I am in Cleveland for a couple of days working on a proposal, and I had a debate with some colleagues over what it takes to do effective entrepreneurship support - one of my fave topics, of course. And a little comment in that conversation led me to go find what you might call a Deep Cut. From 2015, for cryin out loud. How did I get this old?
If I were writing this today, I would probably state more definitive answers, and couch my points below less as questions. Future Della, after all, has been working on solutions that sound rather eerily like what Past Della was looking for. But sometimes it’s good to return to the questions, and re-evaluate our answers.
I’d love to hear what you think.
I’ve written plenty before — in the book and at the main blog — about how one-shot solutions, like throwing up a small business incubator, often don’t help, and may hurt.
This article summarizing the recent Kauffman Foundation’s Mayors Conference on Entrepreneurship shed some additional light on this topic, including this:
One common error by local lawmakers is erecting a downtown incubator and relying on the piecemeal measure. “If you build it, they will come’ does not work for entrepreneurship,” according to their research. “Studies show there is no evidence that incubator firms perform better than non-incubator firms.”
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