Beth Johnson wants more money to market the city of Lawrence as a place to do business.

Lavern Squier sees the former Farmland Industries fertilizer plant as a possible site for a future life sciences campus.

And Mike Maddox suggests starting a venture capital fund, financed by the city of Lawrence and aggressive enough to invest as much as $1 million a year in promising bioscience technologies, products or services.

The common theme during Monday afternoon’s meeting of the Lawrence-Douglas County Economic Development Advisory Board: Lawrence needs to get serious about competing in the world of high-tech businesses or risk falling behind.

“How fun would it be for our meetings to go from (talking about) building sewers and getting land to deciding we’re going to invest $1 million into this bioscience startup company?” said Maddox, the board’s chairman, during the group’s meeting at the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce offices, 734 Vt.

While such investments might pay off only one in three times, or one in seven or even one in 10, Maddox said, the return from just one successful startup – think Dell Computer in Austin, Texas – could pay dividends for years and years to come.

“If we just do what every other community is doing, we’ll never distinguish ourselves,” Maddox said.

The Lawrence Chamber of Commerce invested in Kansas' two-story-tall display at BIO 2006 in Chicago, where a delegation of 15 government leaders and economic-development representatives from Lawrence sought to make contacts, seek opportunities and learn about the competition for bioscience investments. Monday afternoon, members of the Lawrence-Douglas County Economic Development Advisory Board met to discuss the trade show and what the Lawrence community should do in the future to compete in the market for jobs, companies and their technologies.

Monday’s meeting gave board members – including Johnson, the chamber’s vice president for economic development; and Squier, the chamber’s president and CEO – a chance to engage in a discussion about the community’s approach to doing business.

David Corliss, Lawrence’s interim city manager, encouraged board members to think creatively. The community no longer should be limited to simply offering desirable companies tax breaks to locate in town; other enticements should be part of the mix.

Corliss said the importance of such thinking was clear during a recent trip to Chicago, when he joined a delegation of 15 Lawrence leaders to attend the BIO 2006 trade show. The convention floor had 18,000 people milling around 1,800 booths from states, communities, businesses and others angling for their own shares of the burgeoning bioscience business.

An example: West Lafayette, Ind., has a 200-acre campus set up for bioscience businesses and their spinoffs, in cooperation with Purdue University.

Lawrence already worked hard to attract Serologicals Corp. to build a new manufacturing plant in town, but just because that project never reached its full potential – the $33 million investment never ramped up to full production and today sits idle in the East Hills Business Park, awaiting a buyer – doesn’t mean the effort was wasted.

A consensus emerged among board members to pursue an “aggressive” approach to economic development, to create high-paying jobs, expand the community’s tax base and provide for long-term success.

No matter how difficult it gets.

“You have to be willing to take risks,” Corliss said. “We’re going to have to be entrepreneurial. You have to recognize that there are some risks. There are going to be some false starts.”