A contributed article by Senior Vice President Michael Gaiss, written as part of the TiE Education Series, for inclusion in the TiE-Boston Quarterly Newsletter
More than ever, entrepreneurship will continue to play an instrumental role in driving the global economy. We're fortunate in Boston to have exceptionally strong pillars in place - world-class universities, experienced and proven entrepreneurs, and local sources of risk capital to fund new initiatives.
But what else can we be doing for inspiring, fostering and further enhancing the environment to nurture innovation and entrepreneurship across the region?
Connect and Enable the Next Generation of Entrepreneur
Much can be learned from those who have already done it. Barriers preventing the next generation from connecting with the existing entrepreneurial community as well as each other need to be removed. Gatherings and one-on-one mentoring can be orchestrated to bring entrepreneurs of all stages together to better enable the free flow of ideas and advice. The challenge is to leverage existing institutions to get these off the ground and/or give them critical mass, while encouraging the organic emergence of new platforms over time.
It should be noted that TiE has been exceptional over the years at providing these types of environments. It continues to raise the bar through such new initiatives as TiE Young Entrepreneurs (focused on teaching entrepreneurship to young people) and TiE-Boston LaunchPad (a series of workshops to educate entrepreneurs about key aspects of the early lifecycle of a venture start-up) and TiE Café.
There's a broader renaissance happening across Boston on this front as well. The region has adopted global gatherings such as MobileMonday, Tech Tuesday along with the concepts of "unconferences" and "office hours." New organic initiatives for providing channels to further connect people have also proliferated. These include DartBoston, WebInno, Mass Innovation Nights, Venture Café and Greenhorn Connect, and even some specifically targeting just students (e.g., Innovation Open Houses, Stay in MA). Thanks to Microsoft's generous policy of making meeting space available to organizers, the NERD Center in Cambridge has become the hub for many of these events.
We've made terrific strides in offering opportunities to connect and collaborate. There's literally something interesting happening every day. Going forward we need to continue to innovate around our new and better ways of achieving this while keeping the barriers for participation low.
Enhance the Supporting Infrastructure
People and ideas are key pillars of the entrepreneurial foundation. But access to expertise, capital, talented employees and a supportive business environment are what ultimately cause many to succeed.
Connecting the next generation with the broader innovation economy of company-building experts and key service providers is critical for sharing best practices and lessons learned. Through business plan competitions, mentoring sessions and other activities, creative programs for facilitating the flow of early capital and/or venture expertise to entrepreneurs can also serve an important role. As entrepreneurship evolves in a region, what started as forums for sharing insight and advice matures into a vibrant and proven support ecosystem that entrepreneurs can rely on to help get their startups off the ground.
Complementing seed and early stage firms, MassChallenge, TechStars, and a number of other initiatives have emerged over the last several years to address this opportunity. At Highland, we launched our Entrepreneurship Center eight years ago and have rolled out a number of programs to help entrepreneurs and startups take their businesses to the next level.
Not everything should be "just about the entrepreneur" though. Top talent is continually needed to fuel the realization of the entrepreneurial dream. Many future entrepreneurs - executives, engineers, scientists or new grads - are well served early on in their careers by working in a best-in-class start-up where they learn firsthand about building great companies. Entrepreneurial DNA is exchanged and it helps prime the pump with qualified individuals for follow-on entrepreneurial endeavors. Beyond permanent job creation, ways we can expose young people to innovative firms in their native environment through internships will also serve us well in retaining more than our fair share of the great grads coming out of Boston area universities.
Grassroots marketing efforts can have an impact on improving the underlying infrastructure around public policy as well. For example, employee non-compete agreements can thwart the starting of new ventures and even force entrepreneurs to abandon a geography for greener pastures. The campaign underway in Massachusetts to abolish non-competes and level the playing field in this area continues to remain topical.
Bridge Communities & Geographies
A sound infrastructure is important, but we can learn from the early Phoenician traders that collaboration allows new and better models to emerge. Here are a couple examples.
While it is commendable to build a strong, standalone TiE-Boston entrepreneurial community, we stand to benefit tremendously by embracing other entrepreneurial groups. Working with likeminded leaders to identify points of synergy, everyone gains access to broader networks, additional domain expertise and more opportunities for all.
These can obviously be other entrepreneurial/technology focused organizations, but we should be thinking beyond that as well. Take for example the Massachusetts "Creative Economy." This industry employs over 100,000 individuals in the advertising, design, digital media, film, and videogames fields. Many in the broader technology sector may not even know that it exists. My sense is that both sectors would benefit significantly from a competitive advantage standpoint if we could figure out better ways to "cross the streams" and overlay people, ideas and expertise from each respective group.
THE QUEST for Innovation, a city-wide mobile scavenger hunt in October, was designed to bring together heterogeneous associations and organizations across the region focused on innovation. However, much more can be done and the onus should be on everyone to identify ways to make this happen.
In addition, while we should always be looking for ways to improve, it should be noted that we have a lot of good things going for us. In fact, most of the rest of the world would love to emulate Boston's vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem. This presents opportunities to reach out geographically and to build bridges and relationships with other pockets of innovation.
Boston World Partnerships and others are doing an exceptional job here. At Highland, over the last 10 days we've hosted the innovation center affiliated with a leading Midwestern research institution and are meeting with 25 European VC's that are here to learn more and build connections.
While we export our expertise and perhaps strengthen another region, in parallel we import new ideas, perspectives and innovation. It's definitely not a zero-sum game and it all makes for a better, stronger, inter-connected entrepreneurial world.
Celebrate and Brand Success
Success breeds success. Fortunately, today's young generation has grown up with entrepreneurial "hero" figures around them. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell have inspired for decades. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg are more recent examples of individuals that are showing the way. TiE-Boston has its own entrepreneurial heroes in individuals such as Desh Deshpande and Ashraf Dahod.
Opportunities abound to keep the entrepreneurial fire lit and, when certain things go right, turn it into a raging inferno. Constant chatter around entrepreneurs, startups and new products is a good thing and needs to be more prevalent. PR and media play a big role here - both at a global and local level - in celebrating successes. Word-of-mouth is also essential by bringing additional awareness and credibility for inspiring and encouraging the next generation.
People want to be part of the next big thing. It's part of our human nature. Branding around this helps to attract the best talent to entrepreneurial initiatives.
It's exciting times, particularly if we work together. We can all play a key part in not only advancing our own TiE-Boston agenda, but contributing to make the world a better place for harnessing and commercializing innovation.
