Mission & History

Connect: Juice is a platform for networking and since Juice 1.0 participants have developed new business partners, established long-term funding sources and discovered new employees.

Collaborate: The partnerships and collaboration of the Juice Conference will lead to the sharing of Best Demonstrated Practices. The exhibition of successful companies, and the proliferation of innovative ideas.

Create: Together and individually, the participants in Juice are working to further that our business instincts and creativity build a stronger end economy.

The Back Story:

Governor Baldacci commissioned the Blaine House Conference on Maine’s Creative Economy in May, 2004. Over 700 people participated in the event, which was held in the vacant Bates Mill in Lewiston. The Bates Mill conference was Maine’s first major public exposure to the concepts of the creative economy.

In the same year, Midcoast Magnet was born in Rockland, the realized vision of a group of entrepreneurs eating pizza and imagining a creative, vital and profitable future. Today, Midcoast Magnet is comprised of a working board, an advisory board, and over 500 self-selected subscribers from all walks of life. The core group includes graphic designers, architects, bankers, software programmers, dancers, musicians, and engineers.

As Midcoast Magnet has grown, so has the state’s focus on the creative economy. In 2005, Governor Baldacci created the Creative Economy Council, and the Department of Economic and Community Development published a Creative Economy Community Handbook. The creative economy is now a major focus of the State’s economic development strategy.

A significant event in 2006 was Grow Smart Maine’s publication of Charting Maine’s Future, a report from the Brookings Institution. The creative economy is represented strongly in the report, which contains specific recommendations to fund technological innovation, to foster networks of emerging business clusters, to revitalize Maine’s downtowns, and to enhance and protect Maine’s natural landscape.

Juice 1.0: Powering the Creative Economy, was created to pick up where the Governor’s Creative Economy Council and where Grow Smart Maine leaves off. Juice will represent Maine’s second creative economy conference.