Entrepreneurship : Buzz

Twelve years ago, the Queen City Angels were five guys who would meet at restaurants to talk about investing in local startups and who, group chairman Tony Shipley jokes, hadn’t gotten the memo that the dot-com bubble was about to burst.

Now three funds and 54 diverse companies later, the validation-stage and seed-stage investing group – the first of its kind in Ohio – has survived the dot-com bust and two recessions. Its 49 members have invested $33 million of their own money into regional startups, which has been leveraged into additional capital in excess of $200 million from other investors, and created 254 jobs.

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Information technology is perhaps one of the most under appreciated fields in the Dayton region, at least by the public.

IT companies in the Dayton region seem to be booming, as seen by increases in salaries, hiring and new investments.

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Recently, FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron recommended to the Ohio Legislature changes to Ohio's energy efficiency portfolio that would essentially freeze the energy efficiency mandate found in Senate Bill 221 at current levels. As currently written, Senate Bill 221 calls for Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) to undertake energy efficiency improvements by 2025 equal to 22% of 2008's energy consumption. FirstEnergy's proposed changes would end the mandate at the less than 3% cumulative reduction required to date.

Ohio's Legislature should consider carefully any request to alter Ohio's course on energy efficiency. For many reasons, a reduction in the energy efficiency goal does not appear to be a good idea at this time.

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A new report from JobsOhio shows the state’s economic development efforts continue to help spur job creation and capital investments by businesses.

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Chrysler Group LLC is hiring more than 1,100 new workers at its sprawling Toledo, Ohio, manufacturing complex. JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) is looking for hundreds of bankers in Columbus. And the Cleveland Clinic has been adding registered nurses at such a clip that it rented out the Cleveland Browns football stadium for a job fair.
Long an emblem of rust belt decay and despair, Ohio is now outpacing the national economy.

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It’s a shame. Amidst the financiapocalypse, Cleveland, Ohio, has 13,000 homes and other structures in such disrepair that they need to be torn down. It’s a $4 billion job. And at least one designer is trying to find the bright side.

Daniel Cuffaro, department chair at the Cleveland Institute of Art and founder of Abeo Design, has created a modular workspace called the Hive Workstation. It’s similar to the premium corporate furnishings offered by companies like Steelcase, but there’s a key difference: Hive is built from the failed housing projects of Cleveland itself. Every piece has a secondary purpose, to “literally create value from the rubble of economic collapse.”

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Automation, long a way for manufacturers to cut costs and improve efficiency, now is becoming a solution to the problem created by an ever-growing shortage of skilled workers.

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Many entrepreneurs who once envisioned their fledgling clean-tech start-ups becoming the next big thing are now downsizing their dreams.
Newer start-ups attracting investor interest have more modest aims than their clean-tech peers of a decade ago. The new batch expect to generate revenue more quickly and cheaply, and are focusing on making existing industries more efficient and sustainable, building upon the clean-tech infrastructure such as smart meters that have become widespread.

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Successful startups have more women in senior positions than unsuccessful ones, according to a new analysis by Dow Jones (NWSA) VentureSource of more than 20,000 venture-backed companies in the U.S. between 1997 and 2011. They had more than twice as many women in top jobs like C-level managers, vice presidents, and board members than their unsuccessful counterparts did.

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TIME's Rick Stengel talks to successful entrepreneurs about upending the status quo to create truly groundbreaking innovations

"Boulder wasn’t the result of a government effort," writes columnist Vivek Wadhwa. "Rather, it grew organically and resulted from the efforts of a handful of entrepreneurs who got together and decided to foster entrepreneurship in the region."

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The nation’s wind energy industry is growing, and that’s helping Ohio, according to a new report by an environmental group. The Natural Resources Defense Council says its new study finds that a wind farm, consisting of something like 10 wind turbines, creates a lot of jobs.

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