"Good ideas go where they are welcome." Based on this deceptively simple concept, Rick Ellenberger, president and chief executive of telecommunications concern Broadwing Inc. (www.broadwing.com), decided to try to welcome good ideas to the city of Cincinnati, where his company’s headquarters are located.

In 1999, he laid a loop of fiber-optic cable around the city, making sure that, among American cities, Cincinnati has the highest percentage of residents with access to such a high-speed data line, and about 40,000 of the city’s estimated population of 360,000 take advantage of it. Then, as a means of boosting network traffic and revenue, Ellenberger invited a host of other companies to come see what they could do with all that speed.

With Broadwing’s efforts as a starting point, a confluence of people and events has turned Cincinnati into a sort of corporate lab, writ large. Rather than rely on small tests or on focus groups, companies can use all of Cincinnati to try out services that might be delivered to homes and businesses over broadband, or high-speed, lines. Once companies figure out what works, and what doesn’t, they can decide which services they will roll out nationally as broadband becomes more widely available.

In the process, Cincinnati is becoming to broadband services what New Haven, Conn., is to plays that hope to make it to Broadway.

Larry Keeley, for one, is applauding. Keeley, the president of Doblin Group (www.doblin.com), an innovation-strategy firm that specializes in "observational research" of customer behavior, says what is going on in Cincinnati is exactly the sort of real-life testing that companies need to do for new ideas. He says this sort of city-as-lab is even more important for testing the implications of something like broadband, because the track record of predictions about new media is "plumb pitiful."

"Alexander Graham Bell believed the principal use of the telephone would be for remote listening of symphony concerts," Keeley says. "Thomas Edison confidently asserted that radio would fail. Daryl Zanuck, head of [moviemaker] 20th Century Fox in 1946, predicted television would be a craze that would die out in six months. Sony Corp. (www.sony.com) spent a fortune buying movie-production firms, then ‘accidentally’ developed the PlayStation game platform amid internal opposition. PlayStation has contributed as much as 40% of Sony’s global profit in recent years."

Though many of the experiments in Cincinnati are in the early stages, Keeley says having a whole city to test in means "you learn what people want from what they actually do—not what they say, not what the planners imagine, and not what the technologists assume."

So, what exactly happens when you turn a city into a grand experiment where you can zip the entire contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica around in 1/320th of a second?

Not what you might expect—or, at least, not what many companies say they expected.

Intertainer Inc. (www.intertainer.com), backed by many heavyweights in the movie business, came to Cincinnati to test what was to be the nation’s first service that provides video-on-demand for display on personal computers. What Intertainer found is that many users preferred to subscribe to a service that would give them a series of offerings, rather than pay to watch each show they select. Intertainer also learned that many people wanted to watch programs on their televisions, not their PCs. Intertainer is now giving viewers the choice of subscription or pay-per-view services. The company also has begun testing with customers the viability of using set-top boxes from uniView Technologies Corp. (www.uniview.com) that would show the video on TVs.

Intertainer President and CEO Jonathan Taplin says he learned just how much video quality means to consumers and uncovered a technical glitch. "For a few users, the codec [which deciphers the transmission at the viewer’s PC or TV] had a way of starving for bandwidth and doing what we call a slide show." In layman’s terms, that meant the picture jumped and jittered, almost to the point of becoming a series of still pictures, even though the network had more than enough bandwidth. The problem, which was traced to some Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) software and fixed, wasn’t supposed to occur, but there it was. "It was a case of where the real world hits the theoretical," Taplin says.

He says he also has learned that customers found Intertainer’s sign-up process a little onerous and that the service initially "was not as easy to use as customers wanted. So we made changes."

