PROVIDENCE — Betaspring is the equivalent of a midwife for business start-ups.

The Providence-based company works with teams of budding entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into viable businesses. Co-founders Allan Tear, Owen Johnson and Jack Templin pair the teams with mentors to shape business plans and refine potential products. At the end of a 12-week boot camp, the groups can pitch their ideas to investors and, ideally, come up with companies.

Betaspring guides them along the way by offering professional advice and financial support — what Tear describes as “rent and ramen noodles money.”

Last Friday, at a forum to discuss the growth of the local knowledge economy, business leaders and policymakers pointed to what Betaspring does as the type of innovative program Rhode Island needs to create money-making ventures and pull the state out of the doldrums. Their hope is that Rhode Island can move away from traditional manufacturing, a sector that is steadily losing jobs, to industries based on research, life sciences, health care and green technology.

Betaspring is one of a number of so-called “start-up accelerators” that have popped up across the country, said Tear.

“We’re connecting the wisdom, the experience and the battle scars of experienced entrepreneurs with our new entrepreneurs,” he told the more than 100 people at the event held at The Westin Providence.

In Betaspring’s inaugural class last summer, NuLabel Technologies, a business started by four Brown University graduates that created an earth-friendly adhesive label, received advice from Stephen Lane, a veteran designer of medical devices.

Max Winograd, one of the founders of NuLabel, said Betaspring connected his company to its first investor and its first customer.

“Betaspring is the reason we’re here in Providence today,” he said.

That’s good news for a state struggling to climb out of a recession and the unemployment rate up to 13 percent. But it’s also not a common story.

Lane, CEO of Ximedica, said the state needs to do more to reverse a brain drain that sees thousands of college graduates leave each year to find careers elsewhere. Even companies like NuLabel may not stay in Providence if they can’t find more funding. He cited one company that received initial financing from the state-managed Slater Technology Fund, but moved to Boston to be close to major investors.

Lane urged the state to “invest in programs and people, not bricks and mortar.”

Friday’s forum — sponsored by the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce and the Innovation Providence Implementation Council (IPIC) — was designed as a sort of progress report after a meeting a year ago to spur the development of new knowledge-based industries in Rhode Island.

“There are good things coming here, but it’s going to take … perseverance,” said Constance Howes, chairwoman of IPIC and president of Women & Infants Hospital.

Much of the hope for the new economy in Rhode Island is centered around the Jewelry District, the neighborhood south of the old Route 195 overpass that was once a manufacturing center. Brown University plans to move its medical school there. State policymakers want a hub of high-tech and science-related start-up companies to coalesce in the area. More than once, speakers at the forum referred to the area as the “Knowledge District.”

“I think we have begun a lot of the work that will develop this important district,” said Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline.

akuffner@projo.com