via The Atlantic and NPR

Today, at least 90% of the country has a stove, electricity, car, fridge, clothes washer, air-conditioning, color TV, microwave, and cell phone. Take a moment to savor this graph from Visual Economics, which shows the adoption rate of new technologies across the century:

One way to parse it is to ignore everything at the top and trace your eye along the 10% line:

– In 1900, <10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones

– In 1915, <10% of families owned a car

– In 1930, <10% of families owned a refrigerator or clothes washer

– In 1945, <10% of families owned a clothes dryer or air-conditioning

– In 1960, <10% of families owned a dishwasher or color TV

– In 1975, <10% of families owned a microwave

– In 1990, <10% of families had a cell phone or access to the Internet

In his final of 3 posts, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic notes: “In 1900, less than 10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones, and the Model-T was still a full decade away.” His first installment of this series followed shifting family budgets between 1900 and 2003. The second explained why food seems so much cheaper at the dawn of the 21st century. The third is different because it goes beyond numbers, to include issues of quality of life and the question of progress: “It’s not just that life expectancy at birth has grown from 49 years in 1900 to 78 today, but also the quality of our lives has been improved by law (e.g.: new safety and anti-discrimination laws), by culture (e.g.: women’s ascent in college and the workplace) and by technology.” (Believe it or not, the boom box was the fastest-adopted gadget of the last 50 years.)

Another piece from NPR traces the Birth of Silicon Valley. Now a well-known hotbed of innovation stretching along the peninsula southwest of San Francisco Bay, the story that emerges from this timeline is the transformative power of venture capital, as well as the onward march of technology. Click on the image below to explore the timeline.

By: Chuck Stinnett
Via: The Gleaner Henderson, KY

Within a couple of months, fledgling businesses trying to climb to the next level might be able to get a helping hand — and a home.

Northwest Kentucky Forward is taking steps to open a business incubator on the fifth floor of the Soaper Building at Second and Main streets.

It’s also going to be the new home of the regional economic development organization, which for years has been located in the city-owned Peabody Building off Barret Boulevard.

A business incubator is a facility that startup businesses can call home for a while, sometimes on a part-time basis.

The incubator here will provide up to 12 small companies some office space as well as a shared receptionist, conference room, training room and other amenities that they probably couldn’t afford on their own, according to NWKF President and CEO Kevin Sheilley.

Normally, NWKY focuses much of its energies on helping recruit new industries and helping existing industries expand.

But the organization’s goals include encouraging entrepreneurship, as evidenced by its more than five-year-old partnership with Community Ventures Corp., a Lexington-based nonprofit organization that is the largest microlender in the country. CVC has a full-time vice president, Sue Gibbens, who meets with entrepreneurs from the Henderson area who need business counseling or loans.

Sheilley told his board on Tuesday that “a need has been identified” by both a NWKF consultant and the Henderson Chamber of Commerce “for space to help businesses get off the ground.”

“While a business could pay to operate out of the business incubator all the time, it could be a home-based business that uses it one day a week to meet with clients, to work away from home (or) to do conference calls to allow that company to grow, he said.

“It could be a home-based business that’s ready to take the next step but it [sic] not ready to rent or own their own facility,” Sheilley said.

For example, “One of the people we’ve talked to has started a CPA firm doing accounting and bookkeeping,” he said. “They can do it from home but also need to meet with clients somewhere other than the kitchen table.”

NWKF intends to offer “a custom phone number for each client and a professional person to answer the phone,” Sheilley said. Clients will also have access to services such as voice mail and a photocopier.

Thanks to some corporate donations and $100,000 in grants that NWKF secured through a U.S. Department of Agriculture pilot program called Stronger Economies Together, that it has been participating in, “We’ll be able to do it in a very, very affordable way,” he said.

While details are still being worked out, “We anticipate offering three levels of service” to entrepreneurs.

The large training room that is planned “is one of the things we’re most excited about,” Sheilley said.

“Companies need access to training,” he noted. At the Peabody Building, NWKY has been able to use a shared meeting room for occasional workshops or seminars.

At the Soaper Building, NWKF will have full-time access to a training room, “especially on evenings when entrepreneurs are able to attend,” Sheilley said.

The fifth floor of the building will provide NWKF with 4,400 square feet of space, about double its current space, and the space can be remodeled into a more efficient layout than the organization currently has, he said.

