Entrepreneurship Key To Prosperity At National Summit

By Matt Roush

An entrepreneurship panel pointed toward America's small business high tech future late Tuesday morning at the National Summit in Detroit.

Part of that involves university tech transfer, according to panelist Mary Sue Coleman, president of the Univeristy of Michigan: "Universities can be major hubs of innovation and entrepreneurism but it's not a give. It has to be rewarded and celebrated, and it has to have an internal champion." She also said turning a university into a consistent technology-based economic development engine involves "opening the door to businesses big and small."

James S. Turley, chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young LLP, proclaimed "technology entrepreneurship is key to economic recovery in the United States and around the world."

Trends to watch for also include more corporate employees acting like entrepreneurs, pursuing new areas of business untethered to their mother companies, including working more away from offices.

The session seemed to lose a bit of focus, descending into what seemed like random observations about the nature of entrepreneurship. But some were useful: Turley said corporate managers should be "really careful" about strangling the creativity of their underlings with strict policies on technology use, and Eva Chan, co-founder and CEO of Trend Micro Inc., observed that unlimited resources can actually stifle creativity -- or as she put it, "you need that box so you can think outside it." Turley also observed that many entrepreneurs had repeated failure before they finally experienced success, and that American society "needs to stop punishing or shaming failure. That goes to the tax burden or how failed companies get taxed and the liability for lawsuits in the event of business failure."

UM's Coleman pointed out that her university now has more than 100 entrepreneurship-related classes, including an increasing number in the engineering school.

She also said universities and their faculty today must "partner or perish," a takeoff on the old professor's mandate "publish or perish," pointing to several major UM collaborations with an entrepreneurial focus.

And Turley observed that the young workers of today aren't really that different from earlier generations: "They want great careers, they want flexibility and they want respect."

The audience seemed woefully behind the curve on the usefulness of social networking to business, however. Polled as to whether social networking technologies would become a "mainstream" way for businesses to achieve their goals, only 8 percent said that would take place this year, 33 percent said next year, and 56 percent said within the next five years. Check out the Great Lakes IT Report tech calendar -- it's already happening right now.

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Entrepreneurship Key To Prosperity At National Summit

GLITR Thursday, November 19, 2009

GLITR Friday, November 20, 2009

GLITR Wednesday, November 18, 2009

GLITR Tuesday, November 17, 2009

GLITR Monday, November 16, 2009