Last week I headed to the Detroit and Ann Arbor area to make my first visit to one of Xconomy’s newer outposts. I spoke with entrepreneurs and industry veterans, as well as academics and investors looking to jumpstart the region’s innovation engine. Some of what I saw and heard on my trip stood in stark contrast to the Boston technology landscape that I am accustomed to covering—and some was quite familiar. Read on for some of the key insights I took away from the trip.
1) Southeast Michigan lacks a well-connected, grassroots entrepreneurial culture.
It’s not that Detroit is lacking entrepreneurial talent, says Bill Volz, a business professor at Wayne State University and executive director of the Blackstone LaunchPad, an entrepreneurship program founded recently at the school. “The entrepreneurial community here—they don’t know each other at all,” Volz says. “They’re bright people and they’re interesting people. But they don’t know each other.”
It’s one thing that Detroit seems to have in common with Ann Arbor. And formally orchestrated business accelerator programs that put startups together won’t necessarily do the trick if the mindset isn’t there, says serial entrepreneur Dug Song, who’s currently CEO of Scio Security, a stealth-mode security software startup. “We don’t do nearly enough to help connect people here,” he says. “There’s not enough grassroots stuff going on. There need to be more opportunities for serendipity to happen.”
To create such opportunities, Song set up a co-working space in a former brewery building in Ann Arbor, aptly named Tech Brewery, which is now home to mobile app makers, University of Michigan biotech spinouts, cleantech startups, and software developers (including Scio Security). The co-working space is strikingly similar to Polaris Venture Partners’ Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge, MA. Song also favors events like casual hacker meetups where developers can get together without having to push toward a specific business plan. “That’s how companies happen,” he says.
Song says that the disconnectedness in the innovation community is at least in part an inheritance from the institutions that long defined the region, the big three automakers. “It’s the culture coming out of the auto industry: the culture of big, top-down institutions, silos, and big gaps between schools,” he says, pointing to the fact that
