Wednesday, December 31, 2008

TiE Cleveburgh

The Cleveland Plain Dealer provides a follow up to the TiE Ohio story, which mentions a provocative and ambitious mega-regional initiative in the works:

The chapter's next step is to begin matching people who want to launch businesses with experienced entrepreneurs who can coach them.

"That's the TiE model," [said Baiju Shah, president and CEO of BioEnterprise and one of the founders of the local TiE chapter].

The TiE connection will allow Cleveland-area businesses to tap talent and resources from Silicon Valley to London, England, he said.

Organizers plan to hold more focused meetings in the future, exploring topics like biotechnology, Shah said. They also envision convening a Great Lakes conference to foster the concept of a "tech belt" stretching from Chicago through Cleveland to Pittsburgh.

TiE Ohio needs a geography lesson. Not only is the scale too big, but the Rust Belt is really two mega-regions, not one. There is some coherence to the mega-regional conception of the Great Lakes, but I see a number of economic sub-regions, or "corridors". I can imagine (actually, see) venture capital flowing between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, but all the way to/from Chicago? And if there is a tech belt for Chicago it is north and west of the city. Something as large as Minneapolis-Chicago might work, but even that is a stretch. Chicago-Milwaukee would be more like it.

1 comment:

John Morris said...

I kind of feel that the business people and investors may have a better feel for this than us. To start with, it's most likely that the Pittsburgh/ Cleveland corridor lacks enough South Asians alone to complete a network and needs connections to a wider area.

I think theses webs are complex and often industry centric. For example, Pittsburgh's video game developers are connected to places with lots of developers like Boston, NY and the Bay area. Hollywood connects to Bollywood and global finacial centers are globaly linked.