Entrepreneurs looking to cultivate innovative commercial enterprises that reach out to young consumers would do well to consider seriously the merits of Salt Lake City as a proving ground.

As in 2005, Fast Company magazine once again this year named the Utah capital as one of the world’s 30 fast cities, citing its young urban citizenry as the essential catalyst for innovation.

For long-term business growth, the millennial consumer represents perhaps the most significant opportunities. Those who reached the age of 18 in 2000 and beyond are beginning to influence large-scale transformational change in the way businesses will need to position themselves and communicate their messages. This cuts across every imaginable industry.

The numbers certainly favor Salt Lake City. With a median age of just 30, the city’s population includes 39.8 percent of people under the age of 24, compared to just 11 percent for those 65 and older.

Along with the favorable age demographics has been the sustained gentrification of downtown areas. Since the middle 1990s, residential units have increased by more than three-fourths and the trend is expected to continue well into the next decade. A quick glance on several east-west streets in downtown will readily confirm that fact and the planned residential units in the new City Creek Center should expand that population base yet further along with residential projects near Trolley Square and Gateway as well as in the Marmalade District on the city’s northwest end.

And, for the incoming Ralph Becker administration, the money quote from Fast Company’s summary article serves an important theme-building message:

What makes a Fast City? It starts with opportunity. Not just bald economic capacity, but a culture that nurtures creative action and game-changing enterprise. Fast Cities are places where entrepreneurs and employees alike can maximize their potential–where the number of patents filed is high, for instance, or where the high-tech sector is expanding.

The second component: innovation. Fast Cities invest in physical, cultural, and intellectual infrastructure that will sustain growth. “The real forces for change in America and around the world are the mayors and the local communities,” says [Richard] Florida, now a professor of public policy at George Mason University.

Finally, Fast Cities have energy, that ethereal thing that happens when creative people collect in one place. The indicators can seem obscure: number of ethnic restaurants, or the ratio of live-music lovers to cable-TV subscribers. But they point to environments where fresh thinking stimulates action and, by the way, attracts new talent in a virtuous cycle of creativity.

Salt Lake City fits this bill perfectly. Now, if we only answer our challenges with effective downtown development, we will fulfill these optimistic expectations.