Of Course LMS (www.ofcoursecorp.com), a Web-based learning system for businesses, had users quickly tell it to skip the rococo graphics that high bandwidth is capable of delivering and that the company used to jazz up its look. Steve Osborne, the company’s president, said he learned "there’s a huge difference between consumer products and a business-to-business solution" such as his attempt to let businesses teach employees while eliminating the cost of books, CD-ROMs, classrooms, and plane fares. A business-to-business service "doesn’t have to be snazzy. It has to be clear, crisp, and, above all, just needs to work. The simpler it is, the better."

In a tiny test, a unit of Broadwing installed cameras in the locker room of the Cincinnati Bengals of the National Football League and displayed the video on a Web site. Although Broadwing had no idea how the concept would be received, the company found that, during the football season, people watched endlessly.

Gordon Bell, the developer of the Vax minicomputer, which fundamentally changed the computer industry in the 1970s and 1980s, says "one demo is worth a thousand business plans"—and companies in Cincinnati are able to go well beyond the demo stage, to see how real customers react to real products. Now, there have been test markets almost since there were products. Marketers have long talked about whether a mass-market product will "play in Peoria" or, if hoping to sell an upscale product, would say, "Let’s put it on the train and see if it gets off in Westport." What Cincinnati offers is a ready-made test market for an array of products with explosive potential. And, because the city is a magnet for so many would-be pioneers, companies can play off each other, creating an alternative world that the rest of the nation might not see for a few years. As William Gibson says, "The future has already arrived. It just isn’t evenly distributed yet."

In Cincinnati, two distinct hotbeds of discovery have developed. One is Broadwing’s Z-Start incubator division, housed in a 1930 art-deco building that has been designated a National Historic Landmark. Z-Start, which has conducted trials for Intertainer and 30 other businesses, is part of Broadwing’s ZoomTown.com business unit, which provides residential Digital Subscriber Line service to 40,000 subscribers.

The other encompasses a rundown area recently renamed the Digital Rhine. The area gets its name because, in the 19th century, Cincinnati’s Main Street area was dubbed Over-the-Rhine by the German immigrants who worked in the breweries and slaughterhouses near the Miami-Erie canal. Today, Main Street Ventures (www.digitalrhine.com), a nonprofit civic-betterment organization, donates office space to some 20 start-up companies in the area. With the space comes access to fiber-optic and wireless broadband connections provided by some of the biggest names in the technology world. About 750 entrepreneurs have taken advantage of the amenities and are toiling away furiously on all manner of projects in the Digital Rhine’s 150-year-old buildings.

Main Street entrepreneur Jay Waffington figures he benefits from the tight-knit community of innovators and technologists. Waffington, whose small enterprise is called Adternity Inc. (www.adternity.com), is hard at work developing a new Internet advertising model, based on the growing addiction to online games. He hopes to use sizzling, game-style video and audio to attract players to ads that would have them answer five questions about a sponsor. Each answer leads a player down a different path of questions, telling paying sponsors exactly just how much consumers know about their brands and positioning. Waffington says he benefits because "a game-development company called No.2 Games Inc. (www.no2games.com) is right across the hall. That’s pretty convenient for us."

All the freebies make doing business incredibly cheap, says Walter Solomon, president of Main Street Ventures and head of a start-up company called ConnectMail (www.connectmail.com), which is adding video and voice capabilities to existing e-mail systems. He says ConnectMail consumes less than $25,000 a month in cash. He adds, "A venture-capitalist friend told me, ‘You don’t have a burn rate [of spending cash for expenses], you have a smolder rate.’" Companies also say they can get a quick start because they can build on what already has been learned. Broadwing’s ZoomTown provides "jump start" services to bring new businesses up to speed, and Scott Smith, president of TF Logic Inc. (www.thinkingfolders.com), says those services put him 90 days ahead of where he would have been without them. His company builds a wireless manager of workflow, which originally was aimed at small- to medium-size businesses but has been adopted by consumer-products concern Procter & Gamble Co. (www.pg.com), and auto makers General Motors Corp. (www.gm.com), Toyota Motor Corp. (www.toyota.com), and Ford Motor Co. (www.ford.com).

