There's been some confusion and possibly conflicting information around small business job growth, new business job growth and start-up trends in general in the press lately. That is part of why this new report from the Kaufmann Foundation caught my attention. While the whote report is worth reading, this chart particularly caught my attention - …
Continue reading from the Good Ideas File: job creation and young businesses
I wrote this in response to a debate on Facebook a few days ago regarding whether or not urban bicycle riders should be required to wear helmets (a lot of people think that they shouldn't be required because the inconvenience may discourage people from biking for urban transportation. Kind of messes up the hair.) As …
Continue reading Time to piss off the bike riders: a lesson in unintended consequences.
A lot of people have been weighing in on the debate over the Tesla incentives deal with Nevada, but I wanted to share this article as both a valuable insight into what exactly that deal included and as an exceptional example of how to make those costs transparent, tracing out the potential impacts clearly and …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: Knowing the cost in Reno
Readers of the Wise Economy Workshop may recall some mutual interviews and content-sharing between me and Ed Burghard of the Strengthening Brand America platform. I've admired and appreciated Ed's marketing and communication mastery and his determination through his American Dream efforts to get economic development practitioners out of the dead end of thinking that recruiting …
Just a quick follow-up on this Labor Day (in the US) from the video I posted a couple of weeks ago about one of the alumni of the Bad Girl Ventures accelerator that I participated in. How's this for good economic development news? Functional Formularies, makers of Liquid Hope, the first and only whole …
Continue reading More on an Entrepreneur’s Story: follow up on Functional Formularies
What do you need to convince you to read this article from Fast Company, other than this lead? Science Confirms It: If You Want To Succeed, You Have To Screw Up The book told you to do that, now science says so to. So go tell your boss that it's time to go make those …
I had the great fortune of taking my 16 year old to the launch of People's Liberty, the very ground-breaking Cincinnati philanthropy that I wrote about last week. The great thing about taking the kid was that...he's already over 6 foot, so he could actually see what's was going on in a sea of 350 …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: More on People’s Liberty
I posted this last week at EngagingCities. We've got a potential to demonstrate to a lot of tech people how they could actually make a difference in their communities. But to get that chance, we need help. As in, your help. Here's the lowdown: Special to EngagingCities Hi. I usually try to keep a relatively …
One of the big questions underpinning the Local Economy Revolution book and a lot of other current thinking about urban and community revitalization might be summed up like this: We have been doing X for Y years. We can point to some improvements, but fundamentally, the problems that we started doing X to fix...haven't been …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: People’s Liberty turns community philanthropy inside out
One very interesting emerging approach to growing entrepreneurship (and perhaps some of that can-do empowerment that I mentioned yesterday) are makerspaces -- collections of tools and maker resources that people can access to work on projects of interest. The benefits of a makerspace include access to equipment that a person with an idea might not …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: Make your community a MakerSpace
The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived 