Editor’s note: This post is taken from prepared remarks delivered by Salt Lake Chamber President and CEO Lane Beattie at the 4th Annual Utah Genius awards. 

I want to congratulate our honorees this afternoon. Your tremendous skill, your spirit of innovation and your ability to envision and make that vision a reality are inspiring.

These remarkable qualities strongly contribute to our state economy, which has become the strongest in the nation.

And that’s not just me seeing the world through Chamber of Commerce-colored glasses.

The numbers speak for themselves. Just last Friday, Utah’s unemployment rate fell from 5.2 percent—already two-and-a-half points below the national rate—to 4.9 percent. That is the fifth lowest rate in the nation.

But even more impressive is the rate of growth. The national economy is still struggling, growing at 1.5 percent. Here is Utah, we are growing well-above our historical, pre-recession rate at four percent. Since March 2012, we have added 48,700 jobs in our state.

When you combine the diversity of our economy, the growth rate and the types of jobs we are creating in and attracting to our state… it becomes clear that Utah is the economic envy of the nation.

Our pioneering spirit is forging a 21st century, knowledge based, economy built on innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship. And businesses are investing in this future.

The Utah Genius Awards provide an opportunity to acknowledge leaders in innovation, as well as the investment and success of those who have taken risks based on new ideas to power the transformation of the Utah economy.

As this is the fourth Utah Genius awards, it is important to understand the change that innovation has brought to the state’s economy.

Utah’s information sector is the third fastest in terms of growth at 6.4 percent and second fastest when it comes to job creation. And Utah’s economy has the seventh largest concentration of information sector jobs. Since 1990, the state has added 22,000 information sector jobs and 17,000 jobs in computer systems design and related services.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but the economy of the future is online. It is where we connect, it is where we share ideas and it is, increasingly, where we shop. Utah has the eighth fastest average Internet speed in the country. Basic broadband is available in 99.95 percent of Utah. We are connected and our connection is growing faster with Google Fiber coming to Provo.

Utah has also has a robust and growing Life Science industry, including medical devices and equipment, drugs and pharmaceuticals, research, testing, medical labs, and biomedical distribution—Utah has a higher level of industry concentration in these fields, and they are growing more rapidly here than anywhere else in the nation.

Utah’s life science industry contributes nearly $14 billion in economic output to the state and supports more than 63,000 jobs all paying well above the state’s median income.

Utah is number one, and has been for eight years running, when it comes to the effectiveness of policy makers and other stakeholders in parlaying regional assets into regional prosperity. The nation’s strongest economies are the most innovative.

That’s something we’ve known in Utah for a long time. It was the driving idea of the Utah Science Technology and Research initiative. Through innovation USTAR has attracted and developed world-class research talent. It commercializes technology. And it promotes innovative entrepreneurship.

USTAR’s success is well known, having created over 3,000 jobs and contributing hundreds of millions of dollars in economic impact to Utah’s economy. The research USTAR has developed can be soon seen in action on the University of Utah campus with the new WAVE electric bus or up in the skies with a new weather “STORM” satellite.

As a public-private partnership, the USTAR initiative has attracted nearly $300 million in private financing and it is the private sector that is driving the transformation of Utah’s economy.

Utah’s innovation economy is driven by pioneering companies like Micron, Adobe, Fusion-io and Merit Medical.

Our honoree today, Fred Lampropoulos, envisioned this decades ago when he founded Merit Medial here in Utah. Merit has been developing world-class products and talent here in the state of Utah since late 1980s.

We can learn a lot from Fred about what it takes to build a business and what it takes to build a community. When I first met Fred, he invited me to his office. I was surprised to find that we didn’t discuss medical devices much at all. Instead we talked about Utah and what he wants to see our state become. He cares about Utah. Fred isn’t in business solely to make money, he’s in business to strengthen our community and our state.

While Utah is doing a lot of great things, the state needs to make a concerted effort to invest in the future knowledge economy. I am encouraged by the recent work of our Legislature in their commitment to education. The governor, the Legislature and the business community through the Prosperity 2020 movement… are now focused on the same goals:

·     66 percent of all Utah adults with a college degree or skilled trade certificate

·     90 percent of all elementary students performing at grade level in reading and math

The business community also wants to make the Salt Lake area a Top Ten for tech jobs and businesses.

We must ensure Utah continues to be one of the most innovative economies—not just in the nation—but in the world.

We will do that by aligning, leveraging and strengthening the innovator’s access to early-stage capital. This must be a commitment by both the public and private sector to ensure that our state becomes a hotbed of innovation.

The innovators we honor today remind me of square watermelons.

If you haven’t heard the story before, that may sound like a rather odd sentence. But in Japan, grocery stores are much smaller than here in the United States. Though consumers wanted watermelon, the stores were hesitant to stock it because the oblong melons wasted a lot of precious space.

A group of Japanese farmers decided to see if they could do what everyone else assumed was impossible. They decided to ask, “why not?”

And before long, they “squared the circle” so to speak, and invented the square watermelon.

In the end, the secret was to put a watermelon in a square box as it grew and, being mostly water, like all liquids it took the shape of its container.

Their innovation solved a problem for the grocers and for the consumers who liked that watermelons now took up less space in their refrigerators—which are also a little smaller in Japan than they are here. The farmers and stores could even charge a higher price for these innovative melons.

Your efforts make bigger contributions than square watermelons. You are solving problems we may not even recognize that we have. You are creating new products, new businesses and, yes, even new industries that will drive our economy in the coming decades.

On behalf of the broader Utah business community… keep up the good work.