Huntington hosts Create WV Conference

The conference will kick off Sunday night with check in and a Mountain Stage concert featuring West Virginia native Kathy Mattea.

Organizers believe the conference at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena will attract its largest crowd yet. Create West Virginia director Jeff James says the focus of the conference is two-fold.

“One is that it’s focused on building new economy industry in the state, particularly of industries that make their money off of intellectual properties and innovation,” James said. “The other aspect is community level: it’s not some sort of top down thing.”

Organizers chose Huntington because of its Create Huntington group.

James says the success of the conference will be gauged by how many more areas create groups such as Create Huntington and a similar project in Mercer County.

“The real measurement for us is not how many people come to the big conference, it’s how many people take what they find and go back to their own communities and start their own teams and their own initiatives around that,” James said.

David Wiley is one of the four keynote speakers at the conference. Wiley is an associate professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University.

He was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative people in business for developing Flat World Knowledge, a Web site that offers alternatives to expensive college textbooks.

He plans on speaking about how education and technology tie together. He says the two are integral in building a creative economy – especially in a state like West Virginia.

“[The creative economy is] not dependent on the natural resources available there in the state in terms of coal, or some kind of mineral you can mine,” Wiley said.

“The creative economy is fueled by people. As long as there are people around, West Virginia is on equal footing in it’s opportunity to participate in that kind of economy as anyone else because there are people there with as much potential to be creative as there is anywhere else.”

Wiley is originally from Barboursville and graduated from Marshall University. He says it feels great to be able to come back to West Virginia for the first time in a few years.

“The feeling is really incredible,” he said. “Ever since I’ve been gone, I’ve always had this feeling in the back of my mind on how I could reconnect and what could I do, how could I be involved in what’s happening there.”

To register for the conference visit createwv.com.