Grow Your Own Hometown Industry for $250,000

By Mark Forsythe The Kansas City Post Update: Someone has contacted me with "interest" in this idea. Maybe it will take off, maybe it won't. Stay tuned... A long, long time ago in a King Radio engineering lab not too far away, my first manager gave me words of wisdom which I continue to use to this day. "A good engineer knows how to design things. A great engineer knows how to find things." That's a paraphrase of course. His actual words were closer to "incorporate (steal) whatever designs you can," "never reinvent the wheel," "why start from scratch if somebody else already has?" The latest target of my shameless thievery? Boston, Mass. In one of the many news feeds I receive on a daily basis, the following headline caught my eye. It details a competition for startup entrepreneurs in the alternative energy industry. REMAINING 10 FINALISTS ADVANCE TO FINAL STAGE OF COMPETITION 10 Finalists Selected from a Pool of 61 Teams to Compete in the Final Round of the Competition for $250,000 in Cash, Products, and Services Business, government and academia have collaborated in Boston to create their own startup industries. By holding a contest every year, they give aspiring eco-entrepreneurs a chance to realize their dreams and for a relatively small investment, Boston gets the opportunity to be home to to what could be the next big thing. Even if it's just the next little thing it's still new. Can anybody say "job creation?" Not just moving a retail sales clerk position from once part of the city to another. The actual creation of a job where before none existed. Imagine a dramatic, nerve-racking competition. Chosen from an initial round of written applications, thirty semifinalists present business plans to a volunteer panel of judges containing business leaders, venture capitalists and academics. The thirty are whittled down to ten. Those semifinalists are given fifteen minutes to make a presentation to convince a different set of judges that their business plan and technology is the best investment opportunity. Each team receives feedback from the panel on their business plan, and ways to improve their pitches. In the Boston competition, after a few days of deliberation, the winning team or individual receives the following. $25,000 cash; 3 months PR services from a local firm (value: $40,000); $15,000 legal services from a sponsoring law firm; one year of office space (value: $25,000) or incubator space and support at Boston's Applied Technology and Manufacturing Center; and scholarship for up to three team members for the Advanced Invention 2 Venture to be held by the NCIIA August 1 -4 (value: $6,000) The second and third place finishers are awarded lesser packages for a competition total of $250,000 in cash and services. I picture the Kauffman Foundation as an ideal sponsor for such an event. It wouldn't even have to be alternative energy (although it would if I were in charge). I'm told Kansas City has a couple of PR firms, some lawyers, and plenty of empty commercial space. Lining up sponsors for such an event would not be that difficult. Barkley Evergreen are you listening? What about Shook Hardy & Bacon? Colliers International? EDC? The list goes on. Imagine being set up with some of Kansas City's finest firms, in some trendy digs with a chance to make it big. Instead of repeating the mantra of "we must compete with Johnson County" I think the new mantra should be "we must compete with ourselves" and strive to do better. We have all the components, we just need a way to put them together.