for Janesville Craig High School students involved in Elevate, a program for students pursuing careers in business.
While the Janesville Innovation Center hasn’t yet made any major financial commitments to the project and the school board hasn’t yet approved the project, the incubator said it also would gear more than half the workspace on the Gray Goose’s third floor for use by entrepreneurs who are in early stages of launching a business but might not be ready to fully lease traditional office space.
In a pitch to the Innovation Center’s board of directors Tuesday, the Innovation Center’s director, Mike Mathews, called the project a “farm system” that could launch this fall for both entrepreneurs and local students who through the Elevate program are exploring business coursework and meeting with local business operators they’re partnered with on business coursework and projects.
Coworking spaces typically operate as shared offices for budding entrepreneurs as a less costly alternative to renting office space. They’re typically set up with kitchen and lounge amenities, and they’re for use by small groups or individual entrepreneurs who might want someplace besides their home office or a local coffee shop to hold meetings with clients, investors or partners.
Mathews’ survey of the 10 largest cities in Wisconsin show that Janesville is the only metro area that has no private coworking space available. The nearest is at IronTek, an incubator for business startups that runs out of the Iron Works facility in downtown Beloit.
Mathews said some local entrepreneurs in surveys said they would use coworking space for important meetings with clients or colleagues instead of hammering out business proposals from their homes or at a local diner or coffee shop.
Space for students
Mathews and Innovation Center board member John Beckord—the recently retired former president of Forward Janesville—both said they believe the coworking space at the Gray Goose would provide students in Elevate a more coherent experience as they learned what it’s really like to conduct and participate in business meetings.
“Some of these students are working on applied business projects hand-in-glove with local community businesses. And so the (Gray Goose) space becomes a place where they can meet, and it’s a little bit more convenient for everyone involved to participate in the program,” Mathews said.
Some activities now run through Elevate are held at Craig High School’s cafeteria, Mathews and Beckord indicated.
Mathews said Janesville school officials say student enrollment in Elevate is expected to grow from about 30 students this year to as many as 50 next year. He said suites now available at the Janesville Innovation Center aren’t big enough to accommodate coworking space that could draw dozens of people during the daytime.
Other high schools in Wisconsin with similar programs use coworking spaces set up through local partnerships similar to the proposed Janesville Business Hub: spaces separate from the school where students can absorb the ins and outs of office culture and meeting with people in a professional sphere.
Janesville School District spokesperson Patrick Gasper said the district hasn’t made any formal decisions on the proposed business hub, and the board won’t hear the Innovation Center’s formal pitch on the project until meeting on Tuesday. The school board would have to approve any proposed partnership.
Gasper pointed out that since Elevate launched, the district has considered moving the program off campus to give students and business partners involved a “more formal type of business setting.”
Innovation Center officials did not publicize financial details during a Zoom meeting on Tuesday, although Mathews said the Innovation Center would set up the program as a separate offshoot of the Innovation Center, which rents business space to startup entrepreneurs, primarily those in technology and light manufacturing.
He said the Innovation Center is using state grants and direct sponsorships by local business partners which can offset some startup costs for the incubator. Rent paid by those who use the coworking space would also fuel the program.
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