Dancing with the startups: HQ Raleigh co-founder spreads his entrepreneurial strategy around the Tar Heel state.

• Author: Ingram, Billy
• Position: PROFILE

When Christopher Gergen moved to Durham with his wife and two children to teach at Duke University six years ago, he set about creating a financially sustainable "entrepreneurial ecosystem" to fuel small businesses and nonprofits. By channeling the energy of foundations, philanthropic corporations, public schools, universities and the Greensboro campus of the Center for Creative Leadership --where he's innovator in residence --Gergen says he was able to "connect high-impact leaders with the resources and relationships they'd need to create sustainable social and economic impact. That was the origin of Bull City Forward, an organization we co-founded a little over five years ago. What we're trying to do is help young people create deeply intentional, purposeful, happy lives for themselves that can have also a transformative impact in the world around them." Charlotte, Moore County and Raleigh have also adopted that economic narrative, with Gergen's involvement. Each hub offers workspace, events to unite entrepreneurs with community leaders and a months-long mentoring process for select participants that culminates with a pitch to potential investors. Gergen's energy is contagious, says Moore Forward Executive Director Marybeth Sandell. "He's extremely driven and not just for himself. He seems to be in it for the greater good of the community, and that's a rare asset."

The path to becoming a veritable Johnny Appleseed for business and social change was a circuitous one. The son of David Gergen--a Durham native who was an adviser to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton--Christopher earned his bachelor's degree from Duke, a master's in public policy from George Washington University and an MBA from Georgetown University. In the early 1990s, he traveled to Santiago, Chile, to open a coffeehouse and bar dedicated to promoting the arts. Since then, he launched literacy programs in South Africa, taught on a sheep farm in New Zealand, started an AmeriCorps initiative matching 400 commerce-savvy volunteers with more than 90 nonprofits and held management jobs at both for-profit and nonprofit education companies.

In 1999, he co-founded Boston-based Smarthinking Inc., which provides online tutoring for more than 1,000 colleges and universities. It was acquired by London-based Pearson PLC, the world's largest education publisher, in 2011. To Gergen, it's a foregone conclusion where future leaders will come from. "I think the millennial...