NACET Names New President

NACET, the Northern Arizona Center for Emerging Technologies, has named a new president. Russ Yelton is moving to Flagstaff from Asheville, N.C. where he’s the executive director of a business incubator.
NACET is a technology incubator. The public-private partnership supports new companies with reduced rents, workshops and administrative services. NACET’s roots go back to 2001 when a group was formed out of the Greater Flagstaff Economic Council. NACET opened a 10,000-square-foot building last year with offices and state-of-the-art lab spaces.

Lavelle McCoy, Chairman of NACET’s Board of Directors, says the incoming president has an impressive list of accomplishments. McCoy says Yelton has been running a successful 141,000-square-foot incubator operation that McCoy describes as significantly larger than Flagstaff’s facility on Switzer Mesa.
Yelton is replacing Tom Rainey who came to the Northern Arizona Center for Emerging Technologies
nearly two years ago. McCoy says the incubator was lucky to have Rainey. “He did a spectacular
job of getting the incubator off the ground,” said McCoy.

Yelton says he looks forward to taking the incubator to the next level. “It’s exciting for me to see you have a new building there and the opportunity to build a new program,” he said. “I enjoy building
things from the ground up.”

The collaborations between NACET, the City of Flagstaff and Northern Arizona University impressed
Yelton who is looking forward to the possibility of working with the Navajo Nation.
He said he has been following the economy in Flagstaff and says it is times like these when an incubator like NACET can mean the most to a community.

Yelton was one of three finalists selected from dozens of applicants for the NACET position. He begins his new job July 27th.