I would like to consider Wisconsin a great state for entrepreneurship. We have Wiscontrepreneur, which is designed to foster campus entrepreneurial thinking and promote the creation of new businesses. We also have numerous idea competitions such as Innovation Days, Governor’s Business Plan, Burrill Business Plan and Qualcomm Wireless. Surrounded by so many well-educated people and swarms of ideas, I am baffled when statistics drop about just how poorly Wisconsin is doing.
According to the “Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity,” a leading indicator of new business creation in the United States published this month, Wisconsin falls among the three states with the lowest rates of entrepreneurial activity. It is tied with Pennsylvania at 180 new companies per 100,000 adults and is just above West Virginia, which has 170 new companies per 100,000 adults. The national average is 340.
Just yesterday, Forbes published its rankings for “Best Cities for Minority Entrepreneurs.” The Milwaukee metro area was ranked in the bottom eight in self-employment among all three major minority groups. According to Mark Levine, executive director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “Milwaukee has had among the worst job-creation records of any big city in the U.S. for over a decade.”
New companies are critical to Wisconsin’s long-term growth. With a loss of more than 160,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000 and this week’s cancellation of a large wind power project capable of generating 150 megawatts of electricity in Green Bay due to the uncertainty over the future of wind energy in this state, the need for new companies is more necessary than ever.
Wisconsin has gained national attention from the bipartisan conflict looming over our state, and not in a good way in terms of luring businesses in. It is time we come together to agree on at least one clear solution: We need more and better paying jobs in this state. The best way to jump start this is to support startups.
As Kevin Conroy and Jim Connelly point out in their Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article, startups need greater access to capital. They write, “While a third of the nation’s scientific research occurs in the Great Lakes region, in the past two years, the region received less than 5%, and Wisconsin only 0.4%, of nation’s startup capital.” This needs to change.
For taxpayers doubting what benefit they might have from supporting new businesses, look at it this way: We have been funding a war for which there is no insurance plan to turn to that covers the war debt expenses. When taxpayers support job creation, they support getting people off the unemployment line, off welfare and adding to the taxpayer population.
Dan Cataldi, executive director of EIGERlab, said he feels there’s still high interest in starting businesses, but people may not know how to put their ideas into motion – a problem he hopes the Startup Accelerator, taking place this April 30 for the first time in Illinois, will help solve. “I think it’s really tough to find the financial support necessary to move their ideas forward,” he said. “As the economy starts to create more jobs, some of these people might go back to work not because they don’t want to start their own business but because they’re having a tough time seeing how to fit all the pieces together.”
The good news is that there’s hope. On top of the Startup Accelerator, there are incubators out there, like Spreenkler, that are excited to hook up innovative ideas with valuable resources and investors. Moreover, federal grant programs, specifically Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer, will be holding a national conference this upcoming April at Monona Terrace. At this conference, for which at least five other cities competed to host, there will be workshops with experts and representatives from nearly a dozen federal agencies, said Gayle Kugler, director of the UW-Extension’s Wisconsin Entrepreneurs Network and the Small Business Development Centers network.
Startups supply the livelihood of economies. It is time we pump some life back into them in this state.
Victoria Yakovleva ([email protected]) is a senior in chemical engineering.