The new home will be useful to NWKF as well, which is on the verge of expanding from seven staff members to eight, Sheilley told his board. (A recent grant has provided funds for hiring a project manager for the new Northwest Kentucky Training Consortium who will be based at NWKF.)

“We’re simply out of space,” Sheilley said. The organization’s education coordinator has an office in storage closet; some supplies are stored in a women’s restroom.

Five property owners responded to NWKF’s request for proposals in the downtown area.

“We looked at five spaces, and by far this space” was the best, Sheilley said, calling it “first-class office space” that once housed Western Kentucky Energy Corp. and in recent years has housed the United Way of Henderson County.

“Hand’s [sic] down, it was the best site,” board member Brad Hazelwood, who served on a three-person search committee, declared.

“And the most affordable,” fellow search committee member Debbie Gray added.

Developer “Glen Stone has agreed to donate labor for the renovations,” Sheilley said.

The grants will pay for renovation, furnishings, some technology and rent for two years, he said.

The NWKF board on Tuesday voted to approve a move to the Soaper Building under a five-year lease with its owner, Soaper Preston LLC.

In other matters:

Fund drive: NWKF reported that contributions from 99 investors for its five-year OpporUNITY 2016 fund drive have topped $2.7 million. The $100,000 in USDA grants means that the organization has met its goal for paying for economic development efforts for Henderson, Union, Webster and McLean counties over the next five years.

Job fair: The Northwest Kentucky Regional Job Fair last month attracted some 300 jobseekers, Sheilley said.

Public policy: NWKF is asking existing industries to complete a survey concerning their public policy issues on its website at northwestky.com.

Strategic plan: The board heard a presentation from Austin, Texas-based economic development and workforce development consultant TIP Strategies concerning a strategic plan it is developing for the Green River Area Development District workforce program.

By Christine Negroni

via NYTimes


The old Town Hall in Stamford, Conn. has been renovated and will become a home for aspiring entrepreneurs.

STAMFORD, Conn. — The old Town Hall here, a Beaux-Arts building on the National Registry of Historic Places, has sat unused for 25 years, a victim of Stamford’s rapid growth in the 20th century. But the Town Hall will join the 21st-century economy, with the announcement this month that it would become an incubator for business start-ups in a 10-year lease agreement with private investors.

The Stamford Innovation Center, as the venture is called, is expected to open by summer, and aspiring entrepreneurs will get work space, mentoring and access to investors.

Acting as a corporate sponsor for the venture will be Sikorsky Aircraft, the helicopter maker and military contractor based in nearby Stratford, Conn. The company, a subsidiary of United Technologies, has leased 2,000 square feet on the building’s second floor, and will coach tenants and may even invest in them, said Chris Van Buiten, the vice president for Sikorsky Innovations, a network of employees focused on finding new technologies.

Sikorsky is priming the pump by issuing five technological challenges to the public that, on the surface, are aviation related. It is seeking proposals on, among other things, ways to apply wireless monitoring to digitized aircraft and to obscure the visibility of airplanes in flight. Successful applicants will have use of the company’s space at the Town Hall for a year.

“In much the same way that Sikorsky does not make the engines or avionics that are installed into our helicopters,” Mr. Van Buiten said, “likewise will some next-generation technology solutions not be produced by us.”

The Stamford Innovation Center is renting most of the old Town Hall from the city. The Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development provided a half-million-dollar loan to turn the building into modern office space.

In 2008 the city began renovating the Town Hall, with the hope of finding a tenant. It spent $16 million enlarging the space and making it handicapped-accessible. Patty Meagher, a founder of the Innovation Center, remembers the time she and the others involved with the project first considered leasing the building as the work was completed in 2010. “Remember the line from that movie, ‘You had me at hello’? That was the initial reaction,” she said when they first saw the limestone facade, iron-railed staircase, terrazzo floors and brilliant murals on the walls of several rooms.

The location was also an asset, she said, in the shadow of Stamford Town Center mall, steps from the city’s library, theater, shopping and dining districts. There are no restrictions on the kinds of ideas that will be considered for the center, so long as the directors believe there is potential for turning them into successful businesses. A few start-ups are already working in the building on projects as varied as a GPS-enabled community news site and the use of cloned immune cells for medicine.

As fledgling businesses develop, tenants will be introduced to venture capitalists, many of whom live or work in the area, Ms. Meagher said. The investors and entrepreneurs, she said, “will be meeting each other, interacting, and that’s how these companies could very well get funded.”

