🔒Spurring innovation | Maine’s entrepreneur community welcomes a $3 million boost from the Blackstone Charitable Foundation

What is the Caribou connection among U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, pioneer businessman Peter Vigue and the top executive of the biggest private equity management firm in the world?

Collins’ family still operates a sawmill there, not far from where Vigue was born, and Stephen Schwarzman, CEO and co-founder of The Blackstone Group, spent his youth at Camp Caribou, a traditional summer boys camp on Lake Pattee that happens to be in Winslow.

“I loved it there,” says Schwarzman, whose New York-based company oversees a portfolio with assets of $150 billion under management. “I’m a great fan of Maine.”

The three shared a dais recently (along with many other dignitaries) to announce a $3 million gift from the Blackstone Charitable Foundation to enhance entrepreneurship and innovation in Maine. The award, which will be managed by the Maine Technology Institute, will be used to create regional hubs of entrepreneurship with the expectation that businesses within those hubs will grow profits and jobs.

Schwarzman says in the wake of Lehman Bros. bankruptcy, the ensuing economic turmoil and historic spike in unemployment, it became clear the foundation could do the most good by helping create jobs. “Our foundation was recently formed and like a lot of foundations, we were working in a variety of areas, such as health care, education and the arts,” he says. “But ... we asked, ‘Where can we make the maximum impact? We dropped the other interests and decided it was most important to help create jobs.”

The $3 million will be disbursed over three years to expand and support existing Maine entrepreneur programs such as the University of Maine’s Innovation Engineering/Jump Start, which offers intense coaching services to existing companies that need help growing. Another beneficiary is the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development’s Top Gun program, an extensive seven-month mentoring curriculum for early-stage startups.

The Blackstone money has already broadened Top Gun’s reach, expanding the program to 20 participants, up from 12 in 2010, including entrepreneurs from Bangor. The program had previously been focused on southern Maine.

Maine is the first rural state to be awarded the money in the Blackstone Foundation’s $50 million Accelerated Growth program (other recipients of the Accelerated Growth awards were Los Angeles and North Carolina’s Research Triangle.) Amy Stursberg, the foundations’ executive director, says she hopes the program here will provide a model for other rural states challenged by geography and a lack of centralized, strategic services to nurture entrepreneurship. Maine came to Stursberg’s attention thanks to another well-placed advocate for the state, Karen Mills, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s top executive and resident of Brunswick. “What I found in Maine were interesting, cutting-edge companies but with fractured access to services,” says Stursberg. “I knew it was a place where we could make a difference.”

The program has lofty goals; it expects to create 10,000 jobs in 10 years, assist 250 entrepreneurial companies and generate $664 million in revenue. The first priority will be hiring an executive director, then building benchmarks to measure the impact of the award, says Stursberg. She expects the foundation will also tap the expertise of Blackstone Group executives to support the entrepreneurs participating in the program.

Schwarzman says such an alliance is only natural for Blackstone, which employs 500,000 Americans and another 500,000 people across the globe. Its specialty, he says, is creating jobs. “We’re used to growing companies, and the faster we can grow a company, the more it produces, it expands, there’s more money, the investors make more money,” says Schwarzman. “You do that with hiring new people.”

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