Meaningful Internships - New Business Creation and Innovation

As I meet with and correspond with students at college campuses throughout northeast Ohio, I am impressed with the talent and energy that exists in our own backyard. I am struck by the sacrifices that many international students - from India, China, Pakistan, Mexico, Vietnam, etc. -- have made to come to Ohio to take advantage of the world-class opportunities that we have here. For U.S. business to succeed we need to be able to tap the best and brightest (both resident and non-resident) students -- which means increasing the number of work visas to our international students as well as creating more real-world academic and work experiences which tie our industries together with our students through internships, mentoring, and ongoing education for existing business managers.

EDGE's CEOs for NEO Program (which is "Creating Entrepreneurial Organizations for NE Ohio") takes new business ideas from NE Ohio business leaders, recruits the most driven students from area schools to conduct research on these ideas, identifies business mentors to to work with students and their host companies, and creates a synergy with all the groups involved to create new ventures for NE Ohio. In just two years of the program, NE Ohio's business community is already reaping the benefits. For instance, in 2008 one new business venture generated $500K in new business revenue and several new ventures look to create new revenue in the first half of this year.

In 2009 EDGE is creating a complementary program -- the Innovation Class and Internship Program -- which will utilize innovation practitioners to train students (and business professionals) how to manage innovation and place students with companies that are implementing an innovation. As a result, EDGE hopes to create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the region, develop a pool of well-trained professionals that can help reviatlize our regional economy, and be competitive on a national and international level for talent and new business creation.

If programs like ours interest you -- i.e. you have ideas to share, you want to participate, you want to learn more, etc. -- please contact me (chris@edgef.org). You can also check out our web page at: http://www.edgef.org/CEOsforNEOProgram.html. Join us in our efforts to improve our business climate here in NE Ohio.

Economic Development = Value Creation + Exporting

It's easy to say that quality of life in a place can be improved by simply "adding value" to existing resources, like improving infrastructure, cleaning the environment, improving the schools, etc. However, all of these things cost money. And where does that money come from? Generally, the public sector - which represents taxes on income, sales, inventories, etc. So, while we can voluntarily clean up our own mess and donate our time to things we care about, we rely heavily on taxes to improve our place.

We also know that for our economic system to work, there must be "flow" of capital: people buy from and sell to each other, and in an allegedly break-even economy we would all be getting along just fine, doing the equivalent of each other's laundry. The problem is, just about every time there is a financial transaction, a tax erodes some of those dollars...and those dollars flow out of our regional economy to "somewhere else." Thus, a zero-sum game is actually less-than-zero-sum: our economy shrinks if we only serve ourselves. It follows, then, that the only we can bring new (much needed) dollars into our region is to export our services outside the region.

The Entrepreneurs EDGE focuses exclusively on companies that are exporting at least some of their goods or services outside the region, thereby bringing new dollars in. We do this by helping those companies manage the way they add value to their existing resources, mainly through innovation and entrepreneurial (risk-taking) behaviors. This requires that we encourage people to risk wealth rather than preserve wealth, and often this is what distinguishes the companies we work with from what we call lifestyle companies, which seem to exist solely to line the pockets of the owners.