Ellick takes helm at Commerce

Jim Ellick became the Director of the Idaho Department of Commerce on July 1, after the Department of Commerce and Labor was split into two departments. Ellick spent most of his career in Silicon Valley, where he developed and managed a variety of companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor, Applied Materials, Photon Dynamics and Mitsubishi Silicon America.

What are your priorities as commerce director?
What we’re going to do is broaden the enterprise payroll base. That’s one of the key things we need to do. We also need to work on the image of Idaho. There are three types of people who know about Idaho – people who really know about Idaho, people who think they know about Idaho (they may have a picture of snowboarders and cowboys) and people who don’t have a clue what Idaho is. What we’re going to be doing is to make sure we get the message out that Idaho is a very diverse state.
Successful companies have three ingredients. They have a vision, they embrace change and they remain relevant. What we need is to do whatever we can to bring the enterprise payroll to work with the companies we have, so that someone who is born and raised here can get their education – wherever they get it, either here or Harvard or somewhere else – and be able to come back here and have a career and a life experience with a horizon that’s unlimited. In order to do that, we’ll have to bring in a diversity of companies.
What we need to do is to prevent a flat spin into a service economy. Enterprise payroll for me is where the company gets most or almost all of its income from outside the state. Because if we start feeding on each other we turn into a service economy, and you don’t have a very deep bench – which you see with the issues with Micron. The good news is that we have Micron, but the bad news is if they have a hiccup it’s a problem. We need to focus on how we bring these companies in. We’re going to try an outreach program

See COMMERCE, page 3A

and figure out what technologies we need to focus on.
I think, and this is not a criticism, I think we emphasize way too much all the fishing and the hunting. We put a lot of emphasis on that, and people get the idea that we don’t have anything else here. Of course, we need to look at all the metrics. How do we compete with Oregon and Washington? We’re competing for this asset, which is talent. Companies now can move anywhere. They’re not tied to brick or mortar or their home state. If they decide to move, we have to make sure that we put our state on their request for proposal.

Attracting outside companies to come into the state, is that more important than trying to create a fertile business environment inside the state?
It’s equal. You sell what you have. You have to be able to multiplex. You can’t just emphasize one over the other. We certainly have to create an entrepreneurial environment here. We’re going to do that. But at the same time we have to bring in new blood because I want to get that diverse economy in the state. It’s not either or. It’s both.

Speaking of Micron – hopefully you’ve had some experience with this in your career – is it possible for the state economy to be tied too closely to one particular company?
Of course it’s possible. The facts are there. It’s great that Micron’s here. Poor old Steve’s got a big problem. He’s fighting the Koreans. Most companies in Korea really aren’t companies – they’re part of the government. That’s a heck of a competitor. He’s got his hands full, and he’s in a tough business. It’s like having a company with four clients, and one of them is IBM. The good news is you have IBM as a client, but if they skip a shipment you have a problem. You need a diverse balance. That’s why we need to have a recruiting plan.

Are there any major changes or initiatives you’ll be pushing for before the end of the year?
I’ve only been here 30 days. I don’t even know where the cafeteria is. We’re gonna go with this one step at a time.

What are your impressions of the state economy overall?
It’s not that diversified. That’s the issue. If you go out to the rural areas there’s a major problem with infrastructure, issues with jobs – the timber business is closed up, the silver mines are gone. We need to get those areas up and running with something besides tourism. First, we have to get the metrics together. How do we compare to Washington, to Oregon? Is it really easier to do business here than in Washington? Is that what the numbers really say, or is it just a feeling we have? How do we compete with incentives, though incentives aren’t a hundred percent of the reason why people move, it certainly helps. How do we put together an outreach program so we target certain companies, so we don’t just have poster out on I-84 that says ‘move your company here’? We figure out which companies we’d like to have. We’ll be both proactive and reactive.

There’s a lot of interest from the technology sector in making Idaho the next Silicon Valley. How do you go about building that? What is the magic formula to build a region like that?
The magic formula is to work closely with the universities and private business. I was 32 years in Silicon Valley. It boils down to the ability of the group to take risk. It turns out in Silicon Valley that if the idea was good but the company failed, that’s OK. You can go do that again. You have to create a society where risk taking is a good thing. Not foolish risk taking, but calculated risk taking. That’s one of the key ingredients. And of course you have a huge university complex – Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, Cal Poly, etc. You have a vast pool of technical people. That just has to be worked on.
We can find a company that is very visible in the tech world and we can get them to move here. What that does is that all the other people in the industry will see they moved to Idaho and wonder what’s going on here. That would be one of our target accounts. Once you have the seed here and the people here, they’ll be on the internet and phoning friends. The scientific community is relatively small. If you have a certain technical discipline, that group of people is even smaller. By targeting a high profile company I’m not sure the rest will follow, but a lot of people will think about t when it wasn’t on their radar.
That’s one step, but the university cooperation is very important. That’s where people graduate, and if they can get jobs in a diverse economy they stay here.