Business incubators are very of-the-moment across the country. In Chandler, Ariz., the City Council financed a biotechnology-themed center, while a center in Portland, Ore., focuses on sustainability. Nearly three-quarters of these enterprises are sponsored by economic development agencies, governments or academic institutions, according to the National Business Incubation Association. The Stamford Innovation Center is among the 25 percent that are private, with aspirations to become profitable businesses based on rents charged to tenants and educational programs offered to the public.

Over the last five years there have been 150 incubation centers opened nationwide, the association said. While no studies cite the recession as motivating that growth, Linda Knopp, the group’s research and policy director, said she believed the economy played a role. “More communities at least start considering the business incubation concept during economic downturns,” she said, “as they’re looking for ways to stimulate economic growth and create jobs.”

Certainly that is the goal in Stamford, with a population of 122,643, which has an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent, lower than the state and the nation as a whole, but which has lost jobs in the financial and manufacturing sectors and has had an increase in office vacancies. One quarter of the city’s 13 million feet of business space is unoccupied, said Laure Aubuchon, the director of the Stamford Office of Economic Development.

“We are a victim of our own success, because we keep building space,” Ms. Aubuchon said. But she said the upside is that when the entrepreneurs are ready to start their businesses they will be able to find affordable rents in Stamford.

Sikorsky has set a goal of incubating at least two viable companies a year. Barry Schwimmer, a founder of the Innovation Center who is managing the opening, said Sikorsky was setting an example that he hoped other large companies would follow.

“It is a fairly unique model,” he said, adding that such communication between large, established businesses and small, untested ones was “virtually unheard-of.”

What is developed here will most likely have wider applications, Mr. Van Buiten of Sikorsky said. He offered the example of paint that changes color on a military helicopter, which could also be sold to the automobile industry. “We’d be willing to spend a lot of money,” he said of a product like that. “But think of how that would appeal to teenagers if a car company could offer that kind of paint on a Scion at $1,500.”

Did U.S. entrepreneurship grow last year?

By Sarah E. Needleman
via The Wall Street Journal

A report released last month suggests there’s been a major resurgence in the number of start-ups operating nationwide. But some skeptics say that the study fails to take into account the potentially significant numbers of small businesses that shuttered last year.

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 12.3% of the U.S. population was actively engaged in starting or running a new business in 2011, a staggering 60% increase from 2010.

The annual report defines new businesses as ventures less than three-and-a-half years old.

An increase in start-up activity is a good sign for the overall national economy because it will lead to more employment opportunities in the near future, says Donna Kelley, the report’s lead author and an associate professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. “It’s indicating that we’re seeing a recovery,” she says.

The report, based on a combination of survey results and population data, shows that more than half of U.S. early-stage entrepreneurs—59%—expect to create up to four jobs within the next five years. Another 27% plan to create between five and 19 jobs and 14% plan to create 20 or more jobs during that period.

Some critics argue, however, that the GEM report doesn’t paint a complete picture of the nation’s entrepreneurial landscape. Though it does note that 4.4% of U.S. survey respondents closed businesses within the past year, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tell another story.

The government agency reports that the total number of self-employed Americans with incorporated and nonincorporated businesses declined 2% last year. As a result, the number of small businesses shuttered also must have risen last year, says Scott Shane, a professor of entrepreneurial studies and economics at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management.

Using a bathtub as an analogy, he says: “If the level of water is going down, the amount flowing out has to be greater than the amount flowing in.”

To be sure, just because a business closes doesn’t necessarily mean it failed and that another person is collecting unemployment. The former owner could’ve decided to retire or even go work for someone else. “But every business closure eliminates the jobs of the people who worked there,” says Mr. Shane.

John Haltiwanger, an economist at the University of Maryland, says he’s skeptical of the GEM report given that it claims such a dramatic boost in start-up activity. “Last year would’ve been a much more robust year in employment growth and we didn’t see that,” he says. “It was a pretty anemic year.”

But Ms. Kelley offers a possible explanation for the surge in U.S. entrepreneurship identified by the study. She says start-up rates declined in 2010 and 2009, so last year entrepreneurs were essentially making up for lost ground. “It’s very likely people were delaying starting businesses during the recession due to the fact that conditions weren’t favorable for entrepreneurs,” she says. “People that did start businesses during the recession were more likely to start out of necessity because they had no other sources of income.”

