By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com
The TechPoint Mira Awards gala is set for April 25 and eight companies based in Fishers have been nominated for awards this year. Named after a red giant star just under 300 light-years from Earth, the Mira Awards gala recognizes excellence and innovation in 18 different award categories.
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Due to the strong showing by Fishers businesses, The Reporter spoke to Mayor Scott Fadness about the local companies that were nominated and about how the once-sleepy little suburb known as Fishers has become such a force in the tech industry.
Fadness
“There’s a lot of intentionality behind our efforts to create a community where anyone from a single-person entrepreneur all the way through to a large corporation would want to potentially locate their business,” Mayor Fadness told The Reporter. “You know it started many, many years ago when we founded Launch Fishers and it really set upon creating a pretty dynamic place for entrepreneurs and businesses to locate. We’ve been growing that ever since, little by little, year by year, and so it’s really encouraging for me to see so many companies be considered for the Mira awards. There was a time where no one would have ever thought that these types of companies would exist in a suburban environment, and so it’s really, really exciting to see some of this organic entrepreneurial growth happen right here in suburbia.”
Due to his tenure as the first mayor of Fishers, Fadness has a personal connection to several of the businesses that grew out of the Launch Fishers coworking space. One such example is Recovery Force, which is up for awards in two categories this year.
“I think I met them – it was probably the first or second year we started Launch Fishers – they were one of our first tenants,” Fadness said. “I’ve seen Matt Wyatt and his crew continue to plot their course accordingly, and really have grown their company steadily and in a very difficult space.”
That space Fadness refers to is the medical device technology industry, which is a highly competitive market.
“It’s really fun to watch them grow,” Fadness said. “They left Launch Fishers ultimately and took some office space of their own and they’re continuing to grow and develop their company. So that’s one I got to see literally from one guy with an idea through to where they are today. Those are always fun ones to remember and reminisce about what they were when they first got started.”
Launch Fishers and the Internet of Things (IoT) lab have faced many of the same challenges as the rest of the country during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were really doing quite well leading up to COVID, and then when COVID hit a lot of people went home,” Fadness said. “So we had to stay the course and rebuild, and I think we’re back up to the numbers that we had prior to COVID, so that’s encouraging. And then there’s just kind of a general malaise, if you will, over the tech industry today in central Indiana. It’s not what it was 10 or 15 years ago. It’s a little bit different. It’s evolved, so we have to continue to adapt and evolve our programming in our facilities and our recruitment of companies based on that changing landscape.”
Even with those challenges, Fishers continues to attract technology companies to call the city home.
“I’m proud of the fact that we’ve sustained for as long as we have,” Fadness said. “We’re past 10 years now in operation and we still have strong numbers. We still have good companies that call Launch Fishers and the IoT lab home, and it’s still a key component of the DNA of Fishers’ local economy.”
Fadness told The Reporter he believes he has a unique perspective on the sweeping changes and the massive growth Fishers has seen in recent decades.
“I probably have an odd perspective in that when I talk to a lot of people they remark at the pace of change, but it’s been my obsession for 15 years every single day trying to see that occur,” Fadness said. “So when people are like, ‘I cannot believe how much Fishers has changed so quickly.’ For me that’s a decade’s worth of my blood, sweat, and tears and my team’s. I think we have maybe a slightly different perspective, like it’s never fast enough, but occasionally you do take a moment and you take stock and you realize how far we’ve come.”
Fadness said he is keenly aware that Fishers would not have grown to be the tech-innovation leader it is without the work of all the people behind the scenes. He told The Reporter he feels lucky to have found people who like challenges and for whom “the run” is more important than the finish line. He said his job as largely about pointing the right people in the right direction and giving them the resources to get the job done.
At the same time, Fadness is well aware of the impact the pace of change in Fishers has had on many residents who have been living there since before the growth began.
“In the early days of this transformation it was much more pronounced – the people not liking the change – because it was new, and when things are new, there’s always apprehension and concern about what that will mean to them and the effect it will have on the community that they’ve grown to love,” Fadness said. “I don’t get as much of that anymore as I once did, and I would like to believe – I hope – that part of that is because people have become acclimated and they still very much enjoy the city they live in. Maybe they even enjoy going to the new restaurants or walking in the downtown and have found that, although it’s different from what they remember, in some regards it might be better or just something new.”
Fishers has changed from a small and mostly rural town outside the state capital into a city in-and-of itself – and it has done so in a very short time. The number of residents who lived in Fishers before the growth began are now a minority, many of whom struggle to come to terms with being city-dwellers. They speak to one another, to this newspaper, and to city officials of how they preferred the old Fishers to the new.
The Reporter asked Fadness how he addresses these concerns from long-time residents.
“My response back is often the same in that you and I actually want the same things,” Fadness said. “We want a safe community. We want a vibrant community. We want a community that we can all be proud of. The difference is that I don’t believe the right strategy for the city was to do nothing and hope that it just remained the way it was in the 1980s and 1990s. The world is very much changing around us, and as much as many of us would love nothing more than to freeze it in a particular time, that’s not realistic. So we have to plot our course accordingly. Hopefully we’re making the right decisions that can still result in the same values we all want – which is a safe place to live, which is a vibrant place to live, which is a city you can be proud of. That’s my typical response to them. History will judge and time will tell whether we were right in picking this particular course for our city moving forward.”