Companies benefit, too, because residents are conditioned to being guinea pigs. When Intertainer wanted to begin a one-month trial of its product’s technical capabilities, "we had 500 people sign up in 20 minutes," says Rob Pickering, chief technology executive at Broadwing’s ZoomTown.

With so much to draw them, digital entrepreneurs arrive at Z-Start’s offices in such a steady stream that it feels "like Christians going to Lourdes to have themselves dipped," ZoomTown President Mike O’Brien jokes.

The broadband pioneers in ZoomTown have adopted a saying from Albert Szent-Gyorgi, the 1937 Nobel Laureate in medicine and the first to isolate Vitamin C (which he found in—of all places—Hungarian paprika). In large writing on a wall, the saying reads: "Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought."

What these pioneers really hope, though, is that their experiences in Cincinnati will let them see what no one else has seen, let alone understood.

Gilbert is Context’s senior editor and biggest self-described technophobe. He types with two fingers and asks his 18-year-old daughter to program his cellphone. But he swears he’s fascinated by innovation’s constantly changing face.

MARK TWAIN WOULDN’T KNOW THE PLACE

When outsiders think of Cincinnati, they may remember the acid gibe often attributed to Mark Twain that he wanted to be there when the end of the world came, "because everything happens there 10 years later."

Not anymore.

Local businessmen say the city has rejuvenated itself using a three-part recipe:

The first part, of course, is the city’s fiber-optic backbone, which continues to grow. Recently, consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble Co. and fiber-optic network provider Cinergy Communications (www.cinergy-ctn.com) agreed to build a high-speed optical network that will circle 60 miles around metropolitan Cincinnati and connect P&G’s seven major locations.

P&G will use only a portion of the network’s total capacity. The remainder will be available for use by other Cinergy customers, while some will be donated to local schools. University of Cincinnati (www.uc.edu) Associate Vice Chancellor Fred Siff is wiring that campus for all it is worth.

Oddly enough, the original high-speed backbone drew on a major failure: The lines were installed in abandoned subway tunnels built during the Depression but never used.

The second part is the work of Main Street Ventures, says William Burleigh, the recently retired chairman of media giant E.W. Scripps Co. (www.scripps.com). Main Street sponsors Tuesday-night technology presentations that have become de rigueur "for all the techies and wannabe-techies" in the city, Burleigh says. Main Street, a nonprofit group that fosters technological development, also provides an array of services designed to "get people out of their garages, bedrooms, and basements to build a community, a clustering of intellectual capital," says George Molinsky, who founded Main Street in 1999.

He adds that entrepreneurs started to locate near each other, in an area known as Over-the-Rhine, for a number of reasons, including "really interesting work spaces" amid Greek Revival and Italianate architecture that dates from the 1840s to 1880s. (Again, the availability of these buildings stemmed from failure. The area surrounding them had for years been blighted, known principally for a high crime rate.)

The third part is the impressive business talent that has traditionally been attracted to Cincinnati’s base of large companies, such as P&G; Federated Department Stores Inc. (www.federated-fds.com), which operates retail outlets in 33 states; and Scripps.

The profile of a typical Cincinnati entrepreneur is a "solid 30- or 40-something," Molinsky says. Among them are many P&G brand managers, about a quarter of whom have left since the ’90s to pursue start-up opportunities, according to Burleigh. They are well-suited for their new jobs, says Jay Waffington, a former P&G brand manager who now heads an advertising start-up, Adternity. "As a brand manager, your role is like being a mini-CEO. You’ve got to deal with everything: marketing, development, production, financing, you name it," Waffington says.

Such business savvy means that Cincinnati’s innovators don’t easily lose focus, says Walter Solomon, another P&G alum who is president of both Main Street Ventures and his own ConnectMail start-up venture. He adds another explanation for why locals avoid getting caught up in the sort of rush that led to the dot-com crash, an explanation that harks back to Twain. Solomon says: "Cincinnati is not the trendiest place in the world."