Baudouin

PROVIDENCE — The Providence renaissance has brought billions of dollars of investment into the capital city, dressing up the skyline with condominium towers and luxury hotels and giving birth to a string of restaurant and upscale retail shops.

But that growth has failed to boost large segments of the city’s economy. The nightlife may be hopping, but new company creation is sluggish and college graduates still race for the border after leaving campus.

The Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce says it can change that by marketing the city as more business hub than Boston suburb.

In November, the group hired the Washington, D.C., consulting firm New Economy Strategies to study the city’s business climate and recommend ways to retain college graduates, encourage collaborations among businesses, hospitals and universities and support start-up companies.

“It’s a concentrated effort,” Laurie White, the chamber president, said. “We don’t think this has ever been undertaken in this community.”

The results of the study are not expected until early March. But officials involved in the four-month, $132,500 project provided details to The Providence Journal yesterday, describing it as a bold attempt to expand the city’s tax base, add private-sector jobs and arrest the state’s population decline.

The consultants have visited Providence twice, interviewing 200 business leaders, university and hospital administrators, policymakers and entrepreneurs. The analysts will return this month for more focus groups, and they will later publish surveys on the chamber Web site, www.providencechamber.com, asking college students and others about the city’s business climate.

The effort is designed to bolster attempts by the state Economic Development Corporation, the Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council and The Slater Technology Fund to intensify cooperation among academic and private-sector researchers and use their discoveries to power new businesses.

Using public money, those agencies have provided tax breaks, grants and investments to shepherd small companies from garages to skyscrapers, hoping to replicate the successes of California’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 corridor.

The chamber project is more focused, concentrating on Providence and seeking to identify a niche segment of the so-called “knowledge-based economy” that will enjoy special assistance. The chamber and its partners — including The Providence Foundation — say they hope to help businesses in the chosen cluster raise money from investors and federal agencies, recruit employees and establish internships for local college students.

So far, at least, the chamber is being supported by Brown University, the University of Rhode Island, Lifespan, CB Richard Ellis and a collection of other businesses, schools and nonprofit groups. The knowledge-based industries they are studying include biotechnology, digital media, information technology and financial services.

“We’re not looking for a 100-page report that will sit on a shelf,” Janet Raymond, the chamber’s senior vice president for operations and economic development, said. The final “road map,” according to chamber documents, will include a three-to-five-year business plan and a “global positioning strategy” that will turn Providence into a “hotbed of entrepreneurial activity, investment and job growth.”

The new jobs and business opportunities would help universities recruit students and faculty, and help hospitals attract top researchers, according to Daniel A. Baudouin, executive director of The Providence Foundation. “There is an opportunity here,” he said. “This isn’t a basket-case economy.”

But White acknowledged the challenges facing the city’s business community. The “exodus” of college graduates is starving the work force, she said. The city’s troubled schools hurt employee recruitment, and the taxes in Rhode Island are burdensome, she added.

Those problems are not new. But the state and city budget crises, she said, could finally energize efforts to build the businesses needed to finance government services.

“The private sector has to play a much more active role,” White said. “This gives the community something to rally around.”

bgedan@projo.com