By KATHLEEN GALLAGHER
kgallagher@journalsentinel.com
A group of Milwaukee-area business people are gathering support for a nonprofit organization to foster more innovation and entrepreneurship in southeastern Wisconsin.
BizStarts Milwaukee will begin a series of meetings today with lawyers, accountants, marketers and other service providers who are interested in joining the effort. The meetings will focus on what BizStarts is trying to do, and what kind of resources and arrangements the service providers offer for start-ups.
The goal is to jump-start an innovation economy by providing resources for anyone interested in starting a company, said Dan Steininger, co-director of the Successful Entrepreneur Investors angel network and vice president of BizStarts.
"We're going to get over our grieving; we're going to be the innovation capital of the world again," Steininger said. "We did it in the last century, and we can do it in this century."
The aim of BizStarts is to create a center that will link inventors and entrepreneurs with service providers, prototype makers, financiers and others who can help start businesses, Steininger said.
"What we're doing here is creating a great big network of resources to assist the entrepreneur in whatever they need - money, accounting, regulatory stuff - whatever they need," said John Torinus, BizStarts Milwaukee's president and chairman of Serigraph Inc. in West Bend. Torinus also writes a weekly business column for the Journal Sentinel.
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation's annual Index of Entrepreneurial Activity said Wisconsin had 290 entrepreneurs for every 100,000 people in 2007. That's an improvement from the 1996-1998 period, when the state had 230 entrepreneurs for every 100,000 people. But Wisconsin still ranked just 29th among all states.
Wisconsin has no lack of research and technology. Its problem - even in Madison, its entrepreneurial hotbed - has been translating those assets into high-growth companies.
Follow-through lacking
The state ranked 14th for academic research and development but just 43rd for businesses created with university R&D and 45th for short-term employment growth in the 2007 Development Report Card for the States, published by the Corporation for Enterprise Development in Washington, D.C.
"We incubate, but we don't hatch," Steininger said.
As a result, Wisconsin is moving further below the national average in per capita income; number of new jobs created; and the number of new private businesses, according to Measuring Success: Benchmarks for a Competitive Wisconsin, a report by Competitive Wisconsin Inc.
Translating the state's research-and-development assets into companies will require a culture where risk-taking is accepted and entrepreneurs know the resources and support are available, said Keith Burns, managing partner in Ernst & Young's Milwaukee office and BizStarts treasurer.
"It's a simple concept to allow people to know where to go to fill in the gap of their own experience or knowledge. And if that's the impetus for more people to take a chance and start a company, that's a good thing for all of us," Burns said.
BizStarts' concept is nothing new. Southeastern Wisconsin is littered with organizations that nibble on a small piece of the problem, or those like TechStar that failed completely and shut down.
TechStar was formed in 2000 by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and local universities to turn academic research in southeastern Wisconsin into businesses. It closed in 2006 when its state funding ran out, and it was unable to raise outside funds.
BizStarts organizers say they're developing ways to measure the group's effectiveness, which should include an ability to support the most promising entrepreneurs and send others back to the drawing board.
"Part of this is to tell them, 'don't quit your day job,' " Steininger said. "You have a dream - can it be converted into a business plan? Now, nobody tells them this is a great idea, this is a lousy idea. They have nowhere to go to get a realistic assessment of this."