Another factor: many newly launched businesses won’t survive for very long. On average, 20% of start-ups fail within their first year, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which also conducts an annual study on entrepreneurial activity in the U.S. Its newest report, due out next month, is expected to show that start-up volume in the U.S. increased by just a few percentage points in 2011, just as it did in 2010, 2009 and 2008, says E.J. Reedy, a research fellow for Kauffman, a nonprofit in Kansas City, Mo.

Still, he notes that last year’s report indicated that U.S. entrepreneurship in 2010 reached its highest level in more than a decade. He reasons that this happened because many people saw new businesses opportunities resulting from the recession. For example, he says reduced commercial property rates may have prompted the launch of new retail shops and restaurants. Many people also likely started businesses in 2010 because they got laid off or their work hours or pay got scaled back. However, the latter types of businesses typically lack full-time employees, he adds.

Kauffman bases its entrepreneurial activity index on a monthly population survey jointly sponsored by the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics. It focuses on the rate of business creation at the individual owner level.

The GEM is a nonprofit consortium that was initiated in 1999 as a partnership between Babson College and London Business School. Today it consists of more than 85 research teams from around the globe. The 2011 GEM report is based on a survey of 140,000 adults in 54 economies, including 6,000 just in the U.S. Researchers looked at responses from a random sampling of participants, as well as population data for each of the countries represented, to draw conclusions about entrepreneurial activity in those nations. The 2010 GEM report was based on a survey of 175,000 adults in 59 economies, including 4,000 in the U.S.

By Helen Coster
via forbes.com

In June 50 recent college graduates, from some of the best schools in the U.S., will join start-ups in struggling cities as part of Venture for America, a new program designed to help young companies, promote entrepreneurship and generate job growth. As VFA fellows, the graduates will receive five weeks of training at Brown University—where they’ll learn Excel and other consulting and banking-type skills—before moving to Detroit, New Orleans, Cincinnati and Providence for two years. Fifty companies— like The Brandery, in Cincinnati, and Detroit Venture Partners— will pay the fellows up to $38,000 a year, plus health benefits, to do everything from buying office supplies to making sales calls— whatever the small, fast-growing companies need.

“It’s true that a challenge is to put a fellow in a position where he or she can contribute and develop,” says VFA founder Andrew Yang, 37. “These companies have to have a genuine need for someone. It’s very difficult for a start-up to compete alongside big consulting firms and banks when they’re only looking to hire one or two people.”

Yang developed the idea for VFA in 2008, while speaking on an alumni panel at Brown University. Yang, then the head of Manhattan GMAT, had taken a circuitous and expensive path to entrepreneurship. After graduating from Brown in 1996, he felt directionless and, lured by prestige and security, applied to law school. After a stint at a big firm, and swimming in law school debt, Yang realized that he didn’t want to be a lawyer and launched a short-lived dot-com. Although he later became the chief executive of a successful start-up, he wanted to prevent other young graduates from making the same mistakes.

Back at Brown, Yang met fellow alum Charlie Kroll, who had started an 85-person software firm in Providence, a city that struggles to retain recent college graduates. Yang wondered whether a program, modeled after Teach for America, would help draw young talent to Providence and other cities. Start-ups would benefit from talented, hungry, inexpensive labor. Student entrepreneurs would have an alternative to banking and consulting jobs, and the opportunity to continue their entrepreneurial growth. To sweeten the deal, at the end of two years Yang’s program would award $100,000 in seed funding to the most high-performing fellow.

In 2009 Kaplan acquired Yang’s company, and he pursued his plan in earnest, reaching out to entrepreneurs in four cities where clusters of entrepreneurial activity already existed. Charlie Kroll in Providence organized a meeting of 25 local start-ups. Another contact helped him network in New Orleans. Yang raised $500,000 from private donors, hired a skeletal full-time staff, and in the fall of 2011 began visiting over 30 college campuses, promoting the program.

Over 1,000 students have begun the application process, and VFA recently selected the first seven of 50 fellows. They include a mechanical engineer from Yale, a Boston College senior who built a social networking app that he sells on iTunes, and a University of Pennsylvania finance major. Yang eventually wants to run a recruitment database and charge start-ups for access.

Yang says that cities have been eager to work with him. The City of Detroit is providing fellows with free housing, and Newark mayor Cory Booker and others have inquired about the program. Yang’s goal is to create 100,000 U.S. jobs by 2025—ideally because VFA fellows will start their own firms and hire people, or help existing firms scale. “If you’re an entrepreneur in Detroit you’re going to get so much more support from the community than if you lived in San Francisco or New York,” says Yang. “The community cares about your success.”