Innovation
It’s the network
How Scot Rourke's outside-the-box thinking helped OneCommunity bring broadband to new places
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Akron/Canton | September 2008
Scot Rourke saw a problem with the
way people in Northeast Ohio
were looking at telecommunications after the dot-com bubble burst.
“You’ve got a lot of people fighting for
bigger pieces of a shrinking pie, and our
model was to work together to build a
bigger pie,” Rourke says. “Then everybody wins.”
As the president and CEO of
OneCommunity, Rourke has led the successful effort to develop an ultra-broadband community network serving first
the city of Cleveland and then the entire
Northeast Ohio region.
It began with a plan to leverage some
dormant assets. Fiber optic infrastructure
was already in place under the streets of
many areas of Northeast Ohio. Telecom
companies placed it there during the
Internet boom, and although it was perceived as the next generation of communication, it was lying there unused.
After the innovative idea came an innovative approach. To make its vision a reality,
OneCommunity would partner with phone,
cable and utility companies to leverage
their assets. Rourke says many
companies have tried to create a
municipal broadband network
and failed because they have
tried to set up their business in
competition with established
phone or cable providers.
As an experienced executive,
capital raiser and investor,
Rourke was able to make the
case to carriers and technology providers
that OneCommunity would build demand
for bandwidth and related services by
helping the public and nonprofit sectors
identify and realize the benefits of
advanced IT and telecom services. As a
result, OneCommunity has attracted a
wealth of resources, including the donated fiber, equipment to power this next-generation infrastructure and tens of millions of dollars, including in-kind donations from leading global technology businesses interested in taking part.
For instance, FirstEnergy donated
$3 million of fiber to help
OneCommunity expand from
Cuyahoga County to Summit,
Mahoning and other counties.
“They saw it as an economic
development opportunity,” Rourke
says. “They want to prompt economic development in the communities that they serve.”
Since its beginning, the
OneCommunity network has expanded and
will soon connect more than 1,500 schools,
libraries, governments, hospitals and universities to each other and the Internet.
“We’ve been MacGyvering our way
through this like any innovative entrepreneurial endeavor,” Rourke says.
“We’ve had to earn our way.”
HOW TO REACH: OneCommunity, (216) 923-2200 or
www.onecommunity.org
