Introduction:
Discovering innovation economic investment opportunities in your local economy faces two challenges right at the top of the deal creation funnel. First, you need a road map to anticipate the source and the supply of new ideas for technological innovation. Second, you need to find the supply of entrepreneurs who will commercialize the new ideas in either new ventures or in existing enterprises.
In either case, the road map for discovering investment opportunities begins within the technology transfer process. Prior to the start up of a venture, or the creation of a new product, there is a business process that involves technology transfer of innovation from one person to another person.
Finding out how the technology transfer process functions will lead you to ideas and entrepreneurs. But, in order to find them, you need to know where they were and what they were doing before they got to the technology transfer mileux. The right type of mileux to look for them is within the network of social relationships that exist within the region's industrial value chains.
The technology transfer mileux is also the place to look for the most rare of all entrepreneurs. Within the universe of latent and real entrepreneurs, there exists the most valuable breed of entrepreneur called the "serial entrepreneur." This person goes down life's path, like a high tech Johnny Appleseed, spreading seeds of innovation over and over again.
They are very rare individuals, and once found, they must be nurtured and cherished as the most prized resource of innovation economics in any metro region.
Recent research indicates that the place to look for entrepreneurs is in informal business networks that exist within each metro region. However, there seems to be two distinct pools of nascent entrepreneurs who hang out in different networks, so the investigation to find them needs a different mental map for each type of technology transfer.
The Business Tech Transfer Network
In their research
Education and Tech Entrepreneurship (Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation, May 2008), Vivek Wadhwa, Richard Freeman, and Ben Rissing investigated what entrepreneurs were doing before they started their first company.
They surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executive officers and heads of product development in 502 engineering and technology companies established from 1995 through 2005. These companies, identified from an existing data set of corporate records in Dun & Bradstreet's Million Dollar Database, have more than $1 million in sales, twenty or more employees, and company branches with fifty or more employees. The greatest percentage of company founders had been toiling away for about 20 years inside an established corporation. They were well-educated, primarily in the scientific and engineering fields of study.
As they noted, "Indeed, a larger proportion of tech founders are middle-aged, well educated in business or technical disciplines, with degrees from a wide assortment of schools. Twice as many U.S.-born tech entrepreneurs start ventures in their fifties as do those in their early twenties, as this paper will show."
The technology companies that they created were generally very small. "In 2005," they noted, "the average sales revenue of all startups in our sample was around $5.7 million, and these companies employed an average of forty-two workers."
So the road map for finding these middle-aged, well educated latent entrepreneurs is at technology transfer events, like professional education seminars and trade shows.
