It's the Ecosystem, Stupid!

I could not help myself but to invoke a rip-off of a political phrase at this time of year. We all recognize that Presidential candidate Bill Clinton had great political instincts when he argued that change should be focused on "the economy, stupid" when then incumbent President George H. W. Bush admitted that he didn't understand how consumer prices had increased since he had not been grocery shopping in three decades. I chose this headline to highlight a great article in BusinessWeek by Vivek Wadhwa that speaks to whether VCs create or impede innovation in the economy. Multiple arguments are made on each side of this question, but I tend to believe that it is the ecosystem a community can build that matters most when it comes to innovation - and wealth creation that results from innovation. An economy needs three things - great ideas, risk capital, and smart people - in order to create an incredibly rich entrepreneurial community and economy. These assets perhaps manifest themselves via new patents, new VC investments and new job opportunities, but one cannot say that one drives the economic growth and change - they are all pieces of the collective puzzle. When JumpStart first opened for business in 2004 we thought the most important thing to figure out was whether the ideas that could help transform and accelerate the region where actually in Northeast Ohio - we found that they were. Then we principally worried about these companies getting access to the capital they needed to grow and, while this is still a significant problem, we are starting to see capital coming to this region in a significant and robust way. Now our newest and perhaps most significant concern (realize the first two still have not gone away by any means) is talent - how can companies in Northeast Ohio attract the type of people they need to continue to develop and mature? This is a focus area where the region needs to do a much better job of finding what programs and activities can "move the needle." We are energized by the challenge of helping to build this ecosystem in Northeast Ohio. We hope to be able to look back in a few years to see that all of the necessary components that create a thriving ecosystem are in place. Ray Leach is CEO of JumpStart and brings his energy and leadership experiences from founding five high-growth entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial endeavors in the last 20 years. Ray is a Sloan Fellow and earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also earned a BA in Finance from the University of Akron.