Big Improvement: RI Jumps Forward in National Entrepreneurship Ranking
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
If the Rhode Island economy is to get back on its feet, many believe that the state’s entrepreneurs must begin to play a larger role. And in a dark economic season, the recent news that Rhode Island had improved from a ranking of 48th to one of 23rd in the State Entrepreneurship Rankings—measured between 2008 and 2010—was a welcome surprise.
The 2010 State Entrepreneurship Index—created by economists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln—evaluates a state's percentage growth and per capita growth in business establishments. The rankings represent a combination of statistics gathered at the state level regarding growth in employer establishments, business formation, patents issued, and gross receipts. Only Oregon, Delaware, and Kentucky saw larger gains over the same two year period.
Much of this success owes to the fact that over the last several years, a number of organizations, laboratories and networks throughout the state have begun to make serious progress toward making Rhode Island more entrepreneur-friendly.
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Certainly among the most successful is the Business Innovation Factory (BIF), begun in 2004, which bills itself as a laboratory where “organizations can design, prototype, and test new models for delivering value.” Their mission statement goes on to state that “BIF’s mission is to enable business model and system level innovation in areas of high social impact, including health care, education, energy, and entrepreneurship.” BIF aims to provide hands-on services for innovators, and to help them organize and share ideas at the community level. They offer a number of “experience labs,” which offer people from a wide range of backgrounds the opportunity to discuss and test their new ideas.
BIF’s founder, Saul Kaplan, is a major proponent of building stronger entrepreneurship networks throughout the state. “[Entrepreneurs] need other entrepreneurs to bounce ideas off of,” he says. You see that in Rhode Island. You see a network that is forming.”
While for many the idea of an entrepreneur brings to mind high-tech billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, Kaplan believes that in order to foster innovation throughout the state, “We have to broaden the definition of entrepreneurship.” “It’s not just Mark Zuckerberg,” he says. “It is a role that all of us can play.”
BIF recently paired with Babson College to create the Babson Entrepreneur Experience Lab, which has met with entrepreneurs from all over the country. Their goal, in part, has been to meet with as many thinkers, idealists, inventors, and potential startups as they possibly can, or in their words: “To create a first person characterization of the national entrepreneurial experience.” By connecting entrepreneurs up with one another, the Lab provides people with an opportunity to both solve common problems, gain valuable business insight, and share stories and ideas.
Mentors
But BIF is not the only organization in Rhode Island making inroads into Rhode Island’s entrepreneurship community. Betaspring describes itself as a “mentorship-driven Providence-based startup accelerator program for technology and design entrepreneurs who are ready to build a product, launch a company, and change the world.” Betaspring invities entrepreneurial teams from around the world for intensive twelve-week programs, during which time Betaspring aims to help each team “transform themselves into functional, fundable companies by providing mentorship, kickoff funding, and immersion in an intense startup community of like-minded entrepreneurs.” At the conclusion of the program, teams are given an opportunity to present their new company to investors. Betaspring’s mentors hail from an impressive range of businesses and industries, and include Richard Moross, the CEO & founder of MOO.com, Clay Rockefeller, the co-founder of the Steel Yard, and Peter Dorsey, the president of the Business Development Company of Rhode Island.
Betaspring’s roster of successful past participants highlights the eclectic range of companies they serve. Jobzle was created as an easier, more personalized job search engine for finding and hiring college students; Databraid is a web-based platform designed to make it easier for scientists and researchers to share and analyze their data; Manpacks provides male undergarments on a subscription model, delivering brand new underwear to your door every three months. Manpacks has already received major national media attention.
Lessons
In a recent Reuters interview, Jobzle CEO Walker Williams said, “I think the skills you learn from being forced into a position where you’re responsible for everything, from legal to marketing to taxes, is to just give you an incredible experience that a job doesn’t provide,” said Williams. “It’s almost like a secondary education.”
The Babson Entrepreneurship Lab states that, “Our economic future is an era of entrepreneurship and current support solutions are insufficient.” In collaboration with the Babson Entrepreneur Experience Lab, BIF runs the “Entrepreneur Video Booth” on its Web site, where people are invited to share their entrepreneurship story—in 20 seconds or fewer.
The goal is to build an easily accessible network that entrepreneurs can make use of—they are, in essence, their own best resource. The site also features an “Eras Of Entrepreneurship” map, designed to highlight the history of entrepreneurship in the United States. The map serves to remind people of the essential role entrepreneurship has played, time and again, in the building and rebuilding of our country. It is lesson that seems particularly necessary and appropriate in today’s difficult economic climes.
“Everyone can be an entrepreneur,” Saul Kaplan says. “A lot of people have no other choice.”
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