What exactly is venture development?

I realize that JumpStart is not the first organization to put the two words “venture” (as in venture capital) and “development” (as in economic development) together to coin a phrase. But we have been one of the greatest promoters of these two words together of late because we believe this is a model that has the ability to make significant economic change in NEO over the next decade. See wikipedia's definition of venture development.

The reason why these two words together make sense to describe what we do is that we are looking for ideas and companies that become significant wealth-creating businesses, but at the same time we are not doing this for our own or organization’s profit, but instead for the benefit of entrepreneurs who can help transform the short and long-term prospects of the economy of Northeast Ohio.

We know that we did not invent this idea – in fact the predecessor to JumpStart that was started in 1983 at Case Western Reserve University was called the Center for Venture Development! The incredible opportunity that JumpStart has had is to implement this model – at scale. In only 4 years JumpStart has been able to connect with over 5,000 entrepreneurs and have the resources to make 42 investments! Through these actions, JumpStart has begun to help transform this region’s entrepreneurial community and our economy’s future. We look forward to continuing to work to improve the venture development business model we practice at JumpStart and continuing to accelerate our region’s collective transformation.

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.