The economy rewards creative people. Economically successful people have a disproportionate say in the course of our communities and environment. For the last few thousand years, cities have been at the nexus of creativity, because creativity requires human interaction. All of this is of critical practical importance if you are isolated – geographically or socially. Montana, for example, has seen its relative per capita income fall to the bottom of the state rankings over the last generation. The good news is that changes in technology have opened the door to unprecedented connectivity, which translates into opportunity. The bad news is that in order to change the opportunity landscape, those of us on the economic frontier need to become better entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, that sort of knowledge isn’t transmitted nearly as easily as mere information.

The truth is, our technological and transportation networks have outpaced our key social networks. In my experience, nearly all of the entrepreneurial talents in the hundreds of Bozemans of this world are immigrants and repatriates. For a time, they can survive on the social capital that they import with them. But without the chance to reciprocate, those bridges decay. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi wrote, “Networks are only the skeleton…the highways for the various processes that make our world hum. To describe society we must dress the links of the social network with actual dynamical interactions between people.” We need to understand, and act upon, the ways real entrepreneurs interact in the context of the economic frontier, if we are to avoid squandering an historic opportunity.

Pioneer Entrepreneurs is a for-profit, membership-based network that helps entrepreneurs be more successful by connecting them more quickly, cheaply, and effectively with peers and other qualified sources of relevant ideas and resources. Validated connections with capital (I introduced a couple of our members to Village Ventures and Hunt Ventures a few days ago), expertise (an online and teleconference-based program led by a former SVP of Ogilvy PR), and ideas are common outcomes. Equally important is learning through the experience of others about what kinds of businesses thrive outside the urban mainstream.

We use familiar tools (online discussions, Web meetings, teleconferences, face-to-face peer forums, seminars) in some innovative ways. What’s different about us? Well, Mark Granovetter at Stanford University, one of the foremost experts on social networks, recently wrote, “Your project looks very interesting to me. Most networks we know about grew out of physical proximity or snowballing of various kinds. Whether they can be productively created and managed in the absence of a more "natural" origin is a very important question.”

A damned good question for those of us who are betting our livelihoods on it.

To date, we have approximately 60 members from 15 different states and four countries. The problem we’re out to address – profitably – isn’t unique to Bozeman or to Montana. As technological networks push intelligence to the edge (see Paul Krugman, Mohan Sawhney, and Ray Ozzie), the economic frontier is going to be expanding. There are easier ways to make a living, but this one gets me up in the morning.

A lot of this stuff has emerged from a piece I wrote for Inc. magazine last August, which served to help me organize thoughts that had been rattling around my head since I forsook the venture capital path and returned to the Bozone six years